Twin Falls Police | The city's plate reader network

Almost every device volunteers have mapped in Twin Falls County belongs to one system, and that system is the city’s.

What it is and what it cost

The Twin Falls Police Department bought its plate readers in three orders. Twelve cameras in March 2023 for $69,200 over two years. Sixteen more in September 2024 for $96,000 over two years. Twelve more in May 2025 at $43,800 a year, this time with the vendor’s FlockOS software and an Enhanced LPR Upgrade included.

In April 2026 all three orders were folded into one agreement running to 30 April 2028, at $130,000 a year and $260,000 in total. That document lists the three batches on three separate lines, sixteen and twelve and twelve, which is how the count of forty can be checked against the paperwork rather than taken on trust.

The department publishes all four of those contracts itself, on one page of the city website, alongside its written policy and the letter it sent to a neighboring sheriff. That is unusual enough to say plainly.

Where it came from

The city’s own plate reader page lists the fiscal year 2022-2023 budget documents under a heading describing them as the council documents from when the technology was first presented and approved. The police request in that budget is headed Traffic Cameras. It asks for $12,000 a year and describes giving the city the ability to monitor traffic in six locations, for vehicle counts, evidence and criminal apprehension including stolen vehicles.

Nine months later the city signed a contract for twelve plate readers costing $36,700 in its first year. The budget document we read names no vendor, and the words license plate do not appear in it.

We are not saying the two documents were meant to be read against each other. We are saying the city points to the first as the origin of the second, and the first describes something smaller and different from what arrived.

The February letter

On 18 February 2026 the Chief of Police wrote to the Sheriff of Jerome County, the county immediately north, and suspended that office’s access to the Twin Falls network with immediate effect. The letter gives two grounds. The first is concern about improper or questionable use of the network by that office. The second is that the office had adopted no written policy governing plate reader use, which Idaho Code section 49-1432 addresses.

The conditions it sets for reinstatement are worth reading as a description of what good practice would look like: a written acknowledgement limiting administrator level access to designated personnel with an operational need, a written policy covering training, access control, supervision and accountability, and quarterly audits whose results Twin Falls can ask to see.

The letter attaches the department’s own two most recent system audits, neither of which is in the published copy, and is copied to the Office of the Idaho Attorney General.

What that letter establishes, before anything else, is that these cameras were never only Twin Falls cameras. A department that can suspend another agency’s access is a department whose data that agency could previously search.

The argument, and what the Council did with it

Through July and August 2026 residents came to the Monday evening meetings to argue about the cameras. At the meeting of 27 July, sixteen spoke against them and two spoke in favor, and the Council afterwards went into a closed session on matters imminently likely to be litigated.

On 24 August, during the public hearing on the budget, the Council took four recorded votes.

A motion to suspend the use and the financial obligation of the plate readers until the Idaho Legislature adopts comprehensive rules, regulations and accountability measures, including consequences for misuse, failed two to five.

A motion that the city implement any law on plate reading technology within seven days of the governor signing it, and that the current contract be opened to amendments on the chief’s recommendations with Council approval, passed seven to nothing.

A motion to accept the current contract with three revisions, passed six to one. The revisions were to turn off the AI learning component of the contract, to keep the national search function off unless the department needs access for a local crime, and to authorize the chief to sign.

The budget ordinance then passed seven to nothing.

What the amendment actually changed

The amendment came back to the Council on 14 September, signed by the vendor on 28 August and by the Chief of Police on 9 September. It is printed in full in that meeting’s agenda packet, which is the only reason its terms are knowable.

It rewrites one sentence. Under the amended terms the city grants the vendor a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to use and disclose the city’s camera data to provide the service and to use it to support and improve the vendor’s products and services, provided the vendor may not use it to train or improve any machine learning or AI models.

The training carve-out is the entire change. Irrevocable, perpetual and worldwide all survive it, and so does the right to use and disclose the data to support and improve the vendor’s products. A resident reading the council minutes would learn that the AI learning component was turned off. A resident reading the amendment learns what remains.

That gap is not a trick played on anyone. It is what happens when a public body negotiates a change to a contract of adhesion in a single evening, and it is the reason the contract, not the motion, is the document worth keeping.