Pima County

Volunteers have mapped 513 devices in Pima County, more than anywhere in Arizona except Maricopa, and this is the county where the map most often says who runs them. The Tucson Police Department is recorded as the operator on 119 of those points and the Oro Valley Police Department on eighteen.

We read seven years of the county Board’s own record, 399 documents and eight million words of agendas and meeting summaries. What it holds is not what the map shows, and the difference is the most useful thing on this page.

The $45 million contract the Board did not sign

In December 2025 the Sheriff’s Department asked the Board of Supervisors to amend its contract with Axon, the company that makes Tasers and body cameras. The amendment would have run the contract to 2036 and added up to $45 million.

The Board continued the item. In January 2026 it removed the item from the agenda altogether and sent direction to the County Administrator instead. The vote was unanimous.

Reporting by the Arizona Daily Star says the money was largely for Axon’s AI products, including software that drafts police reports from body camera audio, and that around $18 million of it would have gone to that alone. The Star also reports that the deputies’ own union wrote to the Board against the extension, on the grounds that the department was becoming too dependent on one company.

We have read the agenda, the motions and the vote in the county’s own record. The reasons come from the newspaper, and we have marked them as such, because the letter itself is an attachment we have not yet obtained.

What the county brings before its Board

The Sheriff’s Department has brought Operation Stonegarden money to the Board, a federal border grant that reaches counties through the Arizona Department of Homeland Security. In 2020 the Board’s agendas carried the Sheriff’s requests to accept $595,600 of it for equipment and $1,218,986 for overtime and mileage. The equipment request was continued to a later meeting, and we have not read how that meeting decided it. What the equipment money would buy is not written in the agendas either, which is why it is now a records request.

The county runs a Motorola Spillman records and dispatch system. In 2024 the Board took up a “shared agency” agreement letting the Town of Oro Valley use it, and in 2025 an amendment to that agreement. A records system is the index to everything a police agency knows, and a sharing agreement is how one agency’s index becomes several agencies’ index. The terms are not in the agenda text.

In 2022 the county paid Cellebrite, which sells tools for extracting data from mobile phones, $3,619.71. It appears as one line in a list of duplicate warrants put up for ratification on 3 May 2022, approved with the rest of the consent calendar in a single vote.

What the county record does not contain

In seven years of Board agendas and minutes there is no purchase of plate readers, no real-time crime center, no cell-site simulator, no facial recognition and no gunshot detection.

That is a narrower statement than it looks. Almost all the surveillance the Electronic Frontier Foundation records in this county belongs to the City of Tucson, which is a separate government that keeps its own records, and to smaller cities and the university. Tucson Police is credited with a real-time crime center, a cell-site simulator, a camera registry, drones and body cameras. None of that would appear in the county’s record even if all of it is true, and it is.

So the county government is not where this county’s surveillance is decided. That is worth knowing before you go looking in the wrong room.

Where this leaves a resident

Written comment works here in a way it does not everywhere. The county publishes comments on agenda items as attachments to the item, which means an objection you send before a meeting sits in the public record beside the contract it is about. That is how the objections to the Axon contract reached the file.

The Board meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays in Tucson. The meeting hub on this site says how to get in the room and where to send a letter if you would rather write.