Arizona

Every county in Arizona has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. All fifteen have now had their local records read as well, so the county pages carry findings drawn from board agendas, minutes, contracts and grant records, alongside the two outside datasets and the gap between them.

Most of what volunteers mapped in Arizona reads plate numbers

Contributors have mapped 3,252 devices across the fifteen counties. Of those, 2,624 are tagged as automated license plate readers, and 2,426 carry Flock Safety as the manufacturer. One vendor and one kind of device account for most of the state’s mapped surveillance.

That concentration is not evenly spread. Maricopa County alone holds 1,658 of the mapped devices, 1,347 of them tagged Flock. Pinal County’s map is 390 Flock devices out of 406. Apache County’s twenty-one mapped devices are twenty-one Flock plate readers and nothing else.

These counts describe what volunteers have chosen to map, not what is installed. A county with a low number may have an active mapping community and few cameras, or many cameras and nobody mapping them. Until we read the local records, we cannot tell you which.

The border counties carry different hardware, and the map does not say who runs it

Cochise, Santa Cruz and Yuma counties have mapped points that look nothing like the rest of the state. They are tagged with General Dynamics, Elbit Systems and Anduril as manufacturers, and many of them are typed as camera and radar together rather than as plate readers.

On the points we checked, the operator field is empty. The map records equipment and the company that built it, and it does not record which agency runs it. That gap is worth naming rather than filling in: naming an operator from the manufacturer would be a guess, and a guess about who is watching a border community is not something to publish.

One county appears in neither dataset

Greenlee County has no devices mapped in OpenStreetMap and no row in the EFF Atlas of Surveillance.

Two empty datasets are not a finding that Greenlee County has no surveillance, and reading the county’s own record proved it. The Board bought twelve Axon body cameras from a sole source in October 2025, runs a Motorola records system shared with a town, and in January 2026 took $228,000 of state border money for vehicles, equipment and overtime. None of that appears in either dataset.

What the records showed that the datasets did not

Reading all fifteen counties’ own records changed the picture in ways neither dataset hinted at.

Cochise County approved three surveillance and forensics contracts as consecutive items on one afternoon in July 2024: Flashpoint, Cellebrite and Clearview AI, $382,718.73 together. Yavapai County denied $39,348 of plate readers in August 2026 after residents came to speak, having approved $2 million to operate a criminal intelligence coordination center on its consent agenda nine months earlier. A charity paid for Apache County’s first plate reader. Yuma County bought $826,457.41 of plate readers the EFF Atlas does not record at all.

The clearest pattern is money. Nine of the fifteen counties hold agreements under the state’s Local Border Support program, and seven of those nine are not on the Mexican border, from Greenlee at $228,000 to Cochise at $1.9 million. Three of the nine were found only by searching for the agreement’s own language rather than the program’s name, because a county agenda names the money and not the program it came from.

What comes next

The counties are read; the cities are not. Maricopa County’s own record is almost empty while the Atlas lists real time crime centers at eight police departments inside it, because in that county the decisions are made by city councils. That is the next body of work.