Bingham County

Volunteers have mapped 4 devices in Bingham County, all of them surveillance cameras: two beside each other at Firth, one north of Shelley and one on the county’s eastern edge. No manufacturer or operator is recorded on any of them, and none is tagged as a license plate reader. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance holds one entry for the county, body-worn cameras at the Fort Hall Police Department, which belongs to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, a sovereign government whose reservation lies partly inside the county and which the county does not govern.

We read the Board of County Commissioners’ published record from January 2022 to June 2026, the Blackfoot City Council’s and four other Blackfoot bodies’ from 2018 to September 2026, and the Shelley City Council’s from 2021 to 2026. That is 1,646 documents. Every one of the county’s own is a page scan.

What that record shows is a county with no plate reader and a great many cameras, most of them bought a few thousand dollars at a time by the road, landfill and technology departments rather than by the Sheriff, and all of them put onto one contract in 2026 without a discussion.

One contract, four sentences

On 25 March 2026 the Sheriff brought the Board what the minutes call the JSA Contract. It puts all county equipment, cameras included, on one annual program with replacements priced inside the yearly figure: $169,162.00 to start, then $74,612.71 a year. The minutes describe it in three sentences and then record, in full, “The Board had no issues.” The vote was unanimous.

Seven weeks later the vendor’s name appears for the first time. On 13 May 2026 the Board approved Addendum #2 from M2 Automation of Boise, $9,839.55, bringing the annual figure to $84,002.26, because a camera server had to be added as the existing system reached the end of its life. At the same meeting it bought a 160 terabyte network video recorder for $81,244.00, so the new system could record and store footage in the jail.

Running beside it is the same vendor’s access control build: $69,091.01 for the courthouse’s first floor in July 2025, $82,553.25 for the second floor in April 2026, and $17,900.43 for three more doors in the August 2026 agenda packet. That packet is the most detailed surveillance document the county publishes, and it is an attachment. Its device list puts a card reader and a video surveillance task at every controlled door.

Nowhere in any of it is there a camera count, a location list, a retention period or a rule about who may watch.

The cameras point at the county’s own people

Most of what Bingham County records is not the public. On 5 February 2025 the Board approved a three year Samsara contract at $22,272.00 a year for 57 cameras inside its own fleet: 39 in dump trucks and light vehicles, 11 in motor graders, and 7 on the Solid Waste walking floor trailers. The minutes note that the cameras “can be accessed and viewed at any time”. County legal counsel reviewed the contract and his only concern was the retention period, which the minutes say could be addressed at a later date. The record never returns to it.

In October 2025 the Public Works Director asked for cameras at the Central Transfer Station and said why: “The goal is to obtain camera footage of the transfer of money and payments between the public and the employees.” He wanted audio on them. The Board bought three at about $500.00 each and added a panic button to the motion.

The one time this county stopped to think about what a camera does was April 2022, when the probation department asked to turn the audio on in six cameras covering its hallways and entryway. County legal counsel said a mistake would be a felony charge under Idaho Code, and that signs would be needed to eliminate the expectation of privacy. A commissioner said it would record anyone who entered the building. The audio stayed off. Nothing since has been debated that way.

No plate reader, and one grant application

No plate reader appears anywhere in the Board of County Commissioners’ record. Across 269 readable county documents, the phrase “license plate” returns once, in a tow truck licensing ordinance.

The only plate reader in this county’s published record is in the minutes of the Blackfoot Transportation Commission for 26 February 2025, under New City Updates: the Chief of Police is applying for a grant to get three license plate readers installed in Blackfoot, one at Parkway and Bergener, one on North Highway 91 and one on South Highway 91. There is no motion, no vendor, no price and no grant name, and nothing in 994 city documents through September 2026 says whether the application went anywhere.

The city already records everything else

Blackfoot’s Chief of Police told his City Council in March 2022 that every officer had a body camera and every patrol car a camera, that each officer produced about six hours of footage a day, and that the department shared a video storage server with the county’s law enforcement. He said this while explaining why the storage budget was about to rise. In 2024 the department moved to Cellebrite phone extraction software, in the city’s own words in collaboration with the Sheriff’s Office, and told the Council about it in the same sentence as new radios.

Shelley, the county’s other city with its own police force, budgeted $38,000 for police equipment including cameras in 2024, conditional on a grant, and spent April 2026 deciding how to replace Tasers bought in 2013.

What nobody has published

No Bingham County agency publishes a camera policy, a retention schedule, or a rule about who may pull a recording. The county’s lawyer has raised the retention question twice, in 2022 and in 2025, and the record contains no answer either time. Idaho has governed plate readers by statute since 1 July 2025, requiring query logs and twice yearly audits, and there is no plate reader here for it to govern.