home / mytown-research / surveillance_spending

surveillance_spending: 4230

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
4230 Versaterm San Mateo County CA 2018-11-06 CAD/RMS software licenses (approve contract) 3578629.0 The execution of an agreement with Versaterm, Ottawa, Canada, for proprietary software (licenses) and services related to the purchase of new Computer-Aided-Dispatch and Mobile Client software, for the term November 6, 2018 through June 30, 2023, in an amount not to exceed $3,578,629; http://sanmateocounty.legistar1.com/sanmateocounty/meetings/2018/11/1011_M_BOARD_OF_SUPERVISORS_18-11-06_Minutes.pdf https://mytown.theboringparts.com/city/sanmateocounty/#m546206 sv:rms:versaterm ceiling 1 0 0 CA
Powered by Datasette · Queries took 0.49ms · Data license: CC BY 4.0 · Data source: MyTown