Santa Cruz County

In November 2022 Santa Cruz County agreed to spend $689,761.72 replacing the video equipment in its adult jail. The agenda item is one line: “Discussion/possible action to approve Cooperative Purchase Agreement with APIC Solutions, Inc. to replace the outdated video equipment in the adult county jail in the amount of $689,761.72 (Req: Sheriff)”. The minutes of that meeting are not published anywhere we can read, but the county’s own later paperwork says the agreement was “initially entered Nov. 1, 2022”.

The Board had approved a $15,500 agreement with the same company in February that year. In August 2023 it approved another $47,102.11, a “fiber upgrade to the jail surveillance system”, carried on a motion by the Vice-Chairman.

What the packet describes

Attached to that August 2023 agenda is the vendor’s own proposal for the job. It specifies Avigilon ACC 7 software, which the document says “combines an intuitive interface with an advanced search function called Avigilon Appearance SearchTM video analytics technology”. It calls that “a sophisticated search engine for video data” that lets an operator “quickly locate a specific person or vehicle of interest across an entire site”.

That is a description of what the software can do, written by the company selling it. It is worth knowing the difference: a camera records, and a search engine over what the cameras recorded is a different thing.

The proposal also says how Avigilon charges. Its licensing “is server based”, and the company “only license camera connections and certain integrations (POS, LPR and some 3rd party software integrations) with a onetime purchase fee that is transferable”. By the vendor’s own account the analytics are not a separate line to buy or decline. They come with the channels.

The size of the system, from the same proposal

The proposal lists what goes in: 120 ACC 7 Enterprise camera channels, three AI video recorders at 128TB each, seven monitoring workstations with four monitors apiece, and the cameras to fill them. Sixty-seven dome cameras, eleven 20-megapixel 360 degree multi-sensor cameras, ten pan-tilt-zoom cameras, seven fisheyes, fifteen twin-head cameras and more.

One line is different from the rest: two pin hole cameras and omnidirectional microphones, to be added to the investigation room. Everything else on the list watches. That one listens as well, in the room where people are questioned.

The county’s agenda item for all of this is one sentence about replacing outdated video equipment.

The Sheriff shares data with a university

In February 2022 the Board approved, unanimously, “a Data Sharing Agreement with the Arizona Board of Regents for and on behalf of Arizona State University (ASU) for a term of five (5) years”, at the Sheriff’s request.

The record does not say what data, or which way it flows. Sheriffs share data with universities for ordinary research reasons. A five year agreement with no public description is still a question a resident can ask.

The towers on the map

Volunteers have mapped 27 devices in this county made by General Dynamics and Elbit Systems, many of them tagged as camera and radar together. Not one records who operates it, and in the county Board’s archived record, back to 2013, they are never mentioned. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Customs and Border Protection runs tower systems in this Border Patrol sector. That tells you who operates towers in the area. It does not tell you who operates these.

Six other mapped points do name an operator, and all six are federal: four plate readers recorded as the United States Border Patrol’s and two as Customs and Border Protection’s. Those are volunteers’ attributions rather than agency confirmations, and they are not the towers. What they show is that the mapped hardware here is mostly federal, which is part of why a county board’s record cannot account for it.

What the record covers

The county’s website is unread, so this page rests on copies of its agendas and minutes held by the Internet Archive: 699 documents we could read of 834, from 2013 to 2024. Coverage is uneven and some years are missing entirely. Ninety-six of the rest are agenda packets the archive cut off mid-file, and where a complete capture of the same meeting existed we used that instead, which recovered three of them. In what we could read there is no plate reader, real time crime center, cell site simulator or facial recognition purchase.

The jail proposal was not one of the recovered files. It was complete all along, 307 pages of it, and the equipment list sits well past the paragraph that describes the search engine. What a scan surfaces is a snippet; what a county decided is further down.

Where this leaves a resident

The newest meeting notice we hold is from September 2024, because the county’s site is unread and the archive stops there. As that notice has it, the Board meets at 9:30 in the morning at 2150 N. Congress Drive in Nogales, with the doors open at 9:15, and speakers get three minutes at the Call to the Public. There is a Zoom link and a dial-in number, and the notice says incoming calls are muted, so speaking means being in the room. Check the current notice before you go. The Clerk of the Board’s number on that notice is (520) 375-7812.

The jail video system is a Jail District item rather than a Board of Supervisors one, though the same three supervisors decide it. Contracts of that size come back as change orders, and a change order is a chance to ask what the system does now.