Beyond the Flock Cameras: An Inventory of Cooke County and Gainesville Police Technology

When Cooke County's Flock license plate readers became a local argument this summer, the cameras on the poles were the only piece of the county's technology anyone was looking at. They are the newest piece, they are not the largest, and they are the only one that had a public argument about it.

GvilleTX read every check register that Cooke County and the City of Gainesville publish — 332 county registers going back to 2010, and 101 monthly city registers covering October 2017 through May 2026 — and pulled out every payment for equipment that records, searches, tracks or identifies people. This article is the resulting inventory.

Most of what is on it is ordinary. The largest single category at both governments is body cameras and in-car video, which record officers and which police-accountability groups generally want more of, not less. Building security cameras and evidence software are the everyday cost of running a sheriff's office and a police department. Some of the inventory is investigative equipment normally used under a warrant.

A few items are different, in one specific and narrow sense: a facial recognition subscription, covert vehicle trackers billed as an annual service, the county's drone program, the county's first plate reader, and subscriptions to commercial databases about people who have not been charged with anything appear in the ledger and nowhere else in the public record.

The clearest thing this inventory shows is that the two governments have handled that differently. Every camera system the City of Gainesville has adopted or considered — a plate reader in 2013, a 194-camera network the council voted on that November, a drone program with its own project page, three parking-enforcement options presented to council last August, one of them another plate reader — was described in public before or as it happened, and the local paper covered it. Most of the county's equivalents appear only as line items. That contrast, rather than any single purchase, is most of what this article is about.

We are not arguing that any of it should or should not exist. We are publishing the list, what each item is, what it cost, and what the public record does and does not say about how it is used, so that residents arguing about the plate readers know what else is in the room.

What a check register can and cannot tell you

A check register is a list of every payment a government made, with the vendor, the account it was charged to, a short description typed by a clerk, the date, the check number and the amount. It is one of the most detailed records local government routinely publishes, and it is the reason this inventory is possible at all.

It also has real limits, and they cut in both directions.

A register shows what was bought, not how it is used. A line reading "tracking service" does not say whether a warrant was obtained. It shows purchases made by check, so it misses equipment borrowed from another agency, supplied by a state or federal task force, donated, or received in kind through a grant. Descriptions are typed by hand and are frequently truncated, misspelled or blank. And a total is only a total of what we could identify: where a vendor's name is generic, or the description is empty, a purchase can sit in plain sight and not be recognizable as anything.

Every figure below is therefore a floor, not a ceiling. Where the record is ambiguous, this article says so instead of guessing.

The biggest line is cameras pointed at officers

Both governments' largest expenditure in this inventory is body-worn and in-car video.

Gainesville has been paying for it the longest and the most visibly. Beginning Feb. 15, 2018, the city made five annual payments of $39,000 to KS StateBank — $195,000 in total, running through December 2021. The first one says what it financed in the register itself: "1st Year Payment PD Body Camer[as]." Separately, the city has paid Utility Associates, the Georgia company that makes the BodyWorn camera system, $134,700 across nine payments since December 2018. Those include $12,050 in March 2022 charged against a state criminal justice grant, $60,000 in March 2023 recorded as a "year 1 payment," $35,000 in April 2024 for a "Video System Project," and $14,000 in March 2025 for three cameras, controllers and a docking station. Utility and three sister companies rebranded as Coreforce in October 2025.

Cooke County's video runs through WatchGuard, which Motorola Solutions acquired in July 2019 and which makes the 4RE in-car system and the VISTA body camera. County registers show $127,786.80 to WatchGuard since November 2015. The largest single line is $62,941.80 on Sept. 28, 2020, described as "BODY CAMS FOR PATROL" and paid from the sheriff's drug forfeiture fund. Others include $10,040 and $5,490 for in-car camera systems in December 2018, $19,800 for software and licensing in 2021, and $21,780 for cloud hosting plus $1,500 for an upload appliance in May 2023.

Before WatchGuard, the county bought in-car video from Martel Electronics — $63,373.66 across 51 line items between October 2013 and October 2019, mostly DC3 and DC6 camera systems, rear-seat cameras, microphones and repairs.

The equipment is now old enough to be retired. The July 13, 2026, commissioners court agenda carried consent items to surplus asset tag #4970, a "Watchguard Body Camera," from the sheriff's office, and asset tag #1750, an "in car camera system," from Constable Precinct 1.

None of this is unusual, and body cameras in particular are the one technology on this list with broad support across the political spectrum. It belongs in the inventory because it records, and because it is by far the largest number here. It is also a different category from a tool pointed at people who are not interacting with an officer, and readers should weigh it differently.

Plate readers, which are older here than the Flock argument suggests

Cooke County's Flock cameras are the third plate reader program in this county, and the first two were the city's.

Gainesville had one in 2013, and announced it. Then-Police Chief Steven Fleming told the Gainesville Lions Club in May 2013 that the department was buying "an Automatic License Plate Recognition system (ALPR)" running software called Alert View, at roughly $17,700 for equipment, installation and software, mounted on a patrol vehicle and scanning plates that passed in front of or behind it. He described a memorandum of understanding with the Texas Department of Public Safety under which information would be exchanged into the department's system twice a day, and said Amber alerts, stolen vehicles and class C citations could all be entered for quick verification. The Gainesville Daily Register reported it at the time.

In the same talk Fleming described a five-camera pilot with a company he called Wild Fire Communications — just over $12,000 for high-resolution cameras at Main and Dixon, Broadway and Dixon, Rusk and Pecan, California and Commerce, and a monitor at the skate park, streaming to the police station for live monitoring. The cameras, he said, had "tilt and zoom capabilities which will allow us to move in on license plates on vehicles to determine if the vehicle was involved in a crime or if the vehicle has been stolen."

That pilot became a contract. On Nov. 5, 2013, the city council voted 7-0 for Resolution 11-05-2013 C, authorizing the city manager to execute an agreement with Wildfire Camera Networks "for purchase and installation of a city-wide wireless camera network, consisting of 194 cameras, for a total cost not to exceed $519,767.00." That is what a public decision about camera infrastructure looks like: a named vendor, a stated count, a capped price and a recorded vote, thirteen years ago.

The county's first plate reader came in 2018. The Dec. 10, 2018, check register records $3,523.99 to Martel Electronics for a "LICENSE PLATE READER, AU[TO]," charged to the jail's machinery and equipment account. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Atlas of Surveillance lists it, rounded to $3,524, citing that register. It is a single in-car unit, not a network.

Then Flock. Seven line items across four checks between June 2025 and April 2026 total $83,550, of which $12,993 came from the sheriff's drug forfeiture fund. Most is booked to an account labeled "RENT," which is how a subscription for cameras the vendor owns and maintains gets recorded. Our earlier article covers that program, the contract votes and the unanswered questions about camera count and retention.

And the city is considering another one now. At the Aug. 5, 2025, city council meeting, Chief Kevin Phillips presented three options for downtown parking enforcement, prompted by a comprehensive-plan survey in which 40 percent of 57 downtown business owners rated customer parking availability poor or very poor. Chalking tires, he told the council, "was ruled unconstitutional by the Sixth Circuit court of appeals in 2019," and while Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit, "it is our goal to not be the city of Gainesville versus anybody in the Supreme Court."

The three options were CivicSmart's CurbSense, a curbside camera watching two spaces at a time and alerting an officer to violations, paid for out of a share of the fines; MPS Solar's SafetyStick, a 42-inch pole-mounted camera that reports at the end of each day and mails citations to the registered owner, provided to the city at no cost in exchange for 40 percent of parking fines collected, with three demonstration units due to be installed the next day; and the ELSAG License Plate Recognition System, mounted on patrol cars, scanning plates as an officer drives downtown to find vehicles that have not moved — and, in the Register's account of the presentation, able to be "tied to other systems to help recognize wanted or stolen vehicles." The ELSAG option was priced at about $17,750, within $50 of what the city paid for its 2013 plate reader.

No payment to ELSAG, CivicSmart or MPS Solar appears in any city register through May 2026, and neither does any payment to Flock Safety. Two caveats belong with that. The registers only begin in October 2017, so the 2013 systems would not appear in them regardless. And the SafetyStick option was structured to cost the city nothing up front — a system paid for out of a share of the fines it generates would never show up in a check register at all. This is the clearest illustration in this article of why a ledger is a floor and not a ceiling.

Phone extraction and digital forensics

Both agencies own equipment that copies the contents of a mobile phone. It is standard investigative equipment for a modern agency, it is normally used under a warrant or with the owner's consent, and it also produces a far more complete record of one person than any camera does. All three of those things are true at once.

Cooke County's first such purchase in the published record is older than most people would guess: $10,084 to "CELLBRITE USA INC" on July 22, 2013, for "LOGICAL & PHYSICAL" extraction, charged to a homeland security grant account. Since then the sheriff's office has paid Cellebrite in most years — $3,098.99 in 2014 and again in 2015, $2,450 in 2016, $3,400 in 2017, $3,700 in 2018 and 2019, $4,300 in 2021 and 2022, $8,884 in October 2024 on a line the county's own clerk typed as "CELL PHONE DUMP," and $8,800 in October 2025 for the fiscal 2026 subscription. Adding the training courses and accessories booked to the same vendor, payments to Cellebrite in the published registers total $79,974.97.

Gainesville buys the same product. City registers show eight payments to CelleBrite USA Corp between Nov. 22, 2017, and Oct. 6, 2023, rising from $3,400 to $6,170 and totaling $31,965, most of them from the police department's software maintenance line. The October 2022 payment is described as a "UFED Touch2 Subscription." The city's October 2025 register shows $10,255 on the same line to a vendor printed only as "CELL"; the register no longer prints enough of the name to confirm it.

Cellebrite's Universal Forensic Extraction Device is one of the two most widely used law enforcement tools for pulling the contents of a mobile phone — messages, photographs, location history, deleted material and application data. Its use is normally tied to a warrant or to the owner's consent, and nothing in the records reviewed suggests otherwise here.

The county has kept adding capability. The April 13, 2026, register shows $2,000 to Magnet Forensics for "MAGNEET AXIOM ADVANCED," charged to the drug forfeiture fund; AXIOM is a competing forensics suite that parses phone, computer and cloud data in one case file. The Oct. 13, 2025, register records a single check covering two $5,049 "FORENSIC PC" workstations from SUMURI, followed two weeks later by $1,920 for RAID adapters and drive bays — $12,018 for purpose-built examination hardware. SUMURI builds forensic workstations and the Mac-forensics software that runs on them.

No written policy governing digital extraction — what is collected, how long it is kept, or who may review it — is published on either government's website.

Facial recognition

The county has paid for a facial recognition subscription for three fiscal years, and it is not part of Flock.

The registers show four payments to Aware Inc., a publicly traded biometrics software company in Burlington, Massachusetts: $8,515 plus $2,675 in equipment on Nov. 14, 2022, described as "FY 23 AWARE SOFTWARE"; $11,190 on June 10, 2024, described as "FY 24 AWARE SOFTWARE" and booked to prepaid accounts; and $11,190 on Oct. 28, 2024, check 164732, described as "FACIAL RECOGNITION SUBSC" and charged to the sheriff's subscriptions account. The total is $33,570.

GvilleTX reported the October 2024 check in July. What was not previously reported is that it was the third year, not the first. Aware's law enforcement products include AwareABIS, a one-to-many biometric search and deduplication system, and tools for submitting fingerprint and booking records to state and federal databases.

Flock's cameras do not themselves perform facial recognition, a distinction the company stresses. That distinction is narrower than it sounds: Flock has separately built products — Nova, which joins plate reads to commercial data-broker and public records, and a natural-language search over video — that identify or find people without matching faces. Neither has been reported at Cooke County.

What the record does not show is what database of faces the county queries, whether images from county cameras are run through it, who may run a search, or what happens to a match that turns out to be wrong. Facial recognition has produced documented wrongful arrests elsewhere, and a December 2019 National Institute of Standards and Technology evaluation of 189 algorithms from 99 developers found higher false-match rates for some demographic groups. No published county policy addresses any of it.

Covert vehicle trackers

Both governments pay for covert GPS vehicle tracking as a standing annual subscription.

Cooke County has paid Code 5 Group $1,200 a year since Nov. 14, 2022 — four payments, described in turn as "ANNUAL TRACKING SERVICES," "ANNUAL TRACKING SERVICE," "SLAP ON - TRACKING SERVI" and "FY 26 TRACKING SERVICE" — plus $900 in that first year for a "SLAP ON TRACKER" and $15 in shipping, for $5,715 in all. Code 5 Group's own website says it specializes exclusively in GPS tracking for law enforcement, designs and manufactures its equipment in-house, and runs its own monitoring platform.

The county has also paid CovertTrack Group four times since March 2022 — $1,995 in March 2022 and $720 in March 2023 (both from the drug forfeiture fund), $749.04 in February 2024, and $720 in March 2025 — described as a phone for the special crimes unit, a tracking service and a tracking phone app, for $4,184.04. In March 2026 the same line paid $720 to 3SI Security Systems for "TRACKING PHONE." 3SI acquired CovertTrack in December 2019; the vendor name changed, the service did not.

Gainesville has paid CovertTrack $720 in most years since July 19, 2018 — six payments totaling $4,324.02 from the police department's software maintenance line — plus $720 in September 2025 to a vendor the register prints only as "COVE."

There is also a single entry that is not a subscription. The April 24, 2023, register shows $51 to T-Mobile on the sheriff's investigation expense line, described as "GPS TRACKING FOR DEU" — the drug enforcement unit. The record does not say more than that, and we are not going to speculate about it.

This is the one part of the inventory where Texas law is detailed and strict, and it is worth knowing. Under Subchapter E of Article 18B of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a mobile tracking device may be installed only under an order signed by a district judge, only on the sworn written application of an authorized peace officer, and only on an affidavit establishing probable cause that criminal activity has been, is or will be committed and that the device is likely to produce material information. The order expires after 90 days and may be extended once for good cause. The device must be removed as soon as practicable afterward and may not be monitored past expiration. And Article 18B.251 requires the agency to adopt a written policy and submit it to the Texas Department of Public Safety for approval.

So a written policy for covert trackers almost certainly exists at the Cooke County Sheriff's Office, because state law requires one and DPS has to approve it. Neither government publishes it, and nothing in the records reviewed suggests any of these requirements was not followed.

Two drone programs

Both agencies fly drones. The difference is how much either has said about it.

Gainesville announced its program, and it is running. The city maintains a Drone as First Responder project page describing a system that sends a drone to critical incidents "in under two minutes, weather permitting" and delivers "real-time aerial intelligence to first responders." The page lists five project phases, all of them marked complete: research beginning October 2022, vendor selection in October 2024, a docking station and security established in December 2024, police and fire training in February 2025, and, as of March 2025, "Drone is fully operational and deployed for emergency response." Police Chief Kevin Phillips is quoted on the page saying the program "will enhance a coordinated approach to public safety."

The registers fill in the cost. Paladin Drones, a Houston company whose Knighthawk system launches from a dock when a 911 call comes in and streams live video before officers arrive, was paid $49,000 in January 2025 for a "Drone, docking station, related software," and $49,000 again in November 2025 on the software maintenance line. (That second payment appears under the truncated vendor stub "PALA," but the register prints vendor number 1200, which the January 2025 register identifies as Paladin Drones Inc.) Around it sits the infrastructure: $4,120 for a docking station pad, $4,383 for a fence, $2,500 to install electrical, $131.88 of topsoil, $110 in legal fees for a "declaration letter re drone," and $650 for mapping-software training.

That was not the city's first drone. In November 2020 it paid $3,850 for a "DJI Mavi 2 Bundle, Dual Camera" and $469 to W.S. Darley, both charged to a police account the city labels "CSI/SURVAILANCE EQUIPMENT." In March 2023 it paid Unmanned Vehicle Technologies $17,340 for a "DJI M30T Drone Kit," a thermal-camera aircraft, and it paid DroneSense $9,151 for fleet software between 2021 and 2023. City drone spending in the published registers totals about $140,700.

Cooke County has not announced its program, and it is older and larger than a ledger-only description suggests. The county paid $9,846 in July 2018 for a DJI Inspire drone from the sheriff's drug forfeiture fund, added it to the county's liability and employee-liability insurance the following month, and paid W.S. Darley & Co. $13,241.10 on Feb. 28, 2022, for "DRONES," again from forfeiture funds. Around those sit $2,948 in repairs in 2019, propellers, batteries and a transmitter, $216.22 and $81.26 for a "drone command center," $620 for ground control targets, FAA registrations of $5 and $10, drone training of $300, $999, $175 and $320, and $6,280.90 to Brad's Drones TX in May 2025 for an aircraft on the sheriff's machinery and equipment line. Drone-related county spending totals about $36,976 since April 2018.

The Atlas of Surveillance dates the sheriff's drone unit to 2019, citing a sheriff's office Facebook post and that February 2022 register. Its listing names DJI as the vendor; the register names W.S. Darley & Co.

Here too state law says more than most people assume. Chapter 423 of the Texas Government Code makes it an offense to capture an image with a drone with intent to conduct surveillance, then carves out a list of lawful uses, two of which are written for police: pursuit of a suspect on reasonable suspicion or probable cause, documenting a crime scene, investigating a fatal or serious-injury collision, searching for a missing person, a high-risk tactical operation, and disaster and declared-emergency work, among others. Section 423.005 makes an illegally or incidentally captured image inadmissible in any criminal, civil, juvenile or administrative proceeding and exempt from public records requests, and Section 423.007 directs DPS to write rules for law enforcement use.

There is one gap that lands squarely on this county. Section 423.008 requires law enforcement agencies to publish a report every two years listing each drone flight by date, time, location and justification, the investigations it assisted, information gathered on people who were not the subject of the operation, and the total cost — but only for agencies in a county or municipality with a population over 150,000. Cooke County has roughly 42,000 residents and Gainesville about 18,000. Neither the sheriff's office nor Gainesville police has any obligation to publish that report, and neither does.

Cameras on buildings

Fixed cameras are a third category, and mostly an unremarkable one: courthouses, jails, evidence rooms and public buildings have security cameras.

The city has spent $28,232.44 on Axis network cameras and camera servers since 2020, bought through resellers — about $15,332 to replace an Axis server in November 2023 and about $8,307 on "Additional Axis cameras for PS" in June 2024.

What became of the 194-camera Wildfire network the council approved in 2013 is not something the ledger can answer. The city's published registers begin in October 2017 and contain no payments to that vendor, whose Texas registration was forfeited in January 2018.

The county's building cameras run through a local integrator, Notification Systems of Texas, which has installed and repaired cameras at the courthouse, the jail, the evidence room, the annex and juvenile probation for more than a decade. Two entries are worth noting.

The June 9, 2025, register shows $800 in labor and $900.52 from the drug forfeiture fund for a "CAMERA SOFT INTERVIEW RO" — a camera for a soft interview room, the kind of room used when interviewing children and victims, where recording is standard practice and generally considered good practice.

The Nov. 25, 2024, register lists $1,037 for a "DS-2CD3148G2 OUTDOOR IP" camera. That model number belongs to Hikvision's AcuSense line. Section 889 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act names Hikvision among the manufacturers whose video surveillance equipment federal agencies may not buy, or contract with others who use it, for public safety, security of government facilities and certain other national security purposes; the Federal Communications Commission separately placed the company on its Covered List of equipment posing an unacceptable risk to national security. Neither restriction bars a Texas county from buying one with its own money, and a model number in a ledger cannot rule out an equivalent rebranded unit sold by another brand. It is worth flagging only because a $1,037 camera bought through an integrator is not the sort of purchase a commissioners court would normally examine, and this is the sort of detail it might want to confirm.

One line has no public explanation at all. The Jan. 12, 2026, register shows check 171150 to Nortex Communications for $400 on the county's IT contract services account, split into $100 for a "VLAN FOR HOMELAND CAMERA" and $300 for "CHANGED OUT SWITCHES." Registers from 2013 and 2014 show the county buying cameras, digital video recorders and an interview room switch on an account called "HOMELAND SEC GRANTS EXPEN," so a camera bought years ago with homeland security grant money is the most likely reading, and $100 to put it on its own network segment is routine IT work. What the camera is, where it points and how long it keeps what it records does not appear in any public record we found. It is the single line item residents have asked about most.

Commercial databases

The least visible thing a local government buys is a subscription to somebody else's data.

Both agencies subscribe to LeadsOnline, a commercial database of pawn, secondhand, scrap, electronics-kiosk and online-marketplace transactions that police search by name, serial number or item. The county has paid it since December 2013 — $792 a year at first, rising to $2,192 in 2019, $2,819 for fiscal 2024 and $3,106 for fiscal 2026 — for $22,008 in total. The city paid it seven times between October 2017 and October 2023, rising from $2,578 to $4,151 and totaling $20,092, and its October 2025 register shows $4,620 on the same dues and subscriptions line to a vendor printed only as "LEAD."

Both also buy people-search access from TransUnion. TLOxp, the product TransUnion bought out of TLO's bankruptcy in December 2013 and now sells under its TruLookup brand, is assembled from credit-header, property and public-record files. The city's registers describe it plainly as "Online Investigative Services" — $9,446.21 across ten payments since April 2018, split between dues and subscriptions and a line called "INVESTIGATION FUNDS." The county's payments are smaller and monthly, $8,626.25 in total, mostly on the county and district attorneys' accounts.

Both products are ordinary police tools, and both are how a small agency does research it could not otherwise afford to do. They are also commercial files assembled by companies with no relationship to the person described, searched without a warrant because no warrant is required to search a commercial database. Courts have spent years working through the Fourth Amendment questions raised by plate readers; the equivalent questions about data brokers are much less settled.

The county attorney's office added a piece in October 2025: $12,802.79 for an "AXON JUSTICE SUBSCRIPTIO." Axon Justice is the prosecutor- and defense-facing side of Axon's digital evidence platform. Axon is also the company that acquired Fusus, the real-time crime center firm, in February 2024. Nothing in the records shows either government buying Fusus or a real-time crime center; the point is only that the vendor relationship exists.

The county also pays CivicPlus, which acquired ArchiveSocial's parent company in 2022, for social media archiving — $2,943 in March 2024, $4,188 in October 2024 and $4,397.40 in October 2025. This one runs the other way and deserves saying: the product exists because of public records law, and it preserves a government's own social media accounts so the agency can answer records requests. It does mean a comment left on the sheriff's Facebook page is preserved, including if it is later deleted.

People the court already supervises

Two systems belong in a complete inventory with an explicit caution.

Cooke County juvenile probation paid eHawk $9,900 between February 2023 and April 2024 for "SMART PHONE MONITORING." eHawk's RePath is an application installed on a supervised person's own phone; the company describes scheduled and random check-ins, an identity check using a live photo, location sampling through the day compared against the person's historical pattern, and inclusion and exclusion zones. The same department has paid Recovery Healthcare for GPS monitoring of juveniles in registers going back to November 2012, $19,104 in the published record.

These are court-supervision tools applied to people already under a court's authority, which is a materially different thing from monitoring the general public. They are listed because an inventory that omitted them would be incomplete.

What the ledgers add up to

Two charts, with a caveat that matters more than the numbers.

We are deliberately not publishing a single combined "surveillance spending" figure, because the biggest bars on both charts are body cameras and in-car video — equipment that records officers, that both agencies were encouraged to buy, and that would sit near the top of any similar inventory in any county in Texas. A headline total that folds those in with a facial recognition subscription would tell a reader less than the breakdown does.

What we did not find

An inventory is also useful for what is not in it.

We found no gunshot detection microphones at either government. No ShotSpotter, now SoundThinking, which operates in roughly 170 to 180 cities and communities and whose accuracy has been questioned — an Associated Press investigation in 2021 found the systems can miss live gunfire and misclassify fireworks, and a FOX 9 review of 21 months of Minneapolis alerts found officers documented no evidence of a gun-related crime about 80 percent of the time.

We found no cell-site simulator — a "Stingray," which impersonates a cell tower and collects identifiers from nearby phones. Federal agencies have required nondisclosure agreements about these devices, so an absence from a check register is weaker evidence here than elsewhere.

We found no Fusus, no Verkada, no real-time crime center and no program integrating private business or residential cameras.

And we found no predictive policing software.

None of these absences is a guarantee. A check register shows what was bought with a check. The Texas Department of Public Safety holds a Flock contract the Texas Observer reported at $26 million and has installed its own cameras in state rights-of-way, and Interstate 35 runs the length of this county.

What the records do not answer

Across every system in this article, the same four questions have no published answer at either government: what the technology may be used for, who may use it, how long the data is kept, and who audits it.

State law answers some of them, and it is worth being precise about which. As set out above, covert GPS trackers require a district judge's order on probable cause under Article 18B of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and police drone flights are limited to an enumerated list of lawful purposes under Chapter 423 of the Government Code. Since Jan. 1, 2026, Chapter 552 of the Business and Commerce Code has barred a governmental entity from deploying an artificial intelligence system that identifies a specific person from biometric data, or from gathering images from the internet and other public sources to do so, without consent where that would infringe a legal right — though the same section excludes photographs and video, and data derived from them, from its definition of biometric data, so how far it reaches a face-matching system is not settled.

Automatic license plate readers are the real gap. We found no Texas statute setting rules for how police may use them: no warrant requirement, no retention limit, no restriction on who scans are shared with, no audit duty. The state has enforced a different law against the vendor — the Department of Public Safety required Flock to hold a private security license and fined it for operating without one — but that is a licensing rule for the company, not a use rule for the agency.

Local rules are also not simply a choice these two governments have declined to make. A Texas county has no general ordinance-making power of the kind a home-rule city has, and Chapter 552 of the Business and Commerce Code expressly preempts any city ordinance regulating the use of artificial intelligence systems. Some of what a reader might want decided locally is not, under current law, available to be decided locally.

Which is worth saying plainly in both directions: the absence of published local rules is not evidence that anything has been misused, and nothing in this reporting suggests it has. It does mean that on the questions state law leaves open, the answers currently live in internal practice rather than in a document a resident can read.

GvilleTX has not put questions to Sheriff Ray Sappington, County Judge John O. Roane, the commissioners, Police Chief Kevin Phillips or City Manager Barry Sullivan for this article. That is a limitation of this article, not a finding about them, and we are not going to describe an absence of comment we never sought as a refusal to give one.

Parts of this have been reported locally before, and the pattern in what was and was not covered is itself informative. Everything the City of Gainesville has done in this area was reported at the time: KTEN covered the municipal camera network in February 2013, and the Gainesville Daily Register covered the police chief's 2013 presentation of the city's first plate reader and camera pilot, the department's new body cameras in December 2017, and the three parking-enforcement options including a plate reader in August 2025. On the county side the Register covered the commissioners court's approval of cloud storage for the sheriff's video in November 2020.

What we can find no coverage of anywhere — not in the Register, KXII, KTEN or the Cooke County Record — is the county's 2018 plate reader, the Flock contract, the county's drone program, the phone-extraction subscriptions at either agency, or the facial recognition subscription. Both television stations cover this beat routinely for neighboring agencies, from plate readers in Denison, Gunter and Sherman to a drone trial in Denison.

A note on the records themselves

Two things about the records are worth reporting on their own.

Cooke County's check register archive is unusually good, and better than we expected. The county posts 332 registers. Sorted by the dates of the checks inside them, they cover every single month from November 2012 through July 2026 — 162 of those 165 months carry two registers, three carry one — plus four files from 2010 and 2011. Every file we requested returned. Older registers are plain text and newer ones are PDFs; both name every vendor in full and carry a line-item description. A resident with a browser can reconstruct everything in this article from the county's own website.

The City of Gainesville's registers went the other way. Gainesville has been a genuine leader here: the city says it holds all six Transparency Stars the Texas Comptroller awards, and that it is the smallest government in Texas to hold all of them. The first half checks out — the Comptroller's March 2025 list of six-star holders includes Gainesville among eleven governments statewide. The second half does not: the Town of Addison, population about 16,661 to Gainesville's roughly 17,900, is also on that list.

Its registers through February 2025 name every vendor in full and describe every line item. Beginning with the April 2025 register, the city's files identify vendors by only the first four letters of the name and drop the line-item description entirely. A resident reading the October 2025 register sees "LEAD," "CELL," "CIVI" and a dollar amount.

The change is not total. Those files do print an internal vendor number, and a vendor paid both before and after the change can sometimes be identified from it — that is how the November 2025 "PALA" payment is confirmed as Paladin Drones. But most cannot, and that is why several figures in this article are given as what the register prints rather than as a vendor name.

Separately, two of the city's 103 register links do not lead to the month they name. The link labeled "May 2025" serves the April 2025 file, and the link labeled "May 2020" serves the May 2021 file. Those two months are, in practice, not posted.

Where this gets decided

Cooke County Commissioners Court agendas provide for public comment on agenda items: three minutes per speaker, capped at 30 minutes for all speakers combined, with sign-up either by phone or email an hour before the meeting or in person at the county judge's office 15 minutes before it starts. Gainesville City Council has its own public comment period.

A Change.org petition started July 26 by Lorilea Bowers, which had 44 signatures as of this week against a goal of 50, has broadened past plate readers. Among its fifteen demands, it asks the county to release all written policies governing "Flock cameras, drones, mobile trailers, watchlists, camera networks, and other surveillance systems"; to release complaints, internal investigations, false alert reports and audits involving that technology; to adopt a countywide moratorium prohibiting any new automated surveillance system without a separate agenda item, a public presentation, a written privacy impact report, a public hearing and a recorded vote; and to explain the "Homeland camera," including its purpose, location, capabilities, funding, access, retention and approving authority.

Those are one resident's requests, not findings, and a reader can agree with all, some or none of them. The purpose of this article is only that the argument be had with the list in front of everyone.

Methods note: GvilleTX downloaded every check register linked from the Cooke County auditor's page (332 files, fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2013 through the Aug. 1, 2026 register) and every monthly register linked from the City of Gainesville's page (103 links, 101 distinct files, October 2017 through May 2026), extracted their text, and parsed them line by line. County parsing was validated by requiring each check's line items to sum to the printed check total; 99.7 percent balanced. Duplicate rows appearing in two consecutive city files were removed. All dollar figures are the sum of matching line items and are minimums. Vendor product descriptions come from the companies' own published materials. Where a truncated ledger entry only resembles a known vendor, this article says what the register prints. Documents cited are linked in the text. Related: [Cooke County Paid Flock $83,550. Its Camera Rules Remain Unpublished.](https://gvilletx.com/news/cooke-county-flock-cameras-83550-unpublished-rules)