Policies

Per the Minnesota BCA's statutorily required legislative report, the Cottage Grove Police Department (ORI MN0820700) reported 18 warrantless UAV/drone deployments in 2025 at a total program cost of $10,473.00. Of the 18, 7 occurred Jan-Jun 2025 (2 emergency/life-safety, 5 threat-assessment-in-anticipation-of-a-specific-event) and 11 occurred Jul-Dec 2025 (2 emergency/life-safety, 6 reasonable-suspicion information collection, 3 training/public relations).

Statewide report downloaded and read directly; this agency's rows located in the by-agency cost/count table and both reason-code tables, cross-checked that the half-year counts sum to the reported total (7+11=18). Only the 2025 report was checked.

Last checked 2026-09-20

Sheriff's-style department administrative policy (Lexipol-licensed) governing the Cottage Grove Police Department's use of Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology, citing Minn. Stat. §626.8472 and §13.824. Covers permitted uses, a 60-day default data retention limit (with exculpatory-evidence and Address Confidentiality Program exceptions), BCA notification of installations within 10 days, a public log of ALPR use, biennial audits, and a written-request procedure for releasing data to other law enforcement agencies.

Document re-fetched and its PDF text extracted directly on 2026-09-20 at https://cottagegrovemn.gov/DocumentCenter/View/6446/Automated_License_Plate_Readers__ALPR_ (4 pages, Policy 427, Cottage Grove Police Department Policy Manual). This current version carries no ***DRAFT*** marking anywhere in its extracted text (a prior session's fetch of an earlier copy of this document, dated 2025-07-07 in its PDF metadata, had been marked DRAFT) -- this appears to be a newer, non-draft manual page. The document's own Lexipol copyright line and PDF creation metadata both read 2026/01/05 ("Copyright Lexipol, LLC 2026/01/05"; XMP/CreationDate D:20260105111000-06'00'), which is used here as the effective/as-current-of date since the document does not separately print an "effective date" field -- this is the same Lexipol-manual-generation-date convention used for the comparable Washington County Sheriff's Office ALPR policy record. Council-vote search: queried all Cottage Grove Council Meeting records in Base44 (government 6aae9f9d42c796e9d57f082e) for agenda_outline containing ALPR/license plate/Flock/automated license (case-insensitive regex) -- zero matches, consistent with a prior session's finding after searching all 181 Council Meeting records. Spot-checked that the agenda_outline field is populated on other Council Meeting records (not silently empty) to confirm the search was meaningful. No council-vote or council-agenda item referencing ALPR/Flock/license-plate readers was found in the collected record.

Last checked 2026-09-20