Wallowa County

Wallowa County has no entry in any surveillance dataset this site uses. No EFF Atlas row, no camera mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors. That records that nobody had looked, not that there is nothing to find. Morrow County started from exactly the same position and turned out to have two plate readers on Sheriff’s vehicles.

What we found here is smaller. The county has been putting security cameras on its own buildings, paid for by its insurance pool. From the Board’s grant initiation lists:

“Mandy Decker, Justice Center – CIS Security Enhancement Grant, Camera/Intercom Upgrade, $5000”

“Ashley Immoos/Annett Conner/Lisa Collier, Safety Committee – Security Cameras on W.C. Facilities, $5,000”

Two five thousand dollar risk management grants, for cameras at the Justice Center and on county facilities, alongside bollards and exterior lighting. That is building security funded by an insurance pool, not a program aimed at the public, and we record it as what it is. No vendor, count, retention period or policy appears anywhere.

Motorola appears too, and it is worth naming what it turned out to be, because the company sells plate readers and body cameras as well:

“Motorola Solutions Flex Software Contract – 911 CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) System Equipment/Maintenance Contract, 911 Dispatch • Motorola AVTEC Contract - Consoles/Portable Radio Equipment and Maintenance Contract, 911 Dispatch, Sheriff’s Office”

Dispatch software and radio consoles. A search that counted vendor names would have read this as a surveillance relationship. It is a radio one.

Everything else we look for returns nothing: plate readers, drones, body cameras, facial recognition, gunshot detection, Axon, Flock.

That absence is weak, and the reason is the same one as in Sherman and Tillamook. Seventy two of this county’s seventy six sets of minutes are scanned images with no machine readable text. The readable half of what we hold is mostly agendas, which name topics rather than record decisions. So the zeros above describe agendas, and nobody has read what this Board actually decided. Two of the county’s meeting pages also errored while we were listing them, so their documents are missing entirely.

Four cities are unread, and so is the Nez Perce Tribe, whose jurisdiction a county keyed site like this one does not represent well.