Pocatello Police | The city's plate reader network

Most of the devices volunteers have mapped in Bannock County belong to one system, and that system reached the public record in a single evening.

What the Council approved

On 5 December 2024 the Pocatello City Council took up item 7: a services agreement with Flock Group, Inc. and a sole source declaration. Sole source means the city did not put the work out to bid. The item told the Council that the money was already in the police department’s budget for the year and that ongoing costs would be carried in future operating budgets.

A police officer answered the Council’s questions. He said the cameras would go in at designated locations, that officers would be trained before the system was switched on, that the data is kept for 30 days unless it is tied to an active case, and that the system captures plates and vehicle details rather than faces. The City Attorney said the program complied with the Fourth Amendment. Three members voted for it. One voted against.

What it cost

The newspaper reported the purchase at the time as about $102,000 for 34 readers. The order form the department later gave the Council tells a longer story: $118,100 in the first year, $110,000 in each of the next two, and a contract total of $338,100. The hardware is 30 standard cameras and 4 long range cameras.

What it does

The department’s own audits are the clearest account of the scale. Between 27 May and 25 June 2026, 36 cameras read 8,444,450 license plates. Department members ran 6,449 searches in the first five months of 2026. The audits found no evidence of misuse. One search in those five months had not been documented with a reason, and the analyst traced it to a narcotics investigation.

The same audits record something else. Flock users, they say, can query over 6,000 individual networks and nearly 80,000 cameras, and the department’s own cameras are queried daily by agencies nationwide.

What changed, and when

The briefing the department gave the Council in August 2026 says nationwide access for searches of cameras inside the city limits is disabled, and that regional law enforcement partners retain access. The department’s own audit memo from six weeks earlier says its cameras are queried daily by agencies nationwide. Both documents sit in the same packet. The Chief told the work session that the department had recently turned nationwide access off and narrowed sharing to partners across the Western United States.

The retention figure moved too. The department told the Council in 2024 that data was kept 30 days. The vendor announced, on the morning of the August 2026 work session, that it would shorten that window to seven. The county Sheriff told his own board five days later that county data is kept seven days.

What the policy does not say

Department Policy 433 is published on the city website, and it is more specific than most. It names the statute, requires training before access, requires a reason to be entered before a search, bars use for harassment or on the basis of a protected class, and requires a written report to the Chief at least twice a year.

On retention it says the data will be stored in accordance with applicable city retention schedules, and it names no period. On sharing it says data may be released to other law enforcement agencies as approved by a supervisor, and it names no agencies.

The law behind it

Idaho added its plate reader statute in 2025, a year after the Pocatello purchase and a few months after the cameras went live. Idaho Code 49-1432 limits an agency to investigating felonies, misdemeanors and traffic accidents, and to searching for missing or endangered people. It bars using the cameras to enforce traffic infractions. It requires access controls, training, a log of every query including its purpose, and audits of those logs twice a year.

It says nothing about how long the data may be kept, nothing about which agencies it may be shared with, and nothing about reporting any of it to the public.