Apache County

A charity paid for Apache County’s first license plate reader. On 7 March 2023 the Chief Deputy Sheriff asked the Board to accept a contribution from Operation Underground Railroad, a non-profit that works against child sex trafficking, and the minutes record what it was for: “the contribution will be utilized to purchase one fixed license Plate Reader system to be installed within Apache County”. The vote was unanimous.

The item gives no amount and no location. The meeting packet does. Attached to it is a quotation from Vigilant Solutions, dated 27 January 2023, for one fixed plate reader system at a total price of $15,220.35, and a donation agreement naming the Sheriff’s Department as the receiving agency.

A camera bought with a donation reads every passing vehicle in exactly the way a camera bought with tax money does, and the decision to put one up still belongs to the county. What changed is where the money came from, and that a charity’s donation agreement is now part of how a county acquires surveillance equipment.

A six figure payment, and the grant behind it

In December 2023 the Board approved its usual list of demands, the payments the county makes. One line reads “VIGILANT SOLUTIONS LLC $103607.40”. No agenda item names that purchase, and the demands list is candid about its own limits, in the county’s words: “Demands are payments made, or to be made, by the County. Specific details of the demands may be requested through the County public record request process.”

The explanation is in a different meeting’s packet. On 14 August 2023 the Board approved Agreement M23-0026 with the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs “for the prosecution and imprisonment of border related crimes in the amount of $2,210,524”. The grant’s budget, attached to a later amendment, itemizes what the equipment money buys: three detective posts, ten police pursuit vehicles, twenty-five mobile data terminals, ballistic vests and helmets, and six Vigilant plate readers. Four are mobile, budgeted at $17,750 each. Two are stationary, at $16,000 each.

Six plate readers, four of them mobile, budgeted at $103,000. The payment in the demands list is $103,607.40. The county’s record does not state that these are the same transaction and neither do we, but the question a records request should ask is now a precise one.

The detectives who were never hired

On 3 December 2024 the Board approved Amendment #1 to that same grant. The item says what it does: it “allows the reallocation of funds due to the lack of manpower to fill the three (3) detective positions and will be used to purchase an additional ten (10) vehicles for the Sheriff’s Office”.

A rural county could not fill three detective posts, so the money for them became equipment. That is not a scandal and nobody did anything improper. It is how a grant written for people turns into a fleet, and the same budget is where the plate readers sit.

The county flies drones, and wrote rules for them

On 7 May 2024 the Board approved an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Policy and created the post of “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Operations Manager”. Both were consent items, passed in a single vote with the rest of the routine business.

Arizona law bars a county from regulating drones in general but leaves it free to set rules for a drone it owns. Apache County has done that. The policy itself is not published in the records we can read, so what it allows, records and keeps is a question rather than a finding.

The county was buying drones before it had a policy: the demands lists show $10,700 to Dart Drones in December 2018 and $2,066.97 to Drone Nerds a month later.

Border money, at the New Mexico line

On 4 February 2025 the Chief Deputy Sheriff asked the Board to accept “grant funding in the amount of $480,791.18 from the Department of Public Safety to enhance law enforcement services to deter, apprehend, prosecute, and detain individuals charged with drug trafficking, human smuggling, illegal immigration, and other border-related crimes within Apache County”. The vote was unanimous.

The item never names the program. The agreement attached to the meeting packet does: it is the state’s Local Border Support program, and it pays for a full-time evidence technician and a deputy sergeant on the county’s Special Crimes Enforcement Team.

Apache County touches New Mexico and Utah. Its nearest point to Mexico is most of a state away. Nine Arizona counties in this project’s reading have taken Local Border Support money, and seven of the nine are not on the Mexican border.

Nothing about that is unlawful. Trafficking routes run inland and the program’s terms cover them. What the record shows is how far a border-security appropriation reaches, and how little of that is visible from the agenda line alone.

Phone forensics, twice, six years apart

The same demands lists carry two payments to Cellebrite, which sells software for extracting data from mobile phones: $9,584.00 in February 2013 and $4,018.20 in July 2019. The 2013 list also includes $1,836.00 to a second digital forensics supplier.

Two payments six years apart describe a relationship rather than a purchase, and neither list says what was bought or what it was used on. Cochise County’s Cellebrite agreement came to its board as a named three-year contract for $276,243.38. The same technology, the same state, two entirely different levels of visibility.

Evidence, stored by Axon

In March 2025 the Board approved a 60 month contract with Axon for a Digital Evidence Management Program, $82,244.18 in total. The County Attorney’s Office had signed an earlier Axon agreement in 2018 that the item says carried no cost.

What the record covers

The county’s website is unread, so this page rests on copies of its agendas and minutes held by the Internet Archive: 719 documents, of which we have read 630, from 2012 to 2025. In them we found no real time crime center, cell site simulator, facial recognition or gunshot detection.

Twenty-five of those documents are scans with no text layer, and they are the ones that mattered here. The charity’s quotation, the border grant’s budget and the agreement naming the Local Border Support program were all in them, read by optical character recognition. The county’s agendas say what was approved; its packets say what it was. The remaining 89 documents are files the archive cut off mid-download, so this is a statement about what we read and not about the county.

Volunteers have mapped 21 devices here, all Flock Safety plate readers, and the map names no operator for any of them. Nothing in the Board’s record mentions Flock.

The EFF Atlas records plate readers and a camera registry at the St. Johns Police Department, which is a city department with its own record and its own decisions. A camera registry is a list of privately owned cameras whose owners have signed them up so police know where to ask for footage. Neither dataset says whether the 21 mapped cameras are the city’s, the county’s or someone else’s.

Where this leaves a resident

The Board meets in the County Annex Building at 75 West Cleveland Street in St. Johns, in the morning. Its Call to the Public has no fixed time limit: the agendas say individuals may address the Board “for an amount of time determined by the Chairman”. Members may not answer you on the spot, but they can “ask staff to review a matter, or ask that a matter be placed on a future agenda”, which is the outcome worth asking for.

Watch the consent agenda. The drone policy and the job to run the program both passed inside it, in one vote, marked only by an asterisk.