Nez Perce County

Volunteers have mapped 6 devices in Nez Perce County: 6 license plate readers, all six in and around Lewiston, all tagged Flock Safety. None of them names an operator.

Almost everything watched in this county is watched by one city police department, and the public record of how that came about is a list of bills. Between October 2024 and March 2026 the Lewiston Police Department acquired a plate reader license, a camera software subscription, two years of phone extraction software, video management software, a covert tracking phone, fingerprint scanners, a mobile camera trailer and drones. Every one of them reached the City Council as a line in a check register, inside a consent agenda item that approves the city’s bills in a single motion. Not one of them has an agenda item, a contract or a policy of its own in the record we read.

We read 2,683 documents: the Nez Perce County Board of County Commissioners’ whole published agenda record from 2019 to September 2026, the minutes and resolutions the county began publishing in April 2026, its adopted budgets for 2000 through 2027, and the City of Lewiston’s council, board and commission record from September 2024 to March 2026.

The plate readers arrived at $13,000, in a list of bills

On 9 January 2025 Lewiston paid Axon Enterprise $13,000 for an in-car plate reader license and one camera. The payment reached the Council eighteen days later inside an item approving $1,992,311.39 of vouchers, enacted with the rest of the consent agenda by one motion. Six councilors voted aye. In July the city paid Flock Group $22,050 for a police camera software subscription, the same way. Lewiston’s plate readers has the three payments and the votes.

In April the department said the project had not started

The police department’s 2024 annual report, presented to the Council at a work session on 7 April 2025, says the department is working on an initiative to implement license plate readers in the city and that the project is still in the works, with more updates to come. The first license had been paid for ten weeks earlier, in a register the Council itself approved, and the integration for it was paid ten days later.

The one question anybody asked about the bills

On 28 July 2025 a councilor asked for the payment list to be taken off the consent agenda and considered on its own. The question that followed was about duplicate amounts listed under travel and training, and staff explained that those entries were costs for multiple attendees or webinar registrations. The registers, $4,195,632.81 and $2,330,230.46, were then approved five votes to none. The $22,050 Flock subscription was in the second of them.

The rest of the kit is larger than the cameras

The same registers carry $17,139.45 and then $21,441.76 for Cellebrite phone extraction subscriptions, $104,090.48 a year for Axon’s bundled Officer Safety Plan, an annual renewal for Genetec video management software, an annual renewal for what the register calls a narcotics surveillance phone, fingerprint scanners, signs for a mobile camera trailer, and drones with their batteries and pilot training. What else the check register bought lists them with their dates.

The county government is barely in this story

In seven years of Board of County Commissioners agendas, one item authorizes the purchase of cameras, and they are for the new courthouse, bought under a cooperative purchasing contract in May 2025. No price, no count and no coverage is stated. Cameras for the new courthouse has the item.

No plate reader, no body camera contract and no tracking system appears in the county’s published agendas, its budgets for 2000 through 2027, or the minutes and resolutions it began publishing in April 2026.

The county publishes no minutes before April 2026

For every Board meeting before 15 April 2026, the record on the county’s website is the agenda and nothing else. The agendas are not thin: each prints the full title and text of every resolution to be considered. What is missing is the half that shows what happened, which is why the courthouse camera purchase can be quoted but not confirmed.

One body wrote its camera rules down

The Lewiston City Library’s Board of Trustees was shown a security camera policy in November 2024, discussed which of two policies should govern the building, and adopted the result on a recorded vote in January 2025, with additions made to align it with a citywide policy. The library’s cameras has the three meetings. Neither the library’s policy nor the city policy it matches is published.

What the record does not hold

For the plate readers, the same four things are missing that are missing almost everywhere: how many cameras there are, where they stand, how long a record of a passing car is kept, and who may search it. Six readers are mapped in Lewiston and none of the six records an operator. No written plate reader policy appears in the city’s record.

The Board of County Commissioners’ Monday public agenda session carries no citizen comment item. Joint meetings with the city do.

What we have not read

The City Council’s record before 30 November 2022 is not in what we read, so the 37 Axon body cameras the EFF Atlas of Surveillance attributes to the department in 2017 rest on a newspaper report we have not seen. The council record from late March 2026 to the present is also unread. The Nez Perce County Sheriff’s Office’s body cameras, which the Atlas records as WatchGuard, appear nowhere in the county’s published record. Nothing here should be read as saying the office does or does not use them. The Lewiston Police Department’s own web pages are unread. The city councils of Lapwai, Culdesac, Peck and Winchester were not swept.

The Nez Perce Tribe’s police department is a sovereign agency and its records are not county records. The Atlas records that it has a drone.