Maricopa County

Maricopa County holds more than half of everything volunteers have mapped in Arizona: 1,658 devices, 1,443 of them plate readers and 1,347 made by Flock Safety. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance lists real time crime centers at eight police departments here, cell site simulators at three and face recognition at three agencies.

We read the county Board of Supervisors’ own record for 2024 to 2026, 1,140 agendas, packets and minutes. It contains almost none of that. In the documents we could read, we found no approval of plate readers, a real time crime center, a cell site simulator, facial recognition or gunshot detection.

“Drone” and “unmanned aerial” appear in zoning tables. “Surveillance camera” appears in planning applications for a storage yard and a dispensary. Body cameras appear because a deputy’s incident report was attached to a noise complaint. Axon, the police technology company, appears as an employer in the county’s commuter program.

The decisions are made by the cities

Every real time crime center, cell site simulator and predictive policing entry the Atlas records in this county belongs to a city police department (Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Glendale, Scottsdale, Tempe, Peoria) or, in one case, the Salt River tribal police. Each is a separate government with its own record, and none of those records is in the county Board’s.

In 2026 several of them have been revisiting plate readers in public. KJZZ reported in September that eleven Arizona cities and towns have ended Flock contracts, and that Queen Creek, which lies partly in this county, chose instead to pass an ordinance limiting how the data can be kept and shared. We have identified where most of the larger cities publish their council agendas and have not yet read them.

Two things only the map can see, and one only the Atlas can

Volunteers have mapped 51 gunshot detectors in this county, 48 of them tagged Flock Safety. Not one records an operator. The Atlas lists gunshot detection at two departments, Glendale and El Mirage. Those two datasets are describing the same county and they do not meet: a list of agencies on one side, fifty-one unattributed points on the other. Neither says who runs the other’s entries.

The Atlas also carries one row here that belongs to no city and to no county: the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, listed as an agency in its own right. A fusion center is where records from several agencies are brought together for analysis. It is not a city department and not a county one, so it does not appear in the county record this page reads, and it will not appear in a city council’s either.

Where this leaves a resident

In Maricopa County the meeting to watch is almost always your city council, not the county Board. Plate readers, camera networks and crime centers come before councils as contracts, grant acceptances and renewals, and a renewal is the easiest point to ask what the system does, how long it keeps data and who else can search it.