Coeur d'Alene Police | License plate readers

In August 2026 a Coeur d’Alene resident came to the City Council with a number she had found on a public map. Eleven Flock plate readers, listed locally on DeFlock.org. She asked whether the City had contracted for them or whether they belonged to somebody else, and said the public has a right to know who operates the cameras and how their data is used.^[1]

The Chief of Police answered that the City does not use Flock at all, “therefore any Flock devices in town would be privately owned”.^[1]

That exchange is the clearest statement in this county of a gap that runs through the whole project. A map of what volunteers can see from the street is not a map of what a government operates. Both numbers are real and they are answers to different questions, and the distance between them is not noise: it is where private cameras sit, unaccounted for by anyone, until somebody asks.

What the City does run

The department reads plates on a Motorola system, and the Chief’s description of it to the Council is the fullest account we could find anywhere. Queries are “only used in connection with specific criminal cases entered from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) or an officer”, the system “logs license plates only (not the occupants or owners)”, and officers have to “independently establish reasonable suspicion or probable cause before taking action”. Access runs to authorized sworn employees and the department’s crime analysts, “all queries are logged upon entry and audited monthly, and misuse can trigger criminal and administrative penalties”. Asked where the data sits, he said Motorola’s Azure servers, meeting federal criminal justice standards, with background checks on everyone with access on both sides.^[1]

What the record does not say is how many cameras there are, where they are, what they cost, when the Council approved them, or how long the reads are kept. The city publishes its council agendas for the current year and its minutes for the last two, and none of those documents carries any of it.

The one decision we can see

On 18 March 2025 the Council adopted Resolution No. 25-012 on its consent calendar, six votes to nothing. Consent calendars exist so that routine business does not consume a meeting, and most of what was in this one is exactly that. Its title, as the minutes print it, runs to five items: citation software at $69,324.00, a joint powers agreement for ambulances, a traffic notification policy, a surplus auction, and “AN AGREEMENT WITH MOTOROLA SOLUTIONS, INC., FOR DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENCY (DEA) APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE (API) ACCESS TO AUTOMATED LICENSE PLATE READER (ALPR) DATA”.^[2]

An application programming interface is how one system reads another’s data without a person in the middle. Which system is reading which is not stated. The staff report that would say sits in the agenda packet for that meeting, and the city’s host does not publish packets that old.

What state law now bars

Five months later the Council learned the shape of a new limit almost by accident. Asked about noise detecting cameras for the downtown, the City Attorney told the Council that “under Idaho law, using automated license plate reader (ALPR) data for infractions is illegal unless the offense is a misdemeanor or felony, meaning the Council would need to elevate noise violations to misdemeanors to use such technology”.^[3] Since 1 July 2025, Idaho Code 49-1432 has limited plate reader use to felony and misdemeanor investigations, traffic accidents and searches for missing or endangered persons, required every access to be logged with a purpose, and required each agency to audit those logs twice a year.^[5]