Benton County

The Benton County Sheriff’s Office has flown drones since 2019. Its own page says so:

“The Sheriff’s Office began using drones in 2019 through a grant-funded program.”

The page lists three uses: search and rescue, traffic crash reconstruction, and law enforcement response during incidents involving dangerous suspects. It makes two assurances:

“Their use is strictly regulated to protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

“Information collected by drones is handled according to Oregon law, including how it is stored, shared, and deleted.”

It links no policy. It names no retention period. It identifies no rule. That gap is the finding. An agency describing its own conduct as strictly regulated is not the same thing as a published rule a resident can read, and closing that difference is exactly what a public records request is for. The grant that funded the program is unnamed too. The EFF Atlas puts the fleet at twelve registered aircraft as of 2024, from the state aviation registry rather than from any county document.

This county has no known plate reader program, and its Board has been tracking the law that governs them. From a 2026 legislative update in the board record:

“Senate Bill (SB) 1516 dealt with regulating the use of automatic license plate readers. There is concern about the potential use of data collected from the license plate readers being shared with federal immigration authorities. SB 1516 was negotiated during the session to become implementable by local public safety agencies, and reasonable with data type and storage requirements.”

The same passage records that excluded uses include anything contrary to Oregon’s shield law, and a county legislative priorities document lists “SB 1516 – ALPR and others” under 2026 public safety issues. A county with no readers of its own, watching the statute, and naming federal immigration data sharing as the risk it was watching for. That is worth reading on its own terms.

Albany straddles the Linn and Benton county line, and its police chief reports to this Board. From the minutes of a department head meeting:

“APD is preparing for potential statewide Law Enforcement issues regarding automated license plate readers, use of Artificial Intelligence in report writing, and data sharing and/or masking of Law Enforcement officers.”

No program, no purchase, no policy. What is on the record is a police chief telling a county board that these three things are arriving.

The most followable thread in this county is in the District Attorney’s office. From a department head meeting minute:

“In April 2025, the DAO started using the Axon system to process media, which enables faster exchange of video evidence and information between law enforcement and the DAO.”

And from the Board’s agenda for 23 July 2026:

“New AXON AI Technology Budget Update - Ryan S. Joslin, District Attorney”

That is the whole of the record we could find. What the AI technology is, what it costs, what it is pointed at, and whether the Board approved it are all somewhere else. Artificial intelligence entering a prosecutor’s evidence pipeline is a thing residents should be able to read about, and right now it is an agenda line.

One thing we could not reach. Corvallis, the county’s largest city, runs a page titled Surveillance Camera Registration and Mapping. A voluntary registry of private cameras is a mechanism this site watches closely, because whether registration gives police a phone number or a live feed is the entire question, and the answer is usually not on the sign-up page. The city’s website is unread. Two of this county’s three Atlas entries belong to Corvallis.

We read 210 machine readable documents published from January 2026 onward. Everything before that is unread. The two mentions of Flock in this corpus are a chicken coop, from a small farms presentation about keeping roosters separate.