Nye County

On 3 January 2024 the Nye County Board of Commissioners had four prices in front of it for the same thing. The agenda printed them:

“Award Bid 2023-22 to Axon Enterprise, Inc. in the amount of $3,525,250.50; LensLock, Inc. in the amount of $2,275,425.00; PCN Strategies in the amount of $2,302,528.88; or Utility Associates, Inc. in the amount of $2,311,500.00.”

The thing being bought was body cameras for the Sheriff’s Office. Two weeks later, on 17 January, the board had one price:

“Brian Kunzi explained this was a bid put out for body worn cameras for the Sheriffs Office. There were four bids received and in discussions with Captain Harry Means it was determined that three of the bids were non-responsive. The one responsive bid was from LensLock in the amount of $2,000,319.45.”

A captain explained the grounds. The rejected bids had problems with “concealability factor, redaction services, and warranties, among others”. Counsel told the board every requirement had been complied with, a notice of award had been issued, and nobody had filed a protest. Two residents spoke in favour. The board awarded LensLock a five-year contract.

Nothing in that record suggests anything improper, and we are not suggesting it. What the record shows is narrower and still worth knowing. A two million dollar, five-year surveillance contract was decided without a price to compare it against, because after the responsiveness review there was only one price left. The figure the board voted on was also $275,000 lower than the figure LensLock advertised two weeks earlier, and the minutes do not explain the difference.

One commissioner did object that day. Commissioner Strickland “stated she was not happy with the amount of back-up and thought it was unacceptable the Commissioners had to read that much”.

The Sheriff explained the law to his own board, correctly

In the same discussion the Sheriff told the commissioners why they were buying cameras at all. The minutes record that he “informed the Commissioners it was a State mandate that” and then, after a page break, “body cams were on all uniformed officers. Since he and Captain Means were not generally on the street they were not required to wear one.”

That is right, and it is the clearest statement of the law by any Nevada agency in this project’s records. Nevada requires uniformed officers who routinely interact with the public to wear a body camera. A sheriff and a captain who are not on the street fall outside it.

The same statute requires something else, and this is the part no document in the county’s record answers. Every Nevada agency must adopt a written body camera policy containing six specific things, including keeping footage for at least fifteen days. We did not find that policy. It is an agency record rather than a board record, so it would not be in these papers even if it exists.

Who pays, and why that matters here

Nye does not buy this out of the general fund. It uses a dedicated local tax and federal grants.

In November 2023 the board ratified the Sheriff’s acceptance of a U.S. Department of Justice award “in the amount of $314,000.00 to provide funding for body worn cameras”, with a fifty per cent match of another $314,000 from local funds. Purchasing staff told the board the remaining years would draw $463,000 more.

That local money is the Public Safety Sales and Use Tax, created by the Nevada Legislature in 2007. Every year the board adopts a spending plan for it, and it does so town by town. The plan for the Town of Pahrump covered “additional positions and the annual costs for cloud storage, body worn and vehicle cameras, software and licensing related to mobile data terminals, fingerprint machines, and vacuum sealers”. Manhattan and the county as a whole got their own versions of the same list.

This is the most legible surveillance funding arrangement we have found in Nevada. The money comes from a tax the public voted for, and every year the equipment it pays for is written down in a public document that the board has to adopt in an open meeting. If you want to watch this county’s surveillance budget, you do not need a records request. You need the PSST plan, once a year.

Somebody asked where the footage goes

On 1 October 2024, as the board adopted the Pahrump plan, a resident put the obvious question. The minutes record that Tim Bohannon “said the data security was not spelled out as clearly as he was looking for”.

The answer, from county staff, was that “part of the Lenslock contract was a five-year data storage contract for the body cams, which was very extensive and included a lot of components”. The plan was adopted four votes to none.

That exchange is the entire public record on where two million dollars of body camera footage is kept and under what terms. How long it is held, who can see it, when it is deleted, and whether the vendor may do anything with it are not in any document we read. The contract itself is not in the county’s published papers.

The radios that stopped being listenable

In March 2025 the board approved 139 new Motorola P-25 radios for first responders, at $1,277,915.77, and separately $218,407.30 for audio servers. The agenda says what the radios do. One line item is to “add encryption license for LE”.

Encrypted police radio is not a camera and it does not watch anyone. It is on this page because it changes what the public can watch. A scanner is how residents and reporters have followed policing in real time for decades, and encryption closes it.

The county bought it in an open meeting, with the purpose printed on the agenda, and a member of the public commented on the price. That is the opposite of hiding it, and it is worth saying so. It is also worth saying what was lost, because the two facts are not in tension.

What we did not find

Across 326 readable documents and 10.6 million characters of county board papers since January 2023, we found no plate reader, under any spelling and under any vendor name we searched, including the one this county is already known to have used. No facial recognition. No gunshot detection. No camera registry programme. And no drones: not in the county’s papers, not in the EFF Atlas, and not in the state’s drone registry. Nye is the first Nevada county we have researched where every source agrees there is nothing there.

The plate reader gap is the interesting one. The EFF Atlas records the Sheriff’s Office buying two plate readers from PIPS Technology in 2010 for $37,400. That is sixteen years ago and six years before our records window opens. We searched the county’s papers for PIPS and for the companies that absorbed it, and for the vendors a county would buy from today, and found nothing at all. We cannot tell you whether those readers were retired, replaced, or are still running. Nobody has written it down where we can see it.

Fifty-six of the 382 documents we fetched could not be read because they are scans with no text in them, and several of those are long sets of minutes. Everything above is a statement about the 326 we could read.

What this record does not cover

The Sheriff’s body camera policy, and whether it contains the six things state law requires. The LensLock contract itself, including retention and who may access the footage. What happened to the 2010 plate readers. And the Sheriff’s Office publishes what appears to be a numbered policy manual online, which would be the first published manual we have found in any Nevada county, but we could not reach it to confirm.

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