Graham County

On 15 May 2023 the Graham County Board of Supervisors approved the Sheriff’s request for “an Agreement with Flock Safety ALPR Cameras and Solution for license plate readers (DEMA grant)”. The minutes record the vote as unanimous.

DEMA is the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs. Six weeks earlier, on 3 April 2023, the same Board had unanimously approved an agreement with it “to reimburse purchase of communication and law enforcement equipment for $3,103,345”. The minutes do not say how much of that went to plate readers.

Gila Valley Central reported at the time that the cameras would go in “at the entry points to the Gila Valley”, paid for from a $3.1 million state grant. Volunteers have since mapped 49 devices in the county, 48 of them made by Flock Safety.

What a Flock network does

Gila Valley Central described the system at the time: it “can also network with other law enforcement agencies, as well as privately-owned cameras in neighborhoods to track a vehicle’s travel.” In neighboring Coconino County, audit logs obtained by Sedona Red Rock News showed the Sheriff’s Office’s 20 Flock cameras being searched more than three million times in seven months, mostly by agencies outside Arizona.

Graham’s agreement, how long it keeps the data and which agencies can search its cameras are not in the Board’s minutes. They are the records to ask for.

Other things the Board paid for

The Board’s minutes print every bill over $1,000 it approves. Axon Enterprise, which sells Tasers, body cameras and evidence storage, appears in five of them between 2019 and 2022, for $111,031.84 in all. The lists name the company and the amount and not what was bought.

In April 2021 the Board approved the County Attorney’s request to move RICO money, the proceeds of forfeitures, “from body cameras to funding for the Gordon Graham training for Gila Valley Law Enforcement Officers”.

In September 2022 it approved up to $10,000 to connect the county’s Motorola Spillman police records system to the state’s criminal justice information system. Greenlee, Pima, Gila and Yavapai counties run Spillman too.

What the record covers

The county’s own website is unread, so this page rests on copies of its agendas and minutes held by the Internet Archive: 436 documents, of which we have read 430. In them we found no real time crime center, drone, cell site simulator, facial recognition or gunshot detection. The record runs from 2018 to 2023. Nothing later is in the archive, so anything the Board decided since is not covered here.

Eighteen of those documents are scans with no text layer, which we read by optical character recognition. They contain a Sheriff’s vehicle specification, a detention agreement with the United States Marshals, a request to attend a Motorola conference, and no surveillance term at all. Six documents could not be read by any means.

Where this leaves a resident

The Board met at the General Services Building, 921 Thatcher Blvd., Safford, at 8 a.m. on the agendas we read, with a Call to the Public on each one. Those agendas are from 2023, so check the current agenda before you go. Its notices list a YouTube channel for the Board.