home / mytown-research / surveillance_spending

surveillance_spending: 3158

A DISCOVERY INDEX of surveillance and police-technology dollar figures found in local government meeting records across 130+ named vendors — NOT a table of confirmed spending, and NOT safe to SUM. An audit on 2026-07-29 found aggregate views were adding amounts that must not be added: the same procurement recurs at committee, council, approval, amendment and renewal stages; "not to exceed" figures are authorization ceilings, not payments. Use the canned query "the CONSERVATIVE total" for any number you intend to publish, and "data-quality report" to see what is flagged. Columns added for this: `amount_type` (stated / ceiling / proposed / recommended / estimated), `dup_rank` (>1 = redundant copy), `geo_suspect` (city disagrees with the source link), `anomaly` (implausible figure), `state_norm` (normalized state). Vendors covered include ALPR (Flock, Vigilant, Genetec), body cameras/tasers (Axon, WatchGuard, Utility, Getac), gunshot detection (ShotSpotter/SoundThinking), face recognition (Clearview AI, DataWorks Plus), fingerprint biometrics (Idemia AFIS/Livescan, filed separately under `sv:biometrics`), data fusion and OSINT (Fusus, Peregrine, LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters CLEAR), phone forensics (Cellebrite, GrayKey, Magnet), drones (Skydio, BRINC, DJI), cameras/VMS (Verkada, Avigilon), cell-site simulators, CAD/RMS records systems, photo enforcement, jail-call and student monitoring. Every row carries a VERBATIM quote from the minutes and a link to the source document, and a row only publishes if that quote was found character-for-character in the source text. READ THE `ledger` COLUMN: `sv:<category>:<vendor>`. `radio_infra` (two-way radios), `rms` (records/CAD software), `biometrics` (fingerprints) and `not_surveillance` are NOT surveillance sensors — exclude them before quoting any surveillance figure.

Data license: CC BY 4.0 · Data source: MyTown

This data as json

rowid vendor city state spend_date product amount quote source_document mytown_record ledger amount_type dup_rank geo_suspect anomaly state_norm
3158 Verkada Paramount CA 2025-08-12 security cameras, alarm, access control (approve contract) 463114.0 approve the draft agreement with End Point Wireless for the installation of Verkada Security Systems for the replacement of the existing security cameras, alarm system, and access controls for phase 1 facilities for a cost of $463,114 https://paramountcity.primegov.com/Public/CompiledDocument/5819 https://mytown.theboringparts.com/city/paramountcity/2025/#m682707 sv:camera:verkada stated 1 0 0 CA
Powered by Datasette · Queries took 18.787ms · Data license: CC BY 4.0 · Data source: MyTown