Sherman County

Sherman County has about seventeen hundred residents. No surveillance dataset this site uses has a single entry for it: no EFF Atlas row, no camera mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors. Nobody had looked here, including us.

Looking found one thing. From the county Safety Committee’s minutes of 9 May 2024:

“Cameras for Deanna’s Office: Joe reported that the cameras for Deana’s office are installed. There are possibly going to be cameras installed at the Fairgrounds event center.”

The matching agenda a few weeks later lists three standing items in a row: cameras, panic buttons, homeland security.

Describe that accurately. This is building security in a county office, raised by a safety committee alongside panic buttons and cyber security training. It is workplace protection, not a program pointed at the public, and it belongs on this page because the county installed cameras and wrote it down, and because the fairgrounds line is an expansion somebody should follow up on. No vendor, count, cost, retention period or policy appears anywhere. Whether the fairgrounds cameras were ever installed is unknown.

Twenty of the twenty two things we search for return nothing here. No plate readers, no drones, no body cameras, no facial recognition, no Axon, no Flock.

And now the part that matters more than any of it.

We cannot read this county’s decisions. The County Court publishes its agendas as digital documents, which is why we can search them, and it publishes its minutes as scanned images, which is why we cannot. Eighty four sets of minutes, a median of 695 kilobytes each and some running to thirty pages, contain no machine readable text at all. The readable half of what we hold has a median size of 2.6 kilobytes: agendas, which name topics rather than record decisions.

So the twenty zeros above are a statement about agendas. They are not a statement about what the Sherman County Court decided, because nobody has been able to read that. We checked this rather than assuming it, because a body whose documents all fail to open is usually a bug on our end. It is not one here: the same portal handed us 183 documents of clean text alongside 84 image files, and a broken reader does not produce that split.

A resident can open those minutes and read them one at a time, which is more than we can do. What makes this county effectively unsearchable is not secrecy. It is a scanner.