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Nampa Police | Cameras on 39 state-controlled intersections

In January 2023 the Nampa City Council approved, on its consent agenda, an agreement letting the city put multi-lane plate readers, fish-eye cameras and pan-tilt-zoom cameras on 39 intersections the Idaho Transportation Department owns or controls. A police captain administers the agreement.

At a glance

Approved
17 January 2023, on the consent agenda, roll call with all councilmembers present voting yes and one abstaining [1]
What goes up
Multi-lane plate reader cameras, multi-directional fish-eye cameras and pan-tilt-zoom cameras [2]
Where
39 signalized intersections listed in the agreement's Exhibit A, all of them owned or controlled by the Idaho Transportation Department, eight of them Interstate 84 ramp intersections at five interchanges: Idaho Center, Garrity, Franklin, Midland and Northside [3]
Who administers it
The Administrative Captain of the Nampa Police Department, named in the agreement [2]
Who else can watch
Idaho Transportation Department and State Communications staff at the dispatch facility in Meridian may view the feed of any installed camera [2]
What the police may not operate
The pan-tilt-zoom cameras only. The agreement places no such limit on the plate readers [2]
Who answers records requests about it
The city [2]
How many of the 39 carry plate readers
The exhibit lists locations approved for all three camera types together and does not say which type goes where [3]
A plate reader policy
None is published by the city or the police department that we could find [4]
How long the data is kept
Not stated in the agreement or in the staff report [2]

How it happened

  1. Decision

    Approved in the consent block

    The council approves the memorandum of agreement with the Idaho Transportation Department as item 1-6.e of its consent agenda, in a block with meeting minutes, plats and an airport lease. Three other items are pulled from consent that night for discussion. This one is not. [1] [2]

Traffic engineering and policing want cameras in the same places. Both care about intersections, and in Nampa both are served by the same poles, because the busiest intersections in the city belong to the state. This agreement is where those two purposes were written into one document.

On 17 January 2023 the Nampa City Council approved a memorandum of agreement with the Idaho Transportation Department allowing the city to install cameras on the department’s infrastructure. It was item 1-6.e of the consent agenda, approved in a single block alongside meeting minutes, subdivision plats and an airport land lease. The vote was a roll call with every councilmember present voting yes and one abstaining. Three other items were pulled off consent that night for discussion; this was not one of them.[1]

The staff report attached to the item is four bullet points long. It says cameras are being installed at many intersections across the city as part of the Intelligent Transportation System project, that some of them will sit on state-owned infrastructure, and that the agreement allows it.[2]

Three kinds of camera

The agreement itself is more specific than the staff report. Its stated purpose is to memorialize the department’s permission for the city to install three types of roadway monitoring and vehicle detection camera, the first of which it names as “Multi-lane plate reader (ALPR) cameras”.[2] The other two are multi-directional or fish-eye cameras, and pan-tilt-zoom cameras.

A multi-lane plate reader records the plate of every vehicle in several lanes at once. A fish-eye camera watches a whole intersection in one frame. A pan-tilt-zoom camera is steerable, and can be pointed and magnified by whoever holds the controls.

Where they go

Exhibit A to the agreement is a list of 39 signalized intersections, every one of them state owned or state controlled. Nine are marked as owned and maintained by the Idaho Transportation Department; the other 30 are department intersections the city maintains.[3]

They run the length of the city’s main corridors: Garrity Boulevard, Caldwell Boulevard, Franklin Boulevard, Northside Boulevard, Karcher Road, Midland Boulevard, Idaho Center Boulevard, and 11th and 12th Avenue. Eight of them are Interstate 84 ramp intersections, at five interchanges: Idaho Center, Garrity, Franklin, Midland and Northside. The agreement also says the department will consider additional locations the city proposes, including terminal signal sites along the I-84 ramps, though not the interstate mainline itself.[2]

The exhibit lists approved locations for the three camera types together. It does not say which type goes where, so the number of intersections carrying a plate reader is not something this document settles.

Who watches, and who is kept out

Two clauses in the agreement are about control of the cameras rather than their installation, and they point in opposite directions.

The first gives the state a view. The agreement says the city “hereby agrees to allow ITD and/or State Communications (State Comm) personnel located in the dispatch facility in Meridian, Idaho, to have access to and view the camera feeds of any of the installed cameras”, subject to those agencies’ own policies.[2] Meridian is in the next county.

The second limits the police. “The Nampa Police Department is hereby exempt from controlling or manipulating PTZ cameras only”, the agreement says, adding that non-enforcement information can be shared with the department.[2] The restriction is on the steerable cameras. It says nothing about the plate readers, which do not need to be steered.

And the agreement names who runs it for the city: “The administrator of this MOA for City is the Administrative Captain of the Nampa Police Department.”[2] The notice address for the city in the same document is the police department, not public works. A traffic agreement, on traffic poles, administered by a police captain.

The agreement also puts one duty on the city that a resident can use: “City shall address all public records requests pertaining to the equipment.”[2] If you want to know what these cameras see, the city is the place to ask.

What is not here

The agreement covers permission, permits, electricity and liability. It does not say how long a plate read is kept, who inside the department may search the data, whether searches are logged, or whether the data goes to any other agency. The city publishes no plate reader policy that we could find.

That last gap matters more than usual in this county, because the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office runs its own multi-lane plate readers, bought in 2021, on the same state highway structures. Nothing in either record says whether the two systems share anything.

On the map

The community has mapped 120 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

What you can do

Show up

Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have confirmed where each of them meets in Canyon County and how public comment works there.

How to show up in Canyon 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. 1.
    Nampa City Council, regular meeting minutes, 17 January 2023, item 1-6.e · Meeting record · · accessed
  2. 2.
    Memorandum of Agreement between the Idaho Transportation Department and the City of Nampa for camera installation, with the staff report, in the council packet for 17 January 2023 · Primary document · · accessed
  3. 3.
    Exhibit A to the Idaho Transportation Department agreement, City of Nampa signalized intersections ownership and maintenance, in the council packet for 17 January 2023 · Primary document · · accessed
  4. 4.
    City of Nampa, Public Meetings and police pages · Primary document · accessed

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