Twin Falls County

Volunteers have mapped 51 devices in Twin Falls County, 50 of them license plate readers, and Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on 49. Almost all of them belong to one system, and that system belongs to the city rather than the county.

The Twin Falls Police Department runs 40 plate readers under a contract that costs $130,000 a year. The Twin Falls County Sheriff’s Office runs 38 in-car cameras that cost $619,528 and were paid for entirely by a federal grant. Those are the two programs of any size here, and they were bought in two different ways by two separately elected offices.

We read the Board of County Commissioners’ published minutes for every month from January 2015 to August 2026, the Twin Falls City Council’s agendas, packets and minutes for the decisions on this page, and the police department’s own plate reader file, which carries four vendor contracts, two policy revisions and a letter the chief sent to a neighboring sheriff.

The city’s plate readers

The police department bought twelve cameras in 2023, sixteen more in 2024 and twelve more in 2025, then folded all three orders into a single two year agreement in April 2026 at $130,000 a year. It publishes every one of those contracts itself.

In August 2026 the City Council voted on them four times in one budget hearing. A motion to suspend the cameras until the Idaho Legislature writes rules for the technology failed two to five. A motion to keep the contract with three changes to it passed six to one. The city’s plate reader network has the contracts, the votes and what the amendment actually changed.

The Sheriff’s in-car cameras

In May 2024 the Board of County Commissioners found Axon a sole source vendor, on the ground that the county’s prosecutors and public defenders and four police departments in the county already ran Axon’s evidence system. Three months later it accepted a federal grant covering all 38 cameras and a five year bundled package for $619,528, with no county match. The cameras were in service by June 2025. The Sheriff’s in-car cameras has the resolution and the grant.

The body cameras that went to bid

The city’s 60 Axon body cameras came from a Department of Justice matching grant in October 2015 and a competitive bid the following year, and were in service by spring 2017. The city’s body cameras has what the city records.

A network that reaches past the city

On 18 February 2026 the city’s chief of police wrote to the sheriff of the county immediately north and suspended that office’s access to the Twin Falls plate reader network, with immediate effect. He gave two grounds: concern about improper or questionable use of the network by that office, and the absence of any written policy there governing plate reader use.

The conditions he set for reinstatement were a written policy covering training, access control, supervision and accountability, quarterly audits available to Twin Falls on request, and limits on who holds administrator access. The letter is published on the city’s own website and copied to the Idaho Attorney General’s office.

Read plainly, it says that these cameras were never only Twin Falls cameras, and that until February 2026 an agency with no written policy of its own could search them.

What the county board never bought

The Board of County Commissioners’ minutes from January 2015 to August 2026 contain no occurrence of Flock, of ALPR, of plate reader, of facial recognition, of fusion center or of gunshot detection. We searched all 143 published documents with the whole keyword matrix, and five separate control terms each returned all 143, so the search is known to work.

The county’s own camera spending goes to its own buildings: a Johnson Controls upgrade for $18,954.99 in 2020, and camera work at the jail and the juvenile detention center in a 2022 budget adjustment.

What we could not answer

We could not find any list of where the 40 city cameras are. No location list appears in any contract, policy or minute we read.

We could not find either agency naming the others it shares plate reader data with, in any contract, policy or minute we read. The vendor runs a public transparency portal for this department that carries that list.

The department’s own system audits, named as attachments to the February 2026 letter, are not in the copy the city publishes. Those audits are the record of who searched the network and why, which is the question the letter itself turns on.

We have not read the councils of Filer, Buhl, Kimberly, Hansen, Castleford, Murtaugh, Hollister or Eden. The county’s own sole source resolution names Filer, Buhl and Kimberly as Axon and Evidence.com users, so there is something in those records to find.