Skip to content
ORWELL INDEX
Active Updated

Kaufman County Sheriff | License plate readers

Kaufman County paid Flock Group Inc. $24,750 on 13 October 2020, and the payment is one line in a monthly check register with no department, no camera count and no meeting behind it. The county's other plate readers arrived five years later, inside a Constable's Axon contract.

At a glance

What the county paid
$24,750.00, check number 291357, dated 13 October 2020, to FLOCK GROUP INC. The only payment to that vendor in the eighty-eight months of check registers the county publishes [1]
Which department bought it
Not recorded. The check register carries a check number, a date, a vendor name and an amount, and no department or description [1]
How many cameras, and where
No county document read for this page states a count or a location [1]
The meeting that approved it
Not readable. The Commissioners Court's agendas and minutes from before 15 July 2025 are on a separate system that is not on the county's own site [3]
The county's other plate readers
Ten Axon Fleet 3 ALPR licenses on the $1,506,691.03 Axon agreement the Commissioners Court approved for Constable Precinct 2 on 20 January 2026 [5]
How long a plate read is kept, and who can search it
No retention period, search rule or audit requirement appears in any Kaufman County document read for this page. Texas requires no county to publish one [1] [3]
What the volunteer map shows
206 license plate readers mapped in the county, 204 of them recording Flock Safety as the manufacturer. Community reports, not a county inventory, and none of them names an operator [4]
What the EFF Atlas records
Eleven Flock Safety plate readers at the Kaufman County Sheriff's Office, from data obtained in July 2025, and Flock readers at the Forney, Terrell, Crandall and Mabank police departments [6]

How it happened

  1. Deployment

    One check to Flock Group Inc.

    Check number 291357, $24,750.00, appears in the county's accounts payable check register for October 2020, on a page of forty-eight checks written the same day. The register gives the vendor name and the amount. It does not say what was bought, how much of it, or for which department. [1]

  2. Deployment

    The spending record stops

    December 2021 is the last month for which the county publishes a check register. After it there is no vendor-level record of county spending online, and the Commissioners Court's own record does not begin until 15 July 2025. Anything bought in those three and a half years is in no county document we could read. [2]

  3. Decision

    Ten more, inside a Constable's Axon contract

    The Commissioners Court approves a five-year Axon agreement for Constable Precinct 2 worth $1,506,691.03. Its priced quote carries ten Axon Fleet 3 plate reader licenses at $38,406.00, which the item's own title does not mention. [5]

There is one document in Kaufman County’s published record that connects the county to a plate reader company, and it is a line in a list of checks.

On 13 October 2020 the county wrote check number 291357 for $24,750.00 to FLOCK GROUP INC. It sits on page eight of the October 2020 accounts payable register, between a check to a fire equipment supplier and one to a software reseller. The register has four columns: check number, date, vendor name, amount. There is no department, no purchase order reference and no description of what the money bought.

It is the only payment to Flock in the eighty-eight monthly registers the county publishes, which run from October 2013 to December 2021.

Why there is nothing else

The county’s records fall into two series that do not meet. The check registers end in December 2021. The Commissioners Court’s agendas and minutes on the county’s website begin on 15 July 2025. Between those dates the county published neither, so a purchase made in that window leaves no trace in anything a resident can read on the county’s site.

For the years before the registers begin, and for the meetings that would have approved the 2020 payment, the Court’s agendas and minutes are on a separate system the county links to from its own Minutes and Videos page. They are not on the county’s website and we could not read them.

We searched the county record we did assemble, 153 documents with a text layer and 78 scans read through text recognition, for every plate reader term and vendor name. Before July 2025 the Flock check is the only hit. The ten Axon Fleet 3 licenses below are the other one, and they are five years later.

What is actually installed

Volunteers have mapped 206 plate readers inside Kaufman County, and 204 of them record Flock Safety as the manufacturer. Those are community reports, and the map does not say who operates any of them. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance puts eleven Flock readers at the Sheriff’s Office from July 2025 data, and more at four city police departments, which are separate agencies with their own budgets and their own records.

So the county’s own paperwork accounts for one payment, five years ago, and the cameras on the ground are counted by volunteers and by a research project rather than by Kaufman County. Turning a dollar figure into a camera count would be arithmetic on a vendor’s list price, and this page does not do it.

The readers that did get a meeting

Five years after the Flock check, ten more plate readers arrived in this county with a recorded vote behind them. They are Axon Fleet 3 licenses, they belong to Constable Precinct 2 rather than to the Sheriff, they ride in patrol cars rather than standing on poles, and the agenda item that carried them did not use the words plate reader. The Constable’s Axon agreement has the details.

What to ask for

The Flock agreement itself is a public record. So is every check register after December 2021, and so are the Court’s minutes for 2020. Kaufman County’s request queue lists what to ask and whom to ask.

On the map

The community has mapped 206 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 confirmed where each of them meets in Kaufman County and how public comment works there.

How to show up in Kaufman 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.
    Kaufman County, accounts payable check register, checks from 10/01/2020 to 10/31/2020, page 8 · Primary document · · accessed
  2. 2.
    Kaufman County, accounts payable check registers, October 2013 to December 2021 · Primary document · · accessed
  3. 3.
    Kaufman County Commissioners Court agendas and minutes · Primary document · · accessed
  4. 4.
    OpenStreetMap and DeFlock device snapshot for Kaufman County · Dataset · · accessed
  5. 5.
    Kaufman County Commissioners Court, agenda packet, 20 January 2026, item 8: Axon quote Q-693394-45839MS, pricing pages · Primary document · · accessed
  6. 6.
    EFF Atlas of Surveillance, Kaufman County entries · Dataset · · accessed

Get the digest

A regular digest of what changed in the world of surveillance: the counties we published, the devices that appeared on the map, and the public meetings where these decisions get made. We send it when there is enough to report.

Subscribe to the newsletter

One click to unsubscribe. What we do with your address is on the newsletter page.