Siskiyou County

The board said yes. The Sheriff’s Office said no. No camera was ever installed.

According to Siskiyou News, the Board of Supervisors approved a Flock Safety plate reader programme unanimously, and more than a year later the Sheriff’s Office announced it would not go ahead, citing “several significant privacy concerns”. The programme is described as having been funded by federal homeland security money.

That is the third distinct way a county documented on this site has ended up without these cameras, and it is not the same as either of the others. In Eureka a city council refused a police department’s proposal before anything was bought. In Bishop a city council terminated a contract while the cameras were operating. Here the elected body granted the authority and the agency declined to use it.

Those are three different mechanisms, and the third is the least visible. A refusal happens in public, at a meeting, with a vote. A termination does too. An agency deciding not to exercise a power it already has produces no vote at all, and the only reason anyone outside the building knows about this one is that a local outlet reported it.

We have read neither document. The county publishes its agendas as individual PDFs attached to numbered meeting pages, with no platform, no search box and no archive index, so finding the approval item means opening meeting pages one at a time. That is a job for a person with a browser and it is first on this county’s retrieval list.

What the county’s own documents do establish is the rulebook. The Sheriff’s Office publishes a 924-page policy manual dated April 2023, and it can be read. It contains a plate reader policy with a one-year minimum retention and the permissive version of the sharing clause: release to law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies, with no geographic limit and no mention of federal or out-of-state recipients.

That manual predates the Attorney General’s October 2023 guidance on exactly that point by six months. Several counties on this site published the same short clause well after it. Siskiyou published it before, which is a fact about sequence and not about anybody’s choices.

The manual also carries policies for unmanned aerial systems, body-worn cameras and military equipment. Whether the office operates any of that is not established. No inventory, no count and no annual equipment report was found, and this site does not treat a policy as evidence of a deployment.