Chaves County

In June 2019 Chaves County put a camera on every deputy and in every patrol car. The Commission agreed to equip 21 deputies and 21 vehicles with body cameras and video and communication systems from Utility, Inc., and it did not buy them. The equipment was leased for five years at a stated cost of $38,970.03, and the lease itself was a second agreement, financed through Kansas State Bank.

Leasing is a different commitment from buying. The county carries a payment for five years and owns nothing at the end of it, which makes the end of the term a decision point: renew, replace, or stop. That decision is due about now.

The company is worth noting too. Utility, Inc. later became Coreforce, and it is the same supplier the EFF Atlas of Surveillance records at the Roswell Police Department for body cameras bought in 2016. The city and the county bought from the same company three years apart.

What the cameras record, how long the footage is kept and who can search it are not in the county’s published record. That is the question to ask.

What a sheriff’s equipment money actually buys

New Mexico runs a Law Enforcement Protection Fund, a yearly distribution to local police and sheriffs’ offices that state law says can only be spent on certain things. In March 2016 the Chaves County Sheriff applied, and the application is itemized in the meeting packet.

“Through the Law Enforcement Protection Fund, the Chaves County Sheriff’s Office is eligible for a total of $41,600 for fiscal year 2016-2017.”

Where it went: $12,400 on supplies and tools, described as “Ammunition (.45 ACP, .223, 12 gauge, beanbags), targets”. $10,700 on non-expendable supplies, described as “Guns, gunlocks, flashlights, portable radios, mobile radios, crime scene equipment, PA systems, sirens, protective screens, light bars, computers, smart phones, firearms, Panasonic Tough Pads and docking stations”. $14,500 on training and travel. $4,000 on a speaker for annual training.

One line on the form names a camera. “Repair in-car camera equipment” sits against a budget of $0.

Three of the seven lines are zero, and this is a form that lists purposes whether or not money is attached to them, so the zero is not a decision to leave cameras broken. It is a picture of what a rural sheriff’s office spends a state equipment grant on when it gets to choose: ammunition, firearms, radios and rugged tablets. Three years later the same office would be leasing a camera for every deputy.

The cameras on the map are not in the county’s record

Volunteers have mapped thirty-eight devices in Chaves County. Thirty of them are Flock Safety plate readers.

In the documents we read, the county Commission never votes on a plate reader. No automated license plate recognition, no Flock, no Vigilant, no Rekor, no Genetec. Also no face recognition, no gunshot detection, no cell site simulator and no real time crime center.

That absence is narrower than it sounds and the limits matter. The record we could read runs from 2014 to 2020, and forty-six of the documents in it could not be read at all. A contract signed in 2023 would not appear, and the map does not say when its points were installed. The honest statement is that thirty plate readers stand in this county and the county’s own governing body has not been recorded approving one.

The drones in the record are counting birds

The EFF Atlas lists drones at the Chaves County Sheriff’s Department, with no vendor and no date. Nothing in the county’s record supports it.

The single mention of drones in everything we read is a Bureau of Land Management update to the Commission about the Lesser Prairie Chicken, a bird whose numbers a five-state study was proposing to count from the air.

A compilation is a starting point, not a source. This one points at something the county’s own papers do not show, which makes the Sheriff’s drone program, if there is one, a records request rather than a finding.

What the record covers

This page rests on 203 of the 249 documents that survive from Chaves County’s agenda system and document center, covering 2014 to 2020. Forty-six are damaged beyond reading. Half of what remains is photographs of paper rather than searchable text.

The county’s most recent five years are not here at all. Nothing on this page should be read as a statement about what Chaves County has done since 2020.

Where this leaves a resident

Two questions are worth asking the Sheriff’s Office in writing. What does the body camera policy say, since the county has leased cameras for its whole patrol force and published no rule for them. And what happened at the end of the five-year lease that started in 2019, which is a live decision rather than a historical one.

If your question is about the plate readers standing on Chaves County roads, the county Commission’s record does not answer it, and the City of Roswell’s council is the other place to look.