Elko County

Nevada requires every police department and sheriff’s office in the state to put body cameras on uniformed officers, and requires each of them to write a policy containing six specific things. When the camera must be on. That it must not be switched off mid-encounter. That general activity must not be recorded. That people’s privacy is protected. That footage is kept at least fifteen days. That officers face discipline for erasing it early.

Six Nevada counties into this project, we had never managed to read a single one of those policies. Not one agency published one.

Then a town of two thousand people did.

Carlin publishes its rulebook

The Carlin Police Department puts its entire 33-page policy manual on the city’s website. Section 316 is called “Body Worn Cameras”, and this is all of it:

“Pursuant to the provisions of NRS 289.830, the Carlin Police Department provides officers and field employees with portable video and audio recorders (including those worn on the employee’s person) for use during the performance of their duties. The use of recorders are intended to enhance the mission of the Carlin Police Department by accurately capturing contacts between employees and the public and documenting evidence.”

Section 317 starts on the next line.

We searched the whole manual, not just that section, for each of the six things the statute asks for. Across 103,945 characters the word “activation” does not appear. Neither does “deactivate”. Neither does the phrase “general activity”. Privacy appears six times and never about footage. There is one mention of retention and it concerns motor vehicle records. The statute’s own name for the device, “portable event recording device”, is not in the manual anywhere.

So the published policy cites the law and does not contain what the law asks for.

Read that carefully, because the obvious conclusion is the wrong one

Carlin may well hold a separate body camera policy that is not in the published manual. We have not asked, and asking is the first records request on this county’s list. Nothing here says this department is breaking the law.

What it does say is that Carlin is the only agency in six researched Nevada counties whose compliance can be examined at all, and the only reason is that Carlin published.

Every other department and sheriff’s office we have looked at in this state keeps its policies internal. Their policies might be thorough. They might be a paragraph. Nobody outside those agencies can tell, and nothing requires them to say.

That is the finding, and it is bigger than Carlin. Nevada wrote a detailed duty and no way to check it. The statute lists six required elements and requires nobody to publish the result, so a resident who wants to know whether their police force meets it has no route but a records request, and there is no public list of which agencies have adopted a policy at all.

The one department that opened its rulebook turned out to have a policy that does not meet the list. That is not a reason to think less of Carlin. It is a reason to wonder about everywhere else.

A drone that is actually on the state register

Nevada also requires the Department of Public Safety to keep a register of every drone a public agency flies, and to publish it. On other pages of this site that requirement produces an absence: Lyon County’s sheriff runs a substantial drone programme and does not appear in the published list at all.

Elko is one of the few that does. The Elko County Sheriff’s Department is one of sixteen agencies named in the register the department publishes, recorded with a federal aircraft registration and a certificate of authorisation marked “No”.

The register also lists each aircraft’s operators by name with their contact details. We are not reproducing those, and we do not link the file for that reason.

What the register does not tell you is what the drone is for. Local news coverage from 2017, updated in 2022, describes a programme for missing persons, crime scenes, collisions and special events, and quotes the Sheriff saying it is not about spying on people, with a policy said to bar random surveillance and require a warrant or consent where people expect privacy. We have not read that policy. The Sheriff’s Office website does not admit our reader.

Most of this county’s record is closed to us

This page is built differently from the others on this site, and you should know that before you read anything into what is missing from it.

We could not read Elko County’s own board record. The county publishes its agendas and minutes through Granicus, and that host tells every automated reader except four named search engines to go away. We obey that. The Sheriff’s Office website does the same thing with a shorter list. The school district’s agenda platform excludes everyone, which matters because Nevada’s body camera law reaches school district police too.

So there is no corpus sweep behind this page. Everything above comes from documents we fetched one at a time from hosts that allow it: a police manual, a state register, a news archive.

Nothing here is an absence claim about Elko County government, because we did not read Elko County government’s papers. If this county’s commissioners have bought a plate reader, a camera network or anything else, it would be in the record we could not open.

What is open, and what we have not done yet

The City of Elko publishes its council record through a system that does allow us, and the agenda we checked carries a federal Justice Assistance Grant item for the Elko Police Department. That is the same funding route that put a mobile plate reader and an artificial intelligence patrol system into Lyon County. Nobody has read those packets yet, and they are the first thing to do here.

West Wendover’s records are also open. The Elko Daily Free Press is open. Neither has been swept.

Community contributors have mapped eleven devices in this county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.