Webb County Sheriff | The Sheriff's facial recognition program
The Webb County Sheriff's Office has run a facial recognition program since January 2015. In thirteen years of the Commissioners Court's record, the only trace of it is two sentences of congratulation.
At a glance
- What the record shows
- Two congratulatory remarks in the minutes of 26 January 2015, one from a Commissioner and one from the County Judge, on the unveiling of the Sheriff's Department facial recognition program [1]
- A purchase item
- None. No item buying, leasing or accepting facial recognition appears in the corpus [2]
- A vendor
- Not named anywhere in the county record [2]
- A price
- Not stated anywhere in the county record [2]
- A policy
- None appears in the 848 agendas and minutes read for this county [2]
- Whether it is still running
- Not stated. Nothing in the record after January 2015 mentions it [2]
How it happened
- Deployment
Congratulations on an unveiling
In the communications section of the meeting, a Commissioner congratulates the Sheriff and the Webb County Sheriff's Department "for the unveiling of the Facial Recognition Program", and the County Judge congratulates the department "for their Facial Recognition Program". The remarks sit between congratulations on a drug court graduation and a chamber of commerce anniversary. No item about the program appears on that agenda or any other. [1]
On 26 January 2015 the Webb County Commissioners Court met, worked through its agenda, and reached the part of the meeting where members say what they have been doing. A Commissioner “congratulated Sheriff Martin Cuellar and the Webb County Sheriff’s Department for the unveiling of the Facial Recognition Program”. A few paragraphs later the County Judge “congratulated the Webb County Sheriff’s Department for their Facial Recognition Program”.[1]
Those two sentences are the entire public record of facial recognition in Webb County government.
What is not there
We read every agenda and every set of minutes the county publishes, 848 documents covering October 2013 to September 2026. There is no item approving a facial recognition purchase. No vendor is named. No price appears. No grant is accepted for it, no contract is executed, no renewal comes up, and no policy governs it. After January 2015 the subject does not come up again.[2]
The remarks sit in a list of congratulations, between a veterans drug treatment graduation and a chamber of commerce anniversary. They are how the county learned it had the thing.
Why one sentence is a finding
Face recognition is the surveillance technology with the least public tolerance and the most specific risks: it identifies a person from a photograph, it fails unevenly across faces, and an error puts someone in a police encounter they had no part in. It is the technology most jurisdictions that regulate anything regulate first.
Nothing in this absence means money was hidden. A sheriff’s office runs on its own appropriation and buys plenty of things the Commissioners Court never itemizes, and a program can also be a state or federal service supplied at no local cost. What the record does show is that the body which answers to voters for county spending has never been asked to decide whether the county should have this.
The EFF Atlas of Surveillance records the Webb County Sheriff’s Office as having acquired face recognition services from a supplier called Turn-Key Mobile. In this county’s own record Turn-Key Mobile is the office’s thermal and pan-tilt-zoom camera vendor, appearing in three camera purchases and no facial recognition item, so that connection is not something this page asserts. We record what the county’s own minutes say, which is very little, and treat the rest as an open question.
What to ask
What the program is, who supplied it, what it searches and whether it still runs are all answerable by records request. How to ask for a record explains how to put one to the Sheriff’s Office, and the Commissioners Court is where to ask why it was never an item.
What we do not know
- What the program is, what software it runs and who supplied it.
- What it was paid for with, and whether the Commissioners Court ever approved the money.
- Which image databases it can search, and whose faces are in them.
- Whether it is still operating, and under what policy.
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 Webb County and how public comment works there.
How to show up in Webb 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. Webb County Commissioners Court, minutes, 26 January 2015, communications · Meeting record · · accessed
- 2.
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