Harney County

Harney County’s own website is unread, so the county’s record is unread. This page is built from the City of Hines, which publishes freely.

What the county bought, written down in a city’s agenda

The City Administrator’s report to the Hines City Council on 8 October 2024 contains three sentences that are entirely about the county:

Oregon Criminal Justice Commission Granted $563,956.00 for the purchase of Motorola Solutions Software, RMS. Harney County Adopted Resolution #2024-30 on September 24, 2024, entering contract with Motorola Solutions. The City of Hines completed the Shared Agency Addendum on September 26, 2024.

An RMS is a records management system: the database a police agency keeps its reports, its names and its case files in. This is not a camera and should not be read as one. It is the other half of the same question, because a shared records system decides who else can read what an officer wrote down about you.

A state grant of more than half a million dollars, a county resolution, and a city signing on two days later. That is the complete public account we have of the largest law enforcement technology decision made in this county, and it exists because a city administrator mentioned it in a status report. Resolution #2024-30 itself is on the county’s website, which we cannot read.

Two items, and no way to learn how they ended

On 13 May 2025 the Hines City Council agenda listed, under Council Business:

Axon Enterprise, Police BodyCam proposal VOTE

On 23 June 2026 it listed two items in a row:

d) Park Vandalism, Consideration of a Statement Letter VOTE e) New Security Surveillance System Quote VOTE

We can tell you those reached the table. We cannot tell you what the council did, and neither can anyone else reading the city’s website, because every set of minutes Hines publishes is a scanned image. Fifty-four of them in the period we read. A search finds nothing in them because there is nothing in them to search: they are pictures of pages.

So this county has agendas and no decisions. Do not read that as concealment. Scanning minutes is how a small city with a part-time office has always published, and the same pattern turned up in Sherman, Tillamook and Hood River during this work. It is a cost, and it falls on residents.

Vandalism keeps buying cameras

The two items on 23 June 2026 sit next to each other on the agenda. The city does not say they are connected and neither do we.

But it is the third time this sequence has appeared in Oregon in a year. The City of Hood River adopted a security camera policy in January 2026 whose staff report gives its own cause: “Over the past couple of years, there have been incidents of vandalism to the City Hall building. In response to these incidents, there has been a request by the City Employee Safety Committee and other City employees that security cameras be installed on the exterior of City Hall and the Police Department.” Those cameras were installed, for $11,345, before the policy existed.

Property damage is the most common documented reason a small Oregon city acquires cameras. That is worth knowing before your own council reaches item (e), because the decision usually arrives as a quote rather than as a debate.

What the police department says about itself

The Hines Police Department publishes a page about its work and no policy of any kind on it. No body camera rule, no retention period, nothing about what is recorded or how long it is kept.

What the page does say is worth reading, because it explains where this city’s information actually lives. Dispatch for the Hines Police Department, in the department’s own words, is “provided through a contract with the Harney County Sheriff’s Office.”

The city buys its dispatch from the county, and it signed on to the county’s Motorola records contract. Two of the three systems a small department runs on belong to the county, and the county’s record is unread.

What this record does not cover

Harney County itself: the Sheriff’s Office, the County Court, Resolution #2024-30 and the Motorola contract. All unread, because the county’s website will not tell us whether we may read it. This is what a records request is for.

The outcome of every vote in Hines, for the reason above.

Burns, the county seat, which publishes City Council agenda packets going back to 2018, 63 of them in 2025 alone. Those packets are unread.

No devices have been mapped in this county by OpenStreetMap contributors, and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance has no entry for any agency here. Neither is evidence that nothing is operating.