Riverbank Police | Security camera and licence plate reader system

A city that built early

Riverbank has about 25,000 people and does not employ its own police department; the Sheriff’s Department provides its policing under contract. It has nonetheless run its own camera and plate reader system since 2019, and a 2022 staff report is unusually candid about how that went:

In 2019 the City Council approved the initiation of a License Plate Reader and Security Camera pilot program within the City of Riverbank. […] The Council approved a camera lease subscription agreement with IntelliSite which allows the City to have a comprehensive camera system throughout most major entrances and exits in the community as well as other locations that have struggled with nuisance and crime related issues.

By 2022 that was sixteen sites and thirty-six cameras. The report says the programme “represented one of the first comprehensive municipally operated camera systems in our local geographic area”, and that both the Chief and the City Manager had been contacted by jurisdictions around the state asking how it worked, some of whom came to see it.

The report’s account of its usefulness is specific rather than rhetorical: daily use for investigations, identifying stolen vehicles, reviewing footage of car accidents, and deterrence at parks that had trouble.

Cannabis money

The most striking line is about who pays:

The Council directed that the cost for the ongoing subscription/lease of the cameras be paid for out of the Public Benefit Fund (Cannabis Revenues).

About $97,500 a year in 2022, rising to roughly $131,000 with the proposed refresh and two new sites. The report gives the fund’s balance as $1,456,900 and judges it able to carry the cost.

This is the second city in this county to fund plate readers from cannabis revenue: Turlock moved $566,775 out of its Cannabis fund reserve toward its Flock agreement in January 2025. Two cities is not a county-wide pattern and we are not claiming one. It is worth noticing because a dedicated fund with a healthy balance is a different kind of decision from a line in a general fund. Nothing is displaced, so nothing has to be argued about.

The sharing question, which this document complicates

Most pages on this site document data flowing outward. This one records a department saying it does not:

As has been the case since inception, Riverbank Police Services is the only department in the City with direct access to the system, data is not shared with other agencies unless it is in the course of an active criminal investigation.

That belongs here at full weight, and it sits awkwardly beside the other Stanislaus page. Turlock’s staff report, three years later and on the same vendor, describes a countywide network in which members reach each other’s cameras and any member can flag a vehicle that alerts them all.

Riverbank in 2022 describes a closed city system. Turlock in 2025 describes a shared county one. We have read both documents and we have not found the one that reconciles them. It is possible both are accurate about different arrangements, or about different years, or that the network grew around a city that stayed out of it. We do not know, and the honest thing is to print both and say so.

What the refresh was really for

The stated problem was mundane. Most of the plate reader cameras were pan-tilt-zoom units that “routinely go out of focus or move off position due to a variety of variables to include weather and power glitches”, and the vendor recommended fixed mounts for plate reading because they hold position and resolve better.

The rest of the upgrade was a platform change, and the report lists what the new one could carry: monitoring fourteen air quality sensors, pedestrian safety, vehicle type and count for traffic engineering, temperature sensors, “shot detection etc. down the road.”

None of that is a claim that Riverbank has gunshot detection, and this page does not make one. It is a list of what became possible once the data moved onto a platform bought for something else. That is the ordinary way capability arrives: not as a proposal anyone votes on, but as an item on a feature list attached to a refresh of equipment the city already had.

The report is equally clear that a capability existing is not a capability used:

Capability exists for staff to use the system to harness data related to traffic counts for engineering and roadwork purposes, but the system has not been used for that purpose to date.

A department writing down a thing it could do and has not done is worth more than most of what gets published about these systems, and it deserves to be quoted rather than skipped.

Why this page nearly did not exist

Every one of Riverbank’s 156 council documents was recorded by our fetcher as having no readable text. That was wrong. The vendor platform’s text extraction was returning nothing and our pipeline believed it, which meant a search across this county would have found no mention of cameras in Riverbank and reported that cleanly.

The bug is fixed and the documents are readable. We are noting it on the page because a site that publishes what agencies failed to write down should be equally plain about what it nearly failed to read.