St. Anthony Police | St. Anthony's plate readers

A license plate reader is a camera that photographs every vehicle that passes it, reads the plate, and files the plate number with the time and the place. It does this to everyone, not to suspects. Six of them stand in St. Anthony, a city of about three and a half thousand people.

Here is everything the City Council was asked, and everything it said.

The item

On the agenda for 9 October 2025, between surplusing two speed trailers and confirming the appointment of an airport manager, is the line “Open Budget for Safety Cameras – Action Item”.^[1] That is the whole of the public notice.

The minutes of that meeting record the whole of the decision in one sentence: a motion to open the budget to purchase security cameras, made by one council member and seconded by another, on which all council members present were in favor, passing four votes to nothing.^[2]

No vendor is named. No amount is named. No number of cameras is named, and no location. The words license plate do not appear, and neither does the word Flock.

Two weeks later the Chief told the Council the department was moving forward with the security cameras.^[7] Nothing else was voted on.

Eight months later

The word Flock reaches the Council’s record on 25 June 2026, in a department report. The Chief asked whether the Council had any questions about the Flock cameras, gave the members a message he planned to provide to residents, said that he audits the use of the system and that the department is following Idaho Code, and reported that the cameras had recently helped solve a hit and run in town.^[3]

That is the only time the word Flock appears anywhere in the City Council’s published record. We searched all five of the city’s published books, about 5.9 million characters of minutes, agendas, resolutions, public notices and the municipal code, with a full text search checked against terms we knew were present. One hit.

The message to residents is not in the minutes and was not published in the city’s notices.

What Idaho law asks of the system

Idaho has governed plate readers by statute since 1 July 2025, three months before this vote.^[6] Section 49-1432 of the Idaho Code lets an agency use a reader for law enforcement or traffic flow analysis, and where it is used for law enforcement it limits the device and its data to the investigation of felony or misdemeanor crimes or traffic accidents, or to searching for missing or endangered persons. It bars using them to enforce traffic infractions unless an accident is involved.

It also asks for record keeping. Access must be limited to authorized personnel with access controls. Every authorized user must have mandatory training in data privacy, legal compliance and ethical use. Every access and every query must be logged with the user’s identity, the date, the time and the purpose. And the agency must audit those logs twice a year.

The statute says nothing at all about how long the reads may be kept.

That absence matters here, because on 13 August 2026 the Chief told the Council that it was probable the contract was going to change and that the department planned on changing the retention data.^[4] Neither the retention period the city has now nor the one it is moving to appears in any record we could find.

What this page cannot tell you

We can tell you that six readers are there, that the Council opened a budget for them in one sentence, and that the department says it audits them. We cannot tell you the price, the term, the vendor’s name from any document the city produced, the camera count from the city itself, where the cameras stand, or who else can search what they collect. None of that is published.

Those are the questions in the records request this project has drafted, and they are questions a resident can also ask in person. Public comment is a standing item on every St. Anthony City Council agenda, near the top of the meeting, and you do not have to be on the agenda to use it.