Post Falls Police | License plate readers

Most of the plate reader arguments in this county are about whether to start. Post Falls started eighteen years ago, and its argument is about how long the reads have to be kept.

The department’s account of itself is unusually complete, because in September 2026 the Chief of Police put it in front of the City Council as a staff report with the slides printed in the packet. “Post Falls acquired License Plate recognition cameras around 2008”, fixed and car mounted, and “PFPD became the regional hub for LPR data”.^[1] Today there are nine, all fixed, Motorola LQ6 units, with no mobile cameras at all.^[1]

The presentation opens by separating the cameras people see from the cameras that read plates. The city has twenty intersections with video detection cameras that sense a vehicle and cycle the light, three of them with a live feed and one pan-tilt-zoom camera watching traffic flow. None of them records or retains anything, and engineering staff look at them a few times a year to check the signals are working.^[1]

Two years, and not by choice

The interesting part is the retention. A plate reader program usually chooses how long to keep its reads, and the argument is about whether the number is short enough. Here the department says it cannot choose.

“City records retention set by I.C. 50-907 - minimum retention period of two years for all “temporary” data”, says one slide, and the next: “The nearly identical statute for county records, I.C. 31-871, creates a much shorter retention for sheriff’s media recordings”.^[1] Two statutes written to do the same job for two kinds of local government, and the one that governs cities is the stricter of the two about holding on to things.

So the department went to the legislature. “Post Falls, along with Idaho Falls, attempted to shorten cities retention to match counties – Died in legislative committee”, and “City will again pursue legislation”.^[1] When a council member asked how the data is deleted, the Chief said it “is an automatic deletion at two years”.^[2]

What the Council asked

The Council’s questions, as the minutes record them, were about custody rather than capability. Where does the data live: in the city’s own cloud. Who secures it: the Chief “responded that likely our IT Department, but he would find out for sure and get back to council”. How is it deleted: automatically, at two years.^[2]

The department publishes its ALPR policy, its retention policy, its audit policy, the vendor’s data management FAQ and a data sharing report on the city’s records website, and says it audits the queries made on its own system and trains officers on the use rules every year.^[1] Since 1 July 2025, Idaho Code 49-1432 has limited every Idaho agency’s use of plate reader data to investigating felony and misdemeanor crimes, traffic accidents and searches for missing or endangered persons, and barred its use for traffic infractions.^[5]