San Juan County

In October 2014 San Juan County spent more on one piece of software than most New Mexico counties spend on anything. The county’s Communications Authority told the Commission its computer aided dispatch and records management system was outdated, that support for it was limited and might end within months, and that a replacement had been quoted at $2,061,857. The minutes note that the figure does not include expenses, taxes or the hardware the system needs. The motion passed unanimously.

The money came out of the Communications and EMS gross receipts tax fund, which the same minutes record as holding a projected balance of $9,680,087.

That system is not a camera and it does not watch a street, which is exactly why it is worth knowing about. Computer aided dispatch and records management is where every call for service, every dispatch and every report a deputy writes is recorded, and it is where all of that is searched afterwards. It is the spine that cameras and plate readers eventually plug into.

Who can query it, how long it keeps what it holds, and which other agencies have accounts on it are not in the minutes. For a two million dollar system, those are reasonable things for a resident to ask.

Fifty thousand dollars of in-car cameras

On 5 March 2013 the Commission took up a “Request for Approval of Acceptance of Law Enforcement Protection Fund Application”, brought by Sheriff Ken Christesen. The Law Enforcement Protection Fund is a yearly state distribution to local police and sheriffs, spent only on what state law allows.

The application the Commission accepted put $50,000 into in-car camera systems, alongside $17,100 for bullet resistant vests, $8,100 for flashlights and $16,000 for advanced training. It passed unanimously.

Chaves County, four hundred miles south, filed for the same fund three years later. Its only camera line, “Repair in-car camera equipment”, carried a budget of zero. Same state money, same kind of office, opposite choices.

A biometric reader in the jail

In October 2015 the Commission awarded a contract for an electronic health record system for the county’s Corrections Division, at an estimated $183,220 plus taxes over four years. The minutes add that the project would also need biometric and tablet computer hardware, estimated at about $10,000.

A biometric reader inside a jail’s medical records identifies people who cannot walk away from it. The minutes do not say what it captures, whether it reads inmates or staff or both, how long the record is kept or who else can see it.

What the county’s record does not contain

The EFF Atlas of Surveillance gives San Juan County seven entries, the fullest set in New Mexico outside Albuquerque. A real time crime center at the Farmington Police Department. A camera registry there too, run on a platform called Fusus that pulls private camera feeds into a police console. Flock Safety plate readers at Farmington and at Bloomfield. Body cameras at both. And drones at the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office.

In 243 documents of this county’s own record, none of that appears. No Fusus, no camera registry, no real time crime center, no plate reader of any kind. All fifty-two devices mapped in this county are Flock plate readers, and the Commission never votes on one.

Six of the seven entries belong to Farmington and Bloomfield, which are cities with their own councils, and that explains most of the gap. The seventh does not. Drones at the Sheriff’s Office would be a county decision, and the county’s record does not show one.

The drones in the record are a jobs pitch

The only mention of unmanned aircraft in everything we read is from October 2013, when a regional economic development group told the Commission that unmanned aerial systems support was an industry worth chasing and that the sector would create twenty thousand jobs.

That is a county hoping to attract drone manufacturing, not a county buying a drone. The Atlas entry for the Sheriff’s Office stands unsupported by anything in the county’s papers.

What the record covers

This page rests on 243 of the 249 documents that survive from San Juan County’s agenda archive. Almost all of them are photographs of paper rather than searchable text, which is why so little on this page appears in quotation marks.

A further 1,044 county documents survive with no filenames, only numbers, so what they contain is unknown and they have not been read.

Where this leaves a resident

The dispatch and records system is the question worth asking the county, because it is the county’s own and it is large. Ask what its retention rules are and which outside agencies hold accounts.

Ask the Sheriff’s Office about drones directly. A compilation says the office has them and the county’s own minutes do not, and only one of those can be right.

If your question is about the plate readers or the crime center, the meetings that decided them are in Farmington and Bloomfield, not at the county.