Tarrant County

Volunteers have mapped 1,807 devices in Tarrant County, 1,195 of them license plate readers. The county government bought almost none of them, and the few things it did buy for watching people outside its own buildings reached the record without a price.

We read the Commissioners Court’s own archive: 552 agendas and sets of minutes covering every meeting from January 2019 to August 2025. Tarrant County publishes real minutes, and they are unusually good ones. Each item carries a Court Order number, the commissioner who moved it, the commissioner who seconded it and the roll call. Finding out what happened to an item here takes one document.

The Sheriff joined a camera network on the consent agenda

On 5 April 2022 the Court approved Court Order 137852, “Approval of Flock Safety Flowdown Government Agency Agreement - Sheriff’s Office - Flock Group, Inc. - Per Contract Terms”. A flowdown agreement puts an agency onto a platform under terms someone else negotiated.

It was item 15 on the consent agenda. The consent agenda is a block of items voted through together, in one motion, with no separate discussion. The Court’s announcements that morning removed two items from the block, held three more and deferred a fourth, and this was none of them. The minutes record no debate, and no dollar figure appears anywhere in the agenda or the minutes.

That single item is the only time Flock Safety, Flock Group, or any license plate reader vendor appears in six and a half years of this county’s Commissioners Court record.

A covert camera contract with no number in it

From April 2019 the Sheriff’s Office held an annual contract for covert surveillance camera systems with Sandoval Custom Creations, Inc., a Colorado company. It was awarded as RFP 2019-119, renewed in January 2020, renewed again in March 2021, re-awarded as RFP 2022-078 in April 2022 and renewed in February 2023. The three renewals went through on the consent agenda.

In every one of those appearances the price is a phrase. “Per Contract Terms” on the awards. “Same Contract Terms” on the renewals.

The February 2023 renewal is also the last time the contract appears at all. The Court’s agendas and minutes for the two and a half years that follow do not mention it, the RFP number or the vendor.

The county’s own award notices do not close the gap. Tarrant County Purchasing publishes an evaluation sheet for each bid, and for most equipment those sheets are detailed. The sheet for the county’s 2019 building camera work lists five bidders, each broken into materials, services and bonds, the lowest of them at $196,970.88. The sheet for the covert camera contract is the same form with one respondent on it and no price at all.

What the county does put a number on

Cameras in county buildings. In November 2022 the Court approved $1,395,825.00 for Security Camera Upgrades Phase III at various county facilities, on its own vote rather than on consent. The maintenance bid it accepted for the video management system behind those cameras prices the first year at $199,522.00, and adds $215.00 for each camera put on the system.

So the record states a price for the cameras watching the county’s own hallways, and does not state one for the cameras its Sheriff puts outside them.

Body cameras, bought without a bid

The county buys body cameras from Axon Enterprise through BuyBoard, a purchasing cooperative run by the Texas Association of School Boards. Under state law a local government that buys through a cooperative has satisfied any requirement to seek competitive bids.

In September 2023 the Court did put body cameras for the Constable precincts out to bid, as Bid 2023-086, and then rejected every bid it received. Two weeks later it approved the same purchase through BuyBoard instead. Every body camera item in the record is priced per unit or as a discount from a list price. None of them carries a total.

The recordings go to Axon as well. The Court approved a master agreement in November 2021 for Evidence.com to store video and audio from the county’s Axon body cameras, and the Criminal District Attorney’s Office has held its own Evidence.com agreement since 2019. Neither item states a cost.

The District Attorney can open phones

The Criminal District Attorney’s Office has bought Cellebrite Premium Unlimited three times since 2022 and a GrayKey subscription once. Both are tools for getting into locked mobile phones. The first Cellebrite purchase, in August 2022, cost $92,216.57. The three that followed carry no figure in the record. Three of the four went through on the consent agenda.

What is not in the record

Over those 552 documents, no Tarrant County Commissioners Court agenda or set of minutes between 8 January 2019 and 19 August 2025 mentions a license plate reader, automated license plate recognition, a real time crime center, gunshot detection, facial recognition, a fusion center or an intelligence center. The one appearance of the words “license plate” is a yearly housekeeping item about registration plates for county vehicles.

That is a statement about what this Court was asked to approve. It is not a statement about what operates in Tarrant County. The 1,195 plate readers volunteers have mapped here mostly belong to cities, and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance records plate readers at twenty-one police departments in the county, at a school district police force, at the University of Texas at Arlington, at two hospital police departments and at the Tarrant Regional Water District. None of those report to the Commissioners Court.

Volunteers have also mapped 116 gunshot detectors inside the county line. Nothing in the county’s record accounts for any of them either.

Of the 1,807 mapped devices, 1,530 name no operator at all.

Where this stops

The county’s own agenda archive ends on 1 October 2025, when the Commissioners Court moved to a new vendor. Nothing here covers what the Court has done since. The annual contracts described above come up for renewal every year, and whether they were renewed is unread.