Tehama County

The Sheriff’s Office here publishes the most recently revised plate reader policy on this site, and on the question that matters most it is also the most explicit.

Section 472.7 needs both of its paragraphs to read correctly. The first says data may be shared “only with public agencies”, which on its own is loose: a public agency is a far wider category than a police department. The second closes it completely, defining a public agency as “limited to California state or local agencies” and stating that it “does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies”, with the statute cited. Requests from outside California go to a different policy.

We nearly published the opposite. Stopping at the first sentence would have produced a page saying this county had the loosest sharing rule documented here, when it has the tightest.

Three counties on this site publish the same section of the same manual family and answer that question three ways. Tehama names the exclusion outright. Santa Barbara restricts sharing to California agencies, reaching the same place by geography. Colusa names only law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies, with no mention of where they are.

That is a comparison of texts, not of conduct. It shows which agencies wrote the answer down, which matters because a written rule is the thing a resident can point at and a court can enforce. It also has limits, as Ventura found: that county relied on the same restriction, switched off a vendor feature to honour it, and learned through an audit that agencies outside California had queried its data hundreds of thousands of times anyway.

What is missing here is the equipment. No camera count, no vendor, no contract, no cost, no approving decision. That gap is closer to being filled than most: 356 board documents going back to 2021 are already fetched and unread.