Pershing County

In November 2024, the Sheriff of Pershing County told his commissioners that he could not release body camera footage to the public, because his office did not have the equipment to black out the parts it is required to black out, and could not do it fast enough to meet the deadline in state law.

Every county page on this site raises the question of how you actually get hold of body camera footage. This is the only one that answers it.

The problem, in the county’s own minutes

The agenda item was for two purchases: a computer at $5,040.97 and redaction software at $4,346.00, “to redact BWC footage and photos for public release to meet requirements of NRS 239”.

NRS 239 is Nevada’s public records law. It sets time limits.

The minutes record what the Sheriff said: “they do not have the proper equipment to redact the photos and body cam videos, especially to meet the timeframes in NRS 239.”

A commissioner asked whether he had the money in his budget. He did not.

And then a sentence that explains a great deal about this technology generally: the District Attorney noted that “the current vendor doesn’t have the capacity to meet those requirements.”

The county had leased its body camera system twenty-one months earlier. It had the cameras. It had the footage. What it did not have, and what the camera company could not provide, was any way to hand that footage to a member of the public within the time the law allows.

The board approved $9,386.97 out of contingency funds to fix it.

Nobody did anything wrong here, and that is the point

The Sheriff asked openly. The board funded it. The county now has redaction equipment.

What the exchange shows is that a body camera system is not one thing. Buying cameras buys recording. Releasing what they record to the people they record is a separate capability, with a separate cost, which nobody had budgeted for and which the vendor did not supply.

For twenty-one months, in this county, footage existed that could not practically be released. Not because anyone refused, but because the machine to redact it had not been bought.

The county said no to two funding sources

The other thing Pershing does that no other county on this site does is turn money down.

When the body camera contract came up in February 2023, a commissioner pointed out “that there is $110,000 in the 911 Fund, which has taken 10 years to build up to that”. Nevada law lets money from the surcharge on telephone bills pay for body cameras, and other counties use it routinely. Here the recommendation was to budget $80,000 in the Sheriff’s own budget “and not use the 911 Fund”.

Then in November 2024, asked to fund the redaction equipment, a commissioner asked whether opioid settlement money could be used. The District Attorney said no: those funds “must be used in fighting opioid abuse”, and that “is statutorily required”.

That answer is worth holding next to Mineral County, one county south, where in February 2026 the commissioners considered using $50,000 of opioid settlement funds to help pay for deputies’ in-car and body-worn camera systems.

Same state, same settlement money, same year or near enough, and two counties reading the constraint in opposite directions. We are not saying either county acted improperly. We are saying that only one of those two readings can be correct, and that nobody outside those two rooms appears to have noticed the disagreement.

What the cameras are

In February 2023 the board approved a contract with LensLock as a new body camera vendor “with a cost of $343,675.00 over 5 years”, on condition the District Attorney’s changes to the wording were made. A second motion authorised the Sheriff to sign. Both passed.

It is a lease rather than a purchase, and the county insures the units. The equipment never becomes the county’s.

The old WatchGuard body-worn and vehicle cameras were later removed from the Sheriff’s inventory, the agenda noting they had been replaced.

LensLock now appears in two Nevada counties on this site. Nye County awarded it a contract worth $2,000,319.45 over five years in January 2024, after three of the four bidders were ruled non-responsive. Pershing signed a year earlier, for a sixth of the money. The small county went first.

What we did not find

Across 221 readable documents covering the commissioners and the emergency planning committee since January 2023, there is no plate reader under any spelling or vendor name, no Flock, no facial recognition, no gunshot detection, no camera registry and no real-time crime centre.

Forty of the 261 documents we fetched are scans we could not read, so that statement covers the rest.

The one drone in this county’s papers belonged to the Television District, and the item was to remove it from inventory because it was outdated and could no longer be used.

What this record does not cover

The LensLock contract itself, including how long footage is kept and who may see it. The Sheriff’s body camera policy, which state law requires to contain six specific things. And whether the redaction equipment, once bought, actually brought the county inside the deadlines in NRS 239.

Community contributors have mapped no devices in this county in OpenStreetMap. That is a fact about what volunteers have mapped, not a finding that there are no cameras here.