Multnomah County
County record. Includes every city and agency within Multnomah 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
Portland Police Bureau
The Portland Police Department has registered eight active drones with the Oregon Department of Aviation as of 2024.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Oregon Department of Aviation
The Portland Police Bureau started a $2.6 million Axon body-worn camera pilot program in 2022.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Portland Mercury
The Portland Police Bureau has been using automatic license plate readers since 2008.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Directives Manual/Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) policiesThe BulletinWillamette Week
Gresham Police Department
The Gresham Police Department has registered 24 active drones with the Oregon Department of Aviation as of 2024.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Oregon Department of AviationGresham
The Gresham Police Department purchased 139 body-worn cameras from Motorola in 2019.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): City of Gresham
Portland State University Police Department
The U.S. Department of Justice awarded $20,364 to the Portland State University Police Department in 2016 as part of the Bureau of Justice Assistance's body-worn camera grant program.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): U.S Department of Justice
Multnomah County Sheriff's Office
The Multnomah County Sheriff's Office maintains a voluntary registry of private and personal surveillance cameras.
Sources (via the EFF Atlas): Multnomah County Sheriff's Office
Source: EFF Atlas of Surveillance (Electronic Frontier Foundation & University of Nevada, Reno — Reynolds School of Journalism) · CC BY 4.0 · retrieved July 2026