Because of pronounced “public interest,” Bend City Manager Eric King will bring the decision to install stationary automated license plate readers to a City Council vote, allowing the public to offer input beforehand.
During the May 20 City Council business meeting, Mayor Melanie Kebler, in response to a public comment made by a privacy advocate who mentioned the Source’s reporting on the matter, said the public would be able to give the Council feedback before a vote happens.
Per the City’s procurement code, officials, such as the city manager, have the authority to add $250,000 or less to a Council-approved contract without needing to bring it to the City Council — unless they choose to. In the Source’s May 20 story, city officials gave no indication they’d put the matter before the wider Council before moving forward. That changed with Kebler’s comment later that day.
The Axon stationary ALPR cameras will take the place of the four Flock Safety stationary Automated License Plate Readers the City Council turned off on Jan. 7, due to the public’s concerns about privacy and whether federal immigration officials would be able to access that data. The cameras had been situated at two intersections of Highway 97 for seven months.
Automated License Plate Readers are AI-powered, scanning and cataloging license plate numbers, along with vehicle make, model and color, which help cops track people who are wanted for crimes. Axon and Bend PD will evaluate two demonstration ALPR units and begin a phased installation of ALPR cameras at entry and exit points in Bend in the coming year, King indicated in his report.
At the recent Council meeting, Councilor Ariel Méndez said he’d spoken with Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz to talk about the department’s ALPR Policy 428 and its privacy safeguards, such as the end-to-end encryption mandated by the ALPR-centered Senate Bill 1516, which Gov. Tina Kotek signed into law on March 31. Yet Policy 428 doesn’t specify encryption at all. Bend PD told the Source that it will publish its updated ALPR policy in the last week of May to shore it up with SB 1516.
“I think there are many valid concerns regarding people’s privacy, I know there’s a lot of concern about how we use that,” Méndez said. “I want to assure people that the City does not share information about people with ICE for the purpose of immigration enforcement and that our database is not searchable outside of Oregon at all.”
Yet mere policy is not a technological safeguard.
As the Source reported on May 6, federal immigration authorities violated Oregon sanctuary laws by querying Bend PD’s Flock database 279 times in June 2025, due to a Bend PD user error that left the national lookup option, the default setting, turned on. And the Oregon State Police have been sued for allowing federal immigration authorities to query Oregonians’ driving and criminal records a million times a year, with 1.4 million queries happening between February 2026 and the year before.
As City Manager Eric King noted in a May 1 Council report, a $19,000 grant from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission would cover some of the costs of re-installing this stationary ALPR technology, with an emphasis on tracking organized retail crime and theft.
Yet it’s not clear how much beyond that grant amount the City would pay, nor how large the stationary ALPR program would become.
At the May 20 City Council meeting, Jonathan Westmoreland, a local privacy advocate who publishes the newsletter “Signals & Safeguards,” made a public comment addressing the Bend PD’s current ALPR policy not complying with SB 1516, adding:
“…Why are we letting a $19,000 grant become the foot in the door for a quarter-million-dollar surveillance expansion with no council vote, no public input, and no evidence that it solves crime,” Westmoreland said. “Before we expand surveillance, let’s fix the policing we currently have.”
Kebler said that any new add-on to the Axon contract will come before Council and that the public would be able to give feedback. The next City Council business meeting is scheduled for June 3; its agenda has not yet been published.
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