Mora County

Three license plate readers stand in Mora County. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance attributes them to the Mora County Sheriff’s Office and names the company that makes them, Flock Safety. It is the only surveillance technology recorded anywhere in this county, and unlike almost every other county in New Mexico, it belongs to the county itself rather than to a city police department.

We read the County Commission’s own record from 2020 to 2025, ninety-five documents. The words Flock, plate reader and automated license plate do not appear in any of them. Neither does surveillance, security camera, body camera, drone or face recognition. In six years of meetings there is no surveillance technology in this county’s record at all.

Why that is worth saying out loud

Every other New Mexico county on this site fails one of two tests. Either the plate readers belong to a city force, so the county commissioners never had a vote to take, or the readable record stops before these cameras reached New Mexico, so a decision would be invisible even if it happened.

Mora fails neither. The cameras are the county’s own Sheriff’s, and the record runs to last year. This is the clearest test in the state of whether a county commission votes on plate readers, and here the answer is that this one did not.

What that does not mean

It does not mean anything improper happened. A sheriff’s office can end up with plate readers several ways that never reach a commission agenda.

New Mexico gives sheriffs’ offices equipment money every year through the Law Enforcement Protection Fund, and a sheriff applies for it directly. Elsewhere in this project a private charity bought a plate reader for a sheriff outright, and the only thing that reached the board was accepting a gift. Equipment can come through an agreement with a neighboring agency, where the hardware belongs to somebody else. Or a purchase can sit below the spending limit that requires a commission vote at all.

Any of those is ordinary. What none of them does is put the decision in front of the public.

What this leaves a resident with

If you live in Mora County and want to know why there are cameras reading number plates on your roads, you cannot find out by reading what your Commission decided, because your Commission does not appear to have decided it.

The questions belong to the Sheriff’s Office, in writing: how many readers there are, where they stand, when they arrived, who paid for them, how long the record of a passing car is kept, and which other agencies can search it.

Mora County has about four thousand residents. Three cameras is a small number until you consider that the county has only a handful of paved roads worth putting them on.

What the record covers

This page rests on 95 of the 117 documents that survive from Mora County’s meeting archive, covering 2020 to 2025. Twenty-two are damaged beyond reading. The county’s own website answers every request for a document with a refusal, so this record comes from copies held elsewhere.

The Commission’s record in those six years is roads, water, the fairgrounds, a general obligation bond, a veterans memorial, and the village of Wagon Mound. It is the record of a small rural county doing small rural county business, and it contains no technology of the kind this site exists to document.