Grand Forks County
County record. Includes every city and agency within Grand Forks County.
Technology presence
What these categories mean
- ALPR
- Automated license plate readers (ALPR): camera systems that automatically capture, read, and log vehicle license plates with location and time, producing a searchable record of vehicle movements.
- Fixed cameras & RTCC
- Agency-operated fixed video cameras and the real-time crime centers (RTCC) that aggregate live and recorded feeds for monitoring. Extends the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Atlas, which enumerates real-time crime centers and camera registries but not standalone fixed-camera estates.
- Face recognition
- Software that matches faces in images or video against a reference database to identify or verify individuals.
- Drones / UAS
- Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), commonly called drones, operated by an agency for overhead observation, imaging, or sensing.
- Gunshot detection
- Networks of acoustic sensors that detect and locate suspected gunfire and alert an agency.
- Body-worn & dashcam
- Officer body-worn and in-vehicle dashboard cameras that record encounters; public access to the footage is frequently restricted.
- Doorbell & camera registry
- Programs that give an agency access to privately owned camera footage: doorbell-camera partnerships, citizen camera registries, and private-camera integration platforms.
- Cell-site simulators
- Devices that mimic cell towers to locate or identify nearby mobile phones. They are often called Stingrays, or IMSI catchers after the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number that identifies each phone on a network. Adjacent: communications surveillance outside the visual/sensor core.
- Predictive policing
- Software that forecasts where crime may occur or who may be involved, to direct policing. Adjacent: analytics rather than a sensing deployment.
- Social-media monitoring
- Tools that collect and analyze public social-media activity for an agency. Adjacent: open-source/communications monitoring outside the visual/sensor core.
The record, by agency
Grand Forks Police Department
The Grand Forks Police Department can run face recognition requests through the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation's face recognition system. The agency submitted 13 requests through the Bureau of Criminal Investigation's face recognition system between March 2023 to October 2024.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Bureau Of Criminal Investigation Division of North Dakota
Grand Forks Sheriff's Office
The Grand Forks Sheriff's Office's Department operates five Draganfly Innovations drones as of 2011, according to data compiled by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard Collegewww.uasvision.com
University of North Dakota Police Department
The University of North Dakota Police Department began using drones in 2012 through the Northeast Region UAS Unit.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): University BusinessUnmanned Aerial Online
The University of North Dakota Police Department began using body-worn cameras in 2014.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Prairie Business Magazine
Grand Forks County Sheriff's Office
The Grand Forks County Sheriff's Office has used body-worn cameras since at least 2018.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): AP News
Source: EFF Atlas of Surveillance (Electronic Frontier Foundation & University of Nevada, Reno — Reynolds School of Journalism) · CC BY 4.0 · retrieved July 2026