Tehama County Sheriff | License plate readers

Two paragraphs

The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office publishes its policy manual, all 828 pages, on a page titled Policy and Procedures, alongside a custody manual and a declaration about federal surplus equipment. Policy 472 covers licence plate readers, and it was revised on 2 July 2026, which makes it the most current such policy this site has read.

Most of it is what these policies say. No reasonable suspicion or probable cause is needed before running a search. The data “is not open to public review”. Retention is a one-year minimum. Access runs through a login that records who looked, by name and date and time, and audits “should be conducted on a regular basis”. The system it imagines is a patrol car: data “transferred from vehicles to the designated storage”.

The interesting part is section 472.7, and it needs both of its paragraphs.

The first:

The ALPR data may be shared only with public agencies and only as otherwise permitted by law (Civil Code § 1798.90.55).

Read alone that is loose. A public agency is a far wider category than a police department: it takes in every city, county, district and state body there is.

The second paragraph:

For purposes of this section, a public agency is limited to California state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies (Civil Code § 1798.90.5).

That is the clearest statement of the rule anywhere on this site. It names the category, names the exclusion, and cites the section of the Civil Code that defines it. Requests from public agencies outside California are routed to a different policy rather than answered under this one.

We nearly published the opposite. Reading the first sentence and stopping would have produced a page saying Tehama had the loosest sharing clause of any county documented here, when it has the tightest.

Three counties, one section

Three counties on this site publish the same section of the same family of manual, and they answer the central question three different ways.

Tehama’s names the exclusion of out-of-state and federal agencies outright, with the statute cited.

Santa Barbara’s restricts sharing to other California law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies, which reaches the same place through geography.

Colusa’s permits sharing with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies, and says nothing about where those agencies are.

That is a comparison of published texts and nothing else. It does not establish what any of the three agencies does with its data. A department can comply with the statute perfectly while its policy says nothing, or write an admirable clause and never look at it again.

What the comparison does show is which agencies wrote the answer down. That matters because a written rule is the thing a resident can point at, a court can enforce, and an auditor can test against. An unwritten practice is only as durable as the person currently in charge of it.

And it matters here in particular because of what happened further south. Ventura’s sheriff relied on exactly this restriction, switched off a vendor feature specifically to honour it, and then found through an audit that agencies outside California had queried its data hundreds of thousands of times in a single month regardless. A clause is not a wall. It is just the only place the wall is written down.

What is missing

Everything about the equipment.

There is no camera count in anything we read. No vendor. No contract. No cost. No record of the board approving any of it. The policy describes data coming out of patrol cars and has no vocabulary at all for a camera bolted to a pole, which does not tell us whether the office has any.

That last gap is closer to being filled than most on this site: 356 Board of Supervisors documents going back to 2021 are already in our corpus, fetched and unread. The decision is probably in there.

One more thing is reported and unverified, and it would change the shape of this page if it turned out to be true. Reporting describes the Corning Police Department operating both Flock and Motorola readers, and partnering with the Red Bluff Police Department and this Sheriff’s Office on a shared plate reader programme. We have not confirmed it.

If it is true, it raises a question Policy 472 cannot answer by itself. A carefully drafted sharing clause binds the agency that wrote it. In a system three departments share, the data tends to move under whichever of the three rulebooks says the least.