Blackfoot Police | The Blackfoot Police Department's cameras

The Blackfoot Police Department did not ask its City Council for permission to record. By the time the Council was told in any detail what the department had, it already had all of it.

The occasion was a special meeting on 17 March 2022 about the city’s five and ten year plans. The Chief of Police went through vehicle leases, the rising price of bulletproof vests, hard body armor partly reimbursed by the federal government, and fuel. Then this:

Chief Gay explained the police department is at a point where every officer has a body camera, and every police vehicle is equipped with a camera, however, storage of camera recording footage is what has become the major issue.

He told the Council that on average each officer produces about six hours per day, that the department would likely need to switch to cloud based storage in 2023 or 2024, and that “Currently the city’s police department shares a server with the county’s police department that is owned and not leased.”^[1]

What that item actually was

It was a slide about a storage bill. Every fact a resident might want about the department’s recording, that it is total, that it runs to hours per officer per shift, and that the footage is held on hardware shared with another agency, arrived because someone had to explain why the line item was going to grow.

The shared server is the part worth sitting with. Two separate agencies, a city police department and a county sheriff’s office, holding each other’s video on one machine that the record says the city and county own between them. Nothing in either body’s published record says who administers it, who can see what, or whether either agency logs a search of the other’s footage.

Three years later the same closeness shows up in software. The department’s 2024 year in review, read to the Council in February 2025, lists “in collaboration with the Sheriff’s Office transitioning to Cellebrite software to enhance the ability to effectively investigate crimes and retrieve digital evidence”, in a sentence that also covers new Tasers and new radios.^[2] Cellebrite extracts the contents of a phone. The Council was told about it in the same breath as the radios, and no contract, price or policy for it appears in the city’s record.

The parks

The city also records places. Its year in review for 2023 records that it “Installed a new camera system at Jensen Grove, Parks/Rec Shop, and the Golf Course to help deal with vandalism.”^[3] Jensen Grove is the city’s lake and park, the place people go in summer. No price, vendor, camera count or retention period appears anywhere, and the record does not say whether the police department can watch the feed.

What we do not know

How long the department keeps body camera footage. Whether it moved to cloud storage and to whose. What agreement, if any, governs the shared server. Whether there is a written body camera policy, and whether the Council has ever seen it. None of those has an answer in the city’s published record.

If you want an answer

The Blackfoot City Council meets at 7:00 PM on the first Tuesday of the month in the Council Chambers at 157 North Broadway. The police budget presentation, usually in the spring, and the department’s year in review, usually in February, are the two meetings a year where this equipment is described out loud.

A public records request to the City of Blackfoot under the Idaho Public Records Act can ask for the department’s body camera policy, its retention schedule, and any agreement with Bingham County covering the shared storage.