Jerome County

Volunteers have mapped 10 devices in Jerome County: nine license plate readers and one street camera. Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on nine of them, and none of them names an operator.

Two local agencies police this county. In the space of five weeks in 2026, both of them took license plate readers out of the budget for the year beginning in October, and neither had ever put the decision to buy them in front of the body that funds it.

We read the Jerome County Board of County Commissioners’ agendas and minutes from January 2021 to September 2026, with its emergency planning committee and airport board, and the Jerome City Council’s record from January 2019, with the urban renewal agency. That is 1,965 documents.

Eight cameras nobody voted for

The Sheriff’s Office rented eight plate readers. The Board of County Commissioners never voted on them, never saw a contract and was never told a vendor’s name. The whole public record of how the county acquired them is one sentence in a budget request of June 2024, explaining that the large increase in the investigation line was for license plate readers at $12,000 a year.

The next time the Board heard about them, it was interviewing three candidates to fill a vacancy in the Sheriff’s Office, in April 2026. It asked each of them how they would keep the use of technology lawful. All three answered about the cameras and the three answers disagreed, one saying a policy had been implemented and audited, one saying he was not sure a policy existed and wanted a public meeting about it. In September 2026 the new Sheriff asked for the money to go to wages instead, and the Board agreed unanimously. The Sheriff’s plate readers has the budget line, the interviews and the vote.

A subscription with no cameras

The City of Jerome’s police department paid $14,000 a year to search a plate reader network without installing a camera of its own. The policy governing readers arrived first, in a routine revision of the department’s policy manual in March 2026. A resident raised the subject in July and was told the city had no cameras. At the budget hearing on 4 August the Council learned what the money bought: access to cameras other agencies operate, photographs that become the property of the company running the system, and a city window into that data of 28 days.

The city attorney told the Council where he thought the legal line sits, which is not at the camera but at the network: a system inside one jurisdiction is one question, and a system joining the whole Magic Valley or the whole state is another that no Idaho appellate court and no United States Supreme Court has answered. Four of the five people on the dais then said the money should go elsewhere. One said it should not. The city’s subscription has the hearing in full.

The larger bill is the buildings

The most expensive surveillance decision in this county’s record is $149,301.92 for a camera system covering the judicial complex, approved unanimously in May 2023 under an agenda heading that reads “Technology Updates and Purchases”. The Board was told the new measures would let the jail complex view what is happening in other county buildings. Eighteen months earlier the county’s own technology staff had declined to connect a vendor’s free demonstration camera to the county network, and recommended the integrator that already serviced the jail instead. County building cameras has the shopping, the quote and the airport.

Body cameras, paid for partly with seized money

The police department replaced twenty-five body cameras in March 2025 on a $25,000 grant. Part of the city’s match, $2,105.11, came out of a federal asset forfeiture account that had been holding money from a drug case for years. The Council saw that money only because the program requires the governing body to authorize its release. The body cameras.

What the record does not hold

We could not find a contract for the county’s plate readers, a vendor name before 2026, a camera location, a retention period, or a published policy or audit, though two people told the Board in April 2026 that a policy and audits exist. The city’s subscription agreement is not in the council record either. Nine readers are mapped in this county by volunteers and none of them records an operator, so whether the mapped cameras and the county’s eight are the same cameras is not something the record settles.

What we have not read

Hazelton and Eden, the county’s two other cities, have no website we could find. The Jerome School District is a separate body with its own board and was not swept. Neither was the county planning commission, nor four smaller city committees. The vendor’s own public transparency portal, which would place the cameras on the ground, refuses our reader.