Turlock Police | Peregrine data integration platform
Software that pulls dispatch, records, a legacy mainframe, body-worn camera footage and two plate reader systems into one searchable place. The staff report says the county's largest police department and the Sheriff's Office already run it.
At a glance
- What it integrates
- Dispatch, records management, a legacy mainframe, Axon body-worn camera, and two plate reader systems [1]
- Cost
- $98,000 a year, with two one-year extensions, to a stated total not exceeding $294,000 [1]
- Term
- 18 August 2025 to 17 August 2028 [1]
- Funding
- Fund 116, Special Public Safety, computer software [1]
- Plate read volume in the fee schedule
- The purchased tier supports up to 75 million licence plate reads a year [1]
- Retention inside the platform
- The fee schedule describes a 30-day retention of plate detections within the service [1]
- Who else the report says uses it
- Modesto Police Department, the Stanislaus County Sheriff Department, and a number of neighbouring allied agencies [1]
- What the council decided
- we read the staff report, the resolution and the vendor order form, not the minutes [1]
- Who may search across the combined data, and under what rules
- not stated in the staff report or the order form. We have found no policy governing use of the platform [1]
How it happened
- Procurement
The council considers the agreement
An agreement with Peregrine for data point integration software at $98,000 a year, presented by the Police Chief. The attached order form lists the systems to be integrated: TriTech dispatch and records, a legacy AS-400 mainframe, Axon body-worn camera, and both the EPIC iO and Intellisite plate reader systems. [1]
The layer above the cameras
Almost every page on this site is about a device. This one is about what happens when the outputs of several devices are put in one place and made searchable.
The order form attached to the council packet lists what the software joins together:
The initial Customer Data sources and systems that Peregrine will integrate with the Service for Customer are: TriTech CAD, TriTech RMS, Legacy Data (AS-400 Mainframe), Axon BWC, Epic IO ALPR, and Intellisite ALPR.
Dispatch calls. Records management. A legacy mainframe. Body-worn camera footage. And both plate reader systems.
Each of those was bought separately, for its own reasons, with its own rules. The department’s plate reader policy governs plate readers. Its body-worn camera policy governs body-worn cameras. What governs the thing that searches across all of them at once is not something we have found.
The number in the fee schedule
The same order form contains this line:
The fee schedule above includes support for up to 75 million annual LPR reads and a 30-day retention of LPR detections.
Seventy-five million plate reads a year, for a city of about 73,000 people.
That figure needs handling carefully, and we would rather explain it than let it do work it cannot do. It is a service tier in a price list, not a measurement of anything Turlock has collected. A vendor sells capacity in bands and a customer buys the band that fits. What it tells you is the order of magnitude the arrangement is built around, which is not the same as what it counts.
The thirty-day figure needs the same care. It describes how long detections live inside this platform. It is not the department’s retention policy, and it does not resolve the fact that the department’s published plate reader chapter states no retention period at all. Two systems, two questions.
What the department said it was buying
The staff report’s case is efficiency, and it is made in those terms throughout:
Peregrine streamlines the process of researching and cross-referencing information from multiple sources, allowing analysts and officers to access critical data faster and more accurately. By automating and centralizing research tasks that would otherwise take hours, Peregrine reduces manual workload and enables personnel to focus on actionable intelligence and case development.
That is a straightforward account of why an agency would want this, and it is almost certainly true. Cross-referencing six systems by hand is slow work.
The thing worth noticing is that the report describes a change in speed, and speed is the whole of what changes. Every one of those records was already lawfully held by the department. Nobody had to buy a new camera. What $98,000 a year buys is the removal of the friction between them, and friction is not a privacy protection anyone designed, which is exactly why nothing had to be approved when it went away.
A county-level fact in one sentence
The report closes its case with this:
Peregrine software is currently used by the Modesto Police Department, Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department, and a number of neighboring allied agencies.
We read Turlock’s contract. We have not read Modesto’s or the Sheriff’s, and we are reporting only that Turlock’s staff report says they exist.
If it is accurate, then the county’s largest police department, the Sheriff’s Office that runs the countywide plate reader network, and Turlock are all on the same integration platform. That is a county-scale piece of infrastructure assembled through three separate city and county agenda items, each one a software line worth well under a hundred thousand dollars a year.
No single vote created it. That is not a criticism of any of the votes.
What we do not know
- Who may run a search across the combined data, what has to be true before they do, and whether those searches are logged and audited. The department's plate reader chapter governs plate reader systems. We have found nothing governing the layer that joins them to body-worn camera footage and dispatch records.
- Whether the 75 million annual plate reads in the fee schedule reflects expected volume, or is simply the tier that was sold. It is a contractual ceiling, not a measurement.
- How the 30-day retention of detections inside the platform relates to the retention of the same data in the underlying plate reader systems, which the department's own policy leaves to the vendor.
- What Modesto Police Department and the Stanislaus County Sheriff Department are running, on what terms, and whether the deployments are connected to each other.
- What the council decided, and whether anyone spoke.
What you can do
Show up
Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in Stanislaus County.
What we have documented in Stanislaus County →Protect yourself
Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.
Surveillance Self-Defense →Sources
- 1. Turlock City Council agenda packet, 12 August 2025: agreement with Peregrine for data point integration software · Meeting record · · accessed · archived copy
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