Montgomery County

Volunteers have mapped 350 devices in Montgomery County, 345 of them license plate readers, and Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on 330. The Commissioners Court’s own record shows the county buying plate readers since 2007, running a Sheriff’s real time crime center since 2017, holding a sole source agreement with Clearview AI since 2021, and approving more than $23m of Axon cameras since then. Almost all of it passed on the consent agenda.

The Montgomery County Clerk publishes a full-text search of every set of Commissioners Court minutes the county has, from September 1983 to August 2026. We swept that index and read 42 sets of minutes in full. Each one records the item, the motion, who seconded it and the result. The documents behind the items are published separately on the county’s own website and we have not read them, so everything here is what the Court decided rather than what it bought.

Plate readers

The county’s first was a single mobile unit for the Sheriff’s Office in 2007, for $31,932. In 2012 it bought $380,158.56 of ELSAG readers without a bid, on a federal homeland security grant, and three months later 40 light bar mounts to put them on. A grant application for seven more followed in 2014. By 2023 a constable was signing up for the state’s plate reader database and applying to the Governor’s office for a speed trailer with readers built into it.

One of those decisions was debated. In May 2019 the Sheriff’s agreement to let the state highway department install a fixed reader was pulled off the consent agenda and taken up on its own, and the County Judge voted against it. The next agreement of the same kind, two years later, went back onto consent. License plate readers has the details, along with the two agreements that let Flock Safety cameras stand in county road right of way.

Clearview AI

In March 2021 the Court approved a discretionary sole source exemption for a service agreement with Clearview AI, for the county’s information technology department. It was a lettered sub-item inside the consent block, and the item does not say what the service is. The words “facial recognition” appear in no Montgomery County minutes, ever. Clearview AI has the details.

The Sheriff’s real time crime center

The Sheriff’s Office has had one since October 2017, when a reorganization moved a crime analyst and two deputies into it. It appears in the county’s record only as job titles on payroll lists and, from 2024, as a “Real Time Crime Investigation System” bought from LeadsOnline without a bid and renewed in 2025. No document the Court has seen describes what it can watch. The Sheriff’s Real Time Crime Center has the details.

The Axon contracts

In November 2021 the Court approved $2,101,520.00 of Axon “Public Safety Video Surveillance” on the consent agenda. In December 2024 it approved body cameras and in-car video for multiple county law enforcement departments, five annual payments totaling $19,684,557.45, in a single motion alongside four firewall subscriptions. Both were bought through cooperative purchasing contracts, which satisfies the state’s bidding requirement without a bid notice ever describing the equipment in public. The Axon camera contracts has the details.

Drones

The county’s law enforcement drones were donated rather than bought, by a drone company, by Crime Stoppers, by a hospital district and by a city. In May 2025 the Court approved an interlocal agreement with the San Jacinto River Authority to facilitate a Drone First Responder program, on the consent agenda, in two sentences. Drones has the details.

What the record does not show

Searched across every set of minutes the county has, no document contains “facial recognition”, “fusion center”, “intelligence center”, “gunshot”, “camera registry” or “surveillance camera”. That is a statement about what this Court has been asked to consider in writing, not about what operates in Montgomery County. Conroe, Shenandoah, Willis, Splendora, Montgomery, Roman Forest and the Montgomery ISD police department all run their own agencies, and the Atlas of Surveillance records plate readers, body cameras and drones for several of them. We have not read their records.

The questions that matter most to a resident are the ones the minutes do not answer: how many plate readers are running and where, how long a plate read is kept, who can search it, what the Clearview agreement bought, and what the real time crime center can see. Those answers are in the contracts and the quotes, which are public records a request would produce.