Cochise County

On 1 July 2024 the Cochise County Board of Supervisors approved three surveillance and forensics contracts in a row. Item 19 was a $63,399 subscription to the Flashpoint Intelligence Platform, “to identify criminal activity, victims & suspects to build criminal investigations”. Item 20 was $276,243.38 for Cellebrite, “for mobile device investigations solutions, including unlocking, extraction, analysis, and data management”. Item 21 was $43,076.35 for Clearview AI, “for a facial recognition search engine that enables users to search publicly available online images”.

$382,718.73 across three items, each marked Approved, each with a vendor agreement attached. The Clearview item’s attachments name a document called “Clearview Sole Source”, which is what a county files to record why no other supplier would do.

The description of Clearview is the county’s own. A facial recognition search engine over publicly available online images means a photograph of a face can be matched against images already published on the web.

The cameras that watch themselves

Since at least 2019 this county has paid Cogniac Corporation for what its agendas call “visual observation automation”: $105,000 a year, renewing automatically. The Board approved Addendum No. 1 in July 2020 and Addendum No. 3 in May 2021, each for another year.

Visual observation automation is computer vision. Software watches camera feeds and decides what is worth a person looking at. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the Sheriff’s Office began building a “virtual fence system” of 50 wireless cameras in the San Pedro River Valley in 2016, and that the county contracted with Cogniac to process the footage. The EFF quotes the Sheriff’s own assessment that “90% of the images taken with BuckEye cameras produce false alerts due to the movement of animals and vegetation”.

The Board’s agendas do not say which cameras Cogniac runs on. They do show the shape of the commitment: an annual subscription that renews on its own and comes back to the Board only when an addendum is signed.

Cogniac appears in two of the 1,506 agendas we read, and those two are the addenda. The cameras themselves appear in none. Neither the BuckEye name the Sheriff’s Office uses for them nor the state committee that funds them is written anywhere in the Board’s record for 2020 to 2026. Every document in that record is readable, so this is an absence in the record and not a gap in our reading. The county’s public record of a fifty camera network on the border is the software bill.

Body cameras, Tasers and storage, $832,009.50

In April 2024 the Board approved an agreement with Axon “for Body Worn Cameras, TASERS, and Digital Video Storage with all related supplies, software, training, certifications, and warranties, in the amount of $832,009.50 to be paid over a five-year period”. In November it approved a separate Axon Justice Services agreement for the County Attorney’s Office.

In September 2020 it accepted $11,500 of state homeland security money “in support of drone surveillance equipment to protect special events and large incidents”.

Four ways the money arrives

Every state and federal funding channel we have found in Arizona appears in this one county’s record.

Local Border Support, from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, worth $1,924,858.19 over two years, approved in February 2025 and extended in August 2026 to use a remaining balance of $605,705.54. The agreement is for deterring, apprehending, prosecuting and detaining people charged with drug trafficking, human smuggling, illegal immigration and other border related crimes. Cochise is on the border, so here the money is doing what the program name says.

Elsewhere it does not. Nine Arizona counties in this project’s reading hold agreements under that program and seven of them are not on the Mexican border. Gila County, about a hundred miles away, has $624,241 of it, $315,940 of that for its license plate reader program. Coconino County, which borders Utah, has $1,000,000. Apache County, which borders New Mexico, has $480,791.18. Cochise’s share is the largest, and it is one of only two that the program’s name describes.

Operation Stonegarden, a federal border grant that reaches counties through the Arizona Department of Homeland Security. In October 2020 the Board approved spending some of it on air cards for “License Plate Readers (LPR’s) trailers previously purchased through this grant/program”, so the county’s mobile plate readers were bought with federal border money. In Pima County, a $595,600 Stonegarden equipment request came before the Board in 2020 and its agenda did not say what the money would buy.

The county also appears in the GIITEM state gang task force program and takes emergency management grants from the state.

What the Board did not buy

We read all 1,506 of the Board’s agendas from 2020 to 2026, and every one of them was readable. In them there is no real time crime center, no cell site simulator and no gunshot detection.

That last one needs care. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance carries a cell site simulator row for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office. A cell site simulator pretends to be a phone mast so that phones nearby connect to it instead.

The Foundation’s own account of this county explains the row. It reports that the Sheriff’s Office “does not own a cell-site simulator”, and that search warrant records obtained by a local reporter show deputies “have the ability to access such a device maintained by the U.S. Marshals Service”.

So the Board’s silence is what you would expect. There was no purchase to approve. The question a records request can answer is what governs the access: which cases it is used in, who signs off, and what happens to the data of every other phone that connects while it runs.

The towers the map cannot name

Volunteers have mapped 127 devices in this county. Thirty carry General Dynamics as the manufacturer, fifteen Elbit Systems and three Anduril, and many are tagged as camera and radar together. None of them records who operates it, and the Board’s record from 2020 to 2026 does not mention them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs Integrated Fixed Tower and Remote Video Surveillance systems in its Tucson Sector, which takes in Cochise County. No document we have found ties any one of the mapped points to an operator.

Where this leaves a resident

To speak here you return a speaker request form to the Clerk of the Board by 9 a.m. on the day of the meeting, and you can attend over Microsoft Teams or by phone rather than driving to Bisbee. If you raise something that is not on the agenda, the Board is not allowed to discuss it with you: the most it can do is ask staff to look into it or put it on a later agenda.

That rule is worth knowing before you go. Getting a surveillance question answered here means getting it onto the agenda, not raising it from the floor. In February 2026 the Board held a work session on plate reader technology and a grant amendment. Work sessions take no public comment, and the decision comes later, so that is the kind of item to watch for.