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Marion County Sheriff | License plate readers

A signed agreement puts the Sheriff's Office in a three-agency network with Salem and Keizer, data shared across every camera in all three jurisdictions. The agreement sets costs and access, and not one word about retention or use.

At a glance

The record
Intergovernmental agreement SO-6301-24, "Multi-Agency - Automatic License Plate Reader Camera System", signatures March and April 2025, effective through 31 March 2027 [1]
The parties
Marion County Sheriff's Office, Salem Police Department (hosting the server), Keizer Police Department [1]
The vendor
REKOR: "All Parties shall have access to the server data via the REKOR online software cloud interface" [1]
Data sharing
"All parties agree to share collected ALPR data collected by all camera systems within the three jurisdictions" [1]
The county’s cost
A not-to-exceed share of $10,000 toward Salem’s server [1]
Board approval
Management work session 11 March 2025, meeting date 2 April 2025, printed on the contract review sheet [1]
Retention, use limits, audits
the agreement contains none. It allocates costs, hosting and access; no privacy term of any kind appears in its eight pages, and it does not reference SB 1516, which took effect weeks after the signatures [1]
County camera count and locations
not in the agreement, which requires each party to keep its own vendor contract for its own cameras. That contract and the statutory vendor figures are the records request [1]

How it happened

  1. Context

    Salem and Keizer start without the county

    A two-agency memorandum between Salem PD and Keizer PD for inter-agency ALPR cameras, which the county's later agreement terminates and replaces on execution. [1]

  2. Decision

    The county joins, and the network becomes three jurisdictions

    Agreement SO-6301-24 goes to the Board with a work session on 11 March and a meeting date of 2 April 2025; signatures run 12 March to 2 April. Salem hosts the physical server, all parties access data through the REKOR cloud interface, and all data from all cameras in the three jurisdictions is shared. [1]

  3. Context

    The statute arrives after the signatures

    SB 1516 takes effect, requiring published policies before deployment, a 30-day retention cap on non-case data, and vendor-supplied audit figures. The agreement predates the Act and contains no reference to it; the policies the Act requires are separate documents that nothing the county publishes contains. [1] [2]

The best plate reader record in Oregon, and the emptiest

Marion County’s plate reader program is documented the way this site wishes every program were: a signed intergovernmental agreement, on the county’s own website, with the Board’s work session and meeting date printed on the review sheet. No records request was needed to establish that the Sheriff’s Office shares a camera network with Salem and Keizer, that Salem hosts the server, that the vendor is REKOR, and that the county’s share is capped at ten thousand dollars.

The same document is also the emptiest agreement this project has read on the question that matters. Its operative clause on data:

All parties agree to share collected ALPR data collected by all camera systems within the three jurisdictions.

That is the entire data governance of the agreement. No retention period. No restriction on what a query may be for. No audit. No word on who else may be given access. Every camera in three jurisdictions feeds one server, and the agreement’s eight pages say only who pays for it and that everyone may look.

What changed two weeks later

The signatures run from 12 March to 2 April 2025. On 31 March 2026, Oregon’s SB 1516 took effect: no ALPR use except as the Act provides, policies established and published before deployment, a 30-day cap on retaining data not tied to a case, and a statutory list of figures the vendor must hand each agency, including every agency with access to the system.

The agreement does not mention the Act, and nothing the county publishes contains the policies the Act requires. This page does not assert non-compliance; the policies may exist unpublished, the way this Sheriff’s drone policy does. What can be said is that the county’s one public document about this system governs its money and not its data, and that the statute has since assigned the missing half a shape. The records request asks for exactly that half: the section 7 policies, the county’s own REKOR contract, and the section 6 figures.

The vendor worth noticing

Every other plate reader lead in Oregon so far names Flock Safety. This network runs on REKOR, and Salem’s own equipment history in the EFF Atlas runs through Vigilant before that. Different vendors carry different defaults for retention and sharing, which is one more reason the missing policies matter: nothing about this network can be inferred from what Flock does elsewhere.

On the map

The community has mapped 45 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

What you can do

Show up

Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in Marion County.

What we have documented in Marion County →

Protect yourself

Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.

Surveillance Self-Defense →

Sources

  1. 1.
    Marion County contract review sheet and intergovernmental agreement SO-6301-24, "Multi-Agency - Automatic License Plate Reader Camera System", from the county's own document library · Primary document · · accessed
  2. 2.
    Enrolled Senate Bill 1516 (2026), Oregon Laws 2026 chapter 77 · Law · · accessed

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