Surveillance procurement
Automated licence-plate readers arrive by a signature, and sometimes by a vote. This project collects the paper trail behind them — the staff report that was in front of the council, the ordinance or resolution it actually passed, and the agreement that was ultimately signed — and sets the three side by side, term by term, with every passage quoted and page-cited.
Where those three accounts describe different things, that difference is the point. Starting in New Mexico, and working outward.
2 of 134 registered New Mexico jurisdictions have a procurement document on file here. The rest are not a finding of "no cameras" — they are places we have not yet been able to read.
| Jurisdiction | Documents | Systems named | Since | Cameras | Committed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Cruces | 16 | 5 | 2020 | 21 | $1,194,883 |
| Dona Ana County | 5 | 9 | — | — | — |
Documents on file per state. This ranks our own coverage, not the spread of the technology — a state missing from this list is one whose portals we have not yet read.
| State | Jurisdictions with a record | Documents | Earliest | Committed | Findings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | 18 | 51 | 2018 | $9,339,423 | — |
| Florida | 9 | 34 | 2018 | $1,879,079 | — |
| Texas | 8 | 16 | 2020 | $3,862,719 | — |
| Washington | 2 | 8 | 2019 | — | — |
| Illinois | 3 | 5 | 2021 | $458,998 | — |
| Wisconsin | 2 | 5 | 2022 | $590,800 | — |
| New Mexico | 1 | 4 | 2020 | $1,194,883 | — |
| Tennessee | 1 | 2 | 2023 | — | — |
| Arizona | 1 | 1 | 2025 | — | — |
| Kansas | 1 | 1 | 2023 | $273,349 | — |
A separate dataset: search-audit logs that 51 agencies across 7 states publish on their own Flock transparency portals. It records how often the cameras are queried and the reason given — not how the systems were bought. No New Mexico agency publishes one.
The manufacturers’ own films — plate readers, real-time crime centres, gunshot detection, drone-as-first-responder — catalogued and annotated, with the reporting on them alongside. Read them as what they are: a company describing its own product.
Every claim this project makes about the technology, the sources under it, and the strongest arguments on the other side.
Documents are archived copies of what each jurisdiction published, kept because municipal portals do not use permanent links. Every figure is either quoted from a document or marked as not stated. A dash means the record does not say, which is never the same as zero. A jurisdiction absent from this page has not been swept — that is a statement about our coverage, never about whether its agencies operate these cameras.