Kootenai County

Volunteers have mapped 15 devices in Kootenai County: 13 license plate readers, one street camera and one gunshot detector. Nine of the readers carry Flock Safety as the manufacturer, two Motorola Solutions and two Neology. None of them names an operator.

Three agencies have read plates here, and all three bought from Motorola Solutions. What separates them is what their governing bodies were told, and what those bodies then did about it.

We read the Kootenai County Board of County Commissioners’ agendas and minutes from January 2022 to September 2026 plus its April, May and June 2019 minutes, the Post Falls City Council’s record from January 2023, and the Coeur d’Alene City Council’s agendas for 2026 and minutes for 2025 and 2026. That is 3,103 documents.

The Sheriff’s cameras, and the money that stopped

Plate readers first appear in the county’s record in May 2019, and not as an agenda item about plate readers. They appear inside an Operation Stonegarden grant application, a Homeland Security and border program worth $83,350.40, where a commissioner’s reservations about automatic license plate readers are noted and then withdrawn after two staff explained the safeguards.

Five years later the Board voted two to one to put Motorola’s plate reader software in 48 patrol cars, after an hour and a half of public comment. It amended the contract two to one in March 2025. Then the new chair asked, twice, for evidence that the program was working. In ten weeks over the summer of 2025 the $24,000 came out of the fiscal 2026 budget, went back in on a deal that the data would be produced, and came out for good at the budget hearing on 27 August.

Across all 452 of the Board’s published documents dated in 2026, the phrase “license plate” appears once, in a resident’s public comment. The Sheriff’s plate readers has the votes, the budget arc and the office’s own policy manual.

Post Falls, since 2008

The Post Falls Police Department has read plates here for about eighteen years and describes itself as the regional hub for that data. Its Chief presented the program to the City Council in September 2026: nine fixed Motorola cameras, no mobile units, data in the city’s own cloud and shared only with Idaho law enforcement.

The department keeps the reads for two years, and says it does not want to. The state statute governing city records sets a two year minimum for temporary data, while the nearly identical county statute gives a sheriff’s recordings a much shorter one. Post Falls went to the legislature with Idaho Falls to have the city period shortened, the bill died in committee, and the City says it will try again. Post Falls’ plate readers has the presentation and the retention problem.

Coeur d’Alene, and a map that does not match

A resident told the Coeur d’Alene City Council in August 2026 that she had found eleven Flock plate readers listed locally on a public map, and asked whether the City had contracted for them. The Chief of Police said the City does not use Flock at all, so any Flock devices in town are privately owned. He then described what the City does run: a Motorola system, queries tied to specific criminal cases, plates logged without occupants or owners, access limited to sworn employees and crime analysts, every query logged and audited monthly.

How many cameras there are, where they are, what they cost and which Council approved them appear nowhere in the city record we could reach. The one plate reader decision that is visible is a line inside a consent calendar resolution of March 2025, which approved an agreement with Motorola for Drug Enforcement Agency programming interface access to plate reader data, alongside citation software, a traffic notification policy and a surplus auction. Six votes to nothing, no discussion recorded. Coeur d’Alene’s plate readers has the resolution and the exchange.

Three things that arrived under another name

A camera registry, where residents sign up their own security cameras so the police can see where they are, came to the Post Falls Council in September 2023 inside a five year renewal of the department’s dispatch and records system. The item was titled for the records system. The registry is described forty pages into the vendor’s proposal. The camera registry.

Phone unlocking software reached the same Council in June 2026 as a signature on a federal grant certification, and the staff report says no presentation was planned. The Council saw it because the certification form requires the application be reviewed by the governing body and made public. The phone unlocking software.

And the Sheriff’s Office buys equipment the Board never budgets, from a federal asset forfeiture account holding around $83,000. Two purchases are in the record: a thermal camera and spotlight for the helicopter, and “electronic surveillance gear” for the Special Investigations Unit. Each was approved unanimously in a paragraph that names no amount, no vendor and no equipment. Surveillance equipment bought with forfeiture money.

What Idaho law requires

Since 1 July 2025, Idaho Code 49-1432 has limited law enforcement use of plate readers to investigating felony or misdemeanor crimes, traffic accidents, and searches for missing or endangered persons. It bars their use to enforce traffic infractions unrelated to an accident, requires every access to be logged with the user, the time and the purpose, requires training for authorized users, and requires each agency to audit those logs twice a year.

The Coeur d’Alene City Attorney explained the effect of it to his Council in August 2025, when a council member asked about noise detecting cameras: the City would have to make excessive noise a misdemeanor before plate reader data could be used to enforce it.

What we have not read

The City of Rathdrum’s council record, which sits behind a wall our reader could not pass, and the City of Hayden’s, which sits in a document system nothing we have walks. The Sheriff’s Office polices Hayden under a contract worth about $1.39m a year, and whether that carries plate reader access is unread. So are the records of Dalton Gardens, Hayden Lake, Spirit Lake, Athol, Harrison, Huetter, Fernan Lake Village, State Line and Worley, and the county’s own record before 2022.