Kaufman County

Kaufman County’s largest surveillance purchase was approved in one motion on a Tuesday morning in January 2026, and it belongs to a constable. The Commissioners Court agreed a five-year Axon contract worth $1,506,691.03 for Constable Precinct 2. The item on the agenda described video evidence equipment, an evidence management system and Taser devices. The priced quote behind it also carries ten plate reader licenses, a real time crime center platform and four drone licenses.

Volunteers have mapped 208 devices in the county, 206 of them license plate readers, and Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on 204. We fetched 234 documents from the county, read the 153 with a text layer and put all 78 scans through local text recognition, then searched every one of them.

The Constable’s Axon contract

Constable Jason Johnson of Precinct 2 brought the contract to the Court on 20 January 2026. Commissioner Skeet Phillips moved it, Commissioner Tommy Moore seconded, it carried, and the meeting moved on. The whole sitting lasted thirty-nine minutes.

On the quote: ten Axon Fleet 3 plate reader licenses at $38,406, which turn patrol car cameras into readers that move. Axon Fusus in three configurations, the platform that pulls camera feeds onto one screen for a real time crime center. Four Axon Air drone licenses, though no drone purchase appears anywhere in the county’s record. And 41 licenses for Axon Records Draft One, described on the quote as AI-assisted report writing, at $158,993.49.

It was bought through BuyBoard, a cooperative purchasing contract. Under state law that satisfies any requirement to seek competitive bids, so no public bid notice ever described the equipment. In May 2026 the Court approved a $124,272 expansion for eight more vehicles. The Constable’s Axon agreement has the details.

One check to Flock, five years earlier

On 13 October 2020 the county wrote check number 291357 for $24,750 to Flock Group Inc. It is the only payment to that company in the eighty-eight monthly check registers the county publishes, and the register does not say which department wrote it or what it bought.

The EFF Atlas of Surveillance puts eleven Flock readers at the Sheriff’s Office from data obtained in July 2025. The Forney, Terrell, Crandall and Mabank police departments have their own, and they are separate agencies whose records this pass did not read. License plate readers has the details.

The county once ran cameras in school zones

Two lines in the county budget, named “school camera zone” and “school camera zone ATS fees”. They took in $150,395 in fiscal year 2015 and $225,971 in fiscal year 2016, and paid out $78,833 and then $271,911.40 to the vendor. In August 2016 the county wrote a single check for $175,000 to American Traffic Solutions.

Both lines are budgeted at nothing from fiscal year 2018 and never return. Where the cameras stood, how many there were and what ended the program are not in anything we could read. School zone cameras has the details.

Eight years of buying, recorded as vendor names

Between 2013 and 2021 the check registers show the county paying a series of forensics, video and tracking companies. The largest is Cellebrite USA Corp at $110,212.98 across fourteen checks. Others include Axon Enterprise at $66,289.75, WatchGuard Video at $64,453.75, Grayshift at $36,075, and a vendor the register names only as Global Surveillance System, at $62,053.90 across seventeen checks in 2017 and 2018.

A check register carries a name and an amount. It does not describe a product, and no Kaufman County purchase order, quote or contract from those years was reachable in this pass, so this page names the vendors and the sums and does not tell you what each one sold the county. That is a records question, and it is first in the county’s request queue.

Where the record goes quiet

No check register has been published since December 2021. The Commissioners Court’s agendas and minutes on the county’s website begin on 15 July 2025, and the record before that is on a system the county links to but does not host. Between January 2022 and July 2025 there is neither, so a purchase made in those three and a half years is in no county document we could read.

The Sheriff’s Office lists an Intelligence division on its own website, under a heading that reads “Content Coming Soon”.

None of the county’s records states a retention period for a plate read, a rule about who may search one, or an audit requirement. Texas requires no county to publish one.

Show up, or ask

The Commissioners Court meets every Tuesday at 9 in the morning in the Courthouse Annex Courtroom at 100 N Washington Street in Kaufman, and the meetings are streamed. Public comment needs a Public Participation Form and runs three minutes. The two Axon contracts each took less than a minute of a short meeting, so a resident who wants a say has to be in the room before the motion, not after it.