Jerome County Sheriff | County building cameras

The most expensive surveillance decision in Jerome County’s public record is not about plate readers. It is a camera system for the county’s own buildings, approved unanimously on 30 May 2023 for $149,301.92 plus $5,396.46 a year in support.^[4]

It reached the agenda under the heading “Technology Updates and Purchases”, with two IT staff named beside it. Nothing in that line says camera, security or surveillance. A resident scanning the week’s agenda for a decision about being watched would have had no reason to come.

Eighteen months of shopping

The project is easy to follow once you know it is there, and impossible to find if you are looking for device words. It starts in October 2022 with a vendor presenting over video, and the chairman saying plainly what the county wanted: the courthouse, the annex and the sheriff’s department, with someone able to check all three.^[1]

Three weeks later the IT department reported something that deserves more credit than it got. It had not evaluated the vendor’s free test camera, “because it was not comfortable with connecting the camera to the County network”.^[2] A county technology department declining to plug a stranger’s camera into its own network is a small act of good practice, and it changed the outcome: the department suggested the integrator that already serviced the jail, and that is who got the work.

By April 2023 the Board had a Security Master Plan covering every county building, including the extension office and the airport, with cameras kept on a premise network rather than in a cloud.^[3] Nineteen projects were planned. The judicial building was the top of the list at $43,206.97. The Board asked for a full quote per building, and five weeks later approved a package three and a half times the size of the number it had first been shown.

What was actually built

The minutes say the system replaces the camera server, switches and software at the judicial complex, separates the camera network from the county’s production network, and ties into the existing camera system at the jail.^[3] And they say what that is for: the new measures would let the jail complex view what is happening in other county buildings.^[4]

The county did not buy cameras for one building. It joined its buildings together, with the detention center as the place they are watched from. Nothing in the record says how many cameras there are, how long video is kept, or which staff can see which feed.

A year later the same pattern extended outward with no separate decision at all: in September 2024 an IT report mentions, in passing, that airport security cameras were going in that week, along with badge access and a camera watching election materials in the clerk’s office.^[6] Those minutes are a scan with no text layer, which means a keyword search of this county’s record does not find them.

Courthouses have security cameras, and this is an ordinary purchase. It shows how little of such a decision an agenda has to carry. A price, a heading about technology, and a unanimous aye were enough.