Navajo County

Three sources describe surveillance in Navajo County and they do not agree.

Volunteers have mapped 45 devices here, 42 of them plate readers and 40 of those made by Flock Safety. The Electronic Frontier Foundation credits the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office with plate readers, drones and a camera registry. In the Board of Supervisors’ agendas and minutes from 2020 on, we found none of it.

What the Board’s record does not contain

We searched every document on the county’s agenda portal from 2020 on for every surveillance term this project tracks. We found no plate readers, cameras, drones, body cameras, facial recognition or gunshot detection. The one apparent mention of Flock was a wind farm’s bird survey.

That covers 149 of the portal’s 151 documents. Twenty were scans, which we read by optical character recognition, and the other two are blank pages. It is not a finding that Navajo County has no surveillance.

The purchases may predate the record the county publishes online, they may have been made without a Board item, or they may belong to the county’s cities, which keep their own records. The record we read does not say which.

The camera registry

Of the three technologies the Atlas records here, the camera registry is the one to ask about.

A camera registry is a list of privately owned cameras whose owners have signed them up, so that police know where to ask for footage. It makes a doorbell camera part of an investigation, with the owner’s agreement.

Who may enroll, what police may request, how long anything is kept and how an owner withdraws are the terms that matter. They are not in this Board’s record, and they are the first thing to ask the Sheriff’s Office for.

A boundary this page does not cross

Navajo County contains part of the Navajo Nation and part of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and the Atlas lists both tribal police departments separately.

Tribal governments are sovereign. They keep their own records under their own law, and nothing in a county’s record speaks to what they operate. This page describes Navajo County, the Arizona county, and not the nations within its boundaries.

Where this leaves a resident

The Call to the Public here allows “up to 5 minutes”, longer than the three minutes Greenlee and Cochise allow. The Board meets in Holbrook, and its notices say the room is open an hour before the start.

The agendas also print what the Board may do with what you say: members “may not respond to any comments but may respond to criticism, ask staff to review a matter, or ask that a matter be placed on a future agenda”. That last one is the outcome worth asking for.