Jackson County

In January 2026 a resident asked the county to do something about Flock plate reader cameras at three consecutive regular board meetings. The cameras the minutes locate are the City of Medford’s, a city agency, and in the 210 board documents the county has published for 2026 we could not find a plate reader the county itself owns.

That record is everything the Board of Commissioners has published for 2026 so far, through late August: work sessions, regular meetings, staff meetings, land use hearings and every Local Contract Review Board agenda, all of it readable. We swept it for every surveillance technology and every vendor named in this county’s public datasets, Flock, Axon, DJI, Wolfcom, PIPS, Motorola and Omnigo among them. No agenda item, discussion or action on plate readers, drones, body cameras or facial recognition appears in it. The claim is scoped to what the county publishes on its current site. Earlier years live on a separate archive host we have not swept, and in California we watched purchases arrive as bid awards and purchasing items rather than as anything labeled surveillance.

The comments kept coming after January. At the meeting of July 29 a second resident, from Eagle Point, spoke about the number of cameras in Jackson County. That makes four public comments about cameras from two residents in seven months, and the minutes record no board discussion, agenda item or response following any of them.

The year’s one law enforcement technology vote is close to the subject without being it. In March the Board unanimously approved a subscription agreement with Omnigo Software to upgrade the Sheriff’s physical evidence management system. Evidence management is records infrastructure, not surveillance. The detail that matters is in the staff explanation: the new system integrates with the county’s report management system, which is provided by Axon Enterprise. Axon’s records platform often travels with its body cameras, and no body camera record for this Sheriff’s Office appears anywhere we looked, so what the county’s Axon agreement covers is now a records request, and ours is drafted.

The EFF Atlas carries two rows for the Sheriff’s Office, and we publish neither as a system. One records nine DJI drones registered with the Oregon Department of Aviation as of 2024. That registry exists because state law requires public bodies to register their aircraft, so a single records request to the Department of Aviation would confirm the fleet, and we have one drafted. The other row says the Sheriff uses Flock plate readers, and its cited source is an informational slide deck from the City of Florence, on the Oregon coast, dated April 2024. Nothing in the county’s own record corroborates either row, so both stay leads.

Since 31 March 2026, Oregon law (SB 1516) requires an agency to publish specified information about a plate reader system before operating it. For any county deployment after that date, the county’s own website is where the record would have to appear first. We could not find one there.

The cameras the county did fund in 2026 are on its own buildings. A March budget item added $4,000 of security cameras to the stairwells of the Health and Human Services building, and in June the Board moved $135,000 of unspent funds toward camera server upgrades for the Courthouse, District Attorney and Corrections buildings.

The Sheriff’s Office publishes no policy manual on the pages we swept, no plate reader page, no drone page and no equipment page. What rules govern the jail’s cameras, the building CCTV those budget lines fund, or any aircraft the state registry may show, is a records request away.

What this county does not cover

The cities, which hold nearly all of this county’s Atlas rows: Medford (plate readers, body cameras, drones and a camera registry), Ashland, Central Point (a Flock row resting on the same Florence slide deck as the Sheriff’s), Eagle Point and Talent. Grants Pass, the Rogue Valley’s other hub, is in Josephine County next door.

Community contributors have mapped 133 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.