Sierra County

The Sheriff’s Office here publishes an 849-page policy manual, and it can be read. That sounds like a low bar. It is the difference between this page and the one for the county researched immediately before it, where a manual of almost exactly the same kind turned out to be unreadable by any machine and nothing about its contents could be established at all.

Here the extraction works, and a search for the words in it can be trusted. So two things are on the record.

There is no licence plate reader policy in the manual. The phrase appears exactly once in 849 pages, in the records policy, in a list of protected personal information that runs from financial account credentials through medical records to genetic data. That is breach-notification language, not a rule about operating cameras. What it establishes is that the manual contains no usage policy, which is not the same as establishing that the county has no plate readers.

There are policies for body-worn cameras, for military equipment, and for unmanned aerial systems.

The drone policy is worth reading, because parts of it are stronger than anything comparable documented on this site. It bars random surveillance outright. It bars targeting a person on the basis of race, religion, sex, gender identity, economic status, disability or a list of other characteristics. It requires the Sheriff’s written authorisation before an aircraft flies, and a warrant or exigent circumstances before recording anywhere a person would reasonably expect privacy. It says the aircraft shall not be weaponised.

And it makes a named coordinator responsible for something no other policy read here requires:

Implementing a system for public notification of UAS deployment.

Nobody else has written that down. Whether it has actually been implemented is a separate question and one we cannot answer.

What none of this establishes is whether Sierra County owns a drone at all. These manuals are assembled from a vendor’s template, and they carry policies for capabilities an agency may never have acquired. Nothing found in this sweep records an inventory, so the rules are documented and the equipment is not. We have published no drone page for this county, because there is nothing yet to publish.

The board record says the same thing, and it can now be checked. A hundred and seven readable documents from 2022 to 2026, fourteen million characters, and not one reference to a licence plate reader under any spelling. The searches work: “agenda” appears in 87 of those files, “Supervisors” in 75, “Sheriff” in 38.

Two apparent hits turned out to be nothing. “ALPR” matched the middle of the word malpractice in a health services contract. “Flock” matched flocks of sheep, in a history of Basque sheepherding in the Sierra Valley, and flocks of sandhill cranes in a habitat assessment.

So two separate bodies of this county’s own documents, both searchable and both checked, contain nothing about plate readers. That is not the same as proving there are none: a purchase under the board’s threshold, a grant accepted administratively, or a city’s own equipment need not appear, and the record we hold opens in 2022.