SALISBURY — Typically, a request like the one the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office brought before the Rowan County commissioners on Monday would be handled in the consent agenda. However, the commissioners chose to handle the request to accept a public grant outside of the consent agenda so that they could address concerns Chairman Greg Edds said he had heard about how the requested funding could affect the privacy of Rowan County citizens.

The grant the Sheriff’s Office was requesting to accept was an Operation Underground Railroad grant that would pay 50 percent of the office’s licensing payment to GrayKey, a service that allows officers to bypass passwords on iPhones so that they can search the phone for evidence or other information. Edds said he had received questions about how the ability for officers to get into locked iPhones may violate citizens’ rights to privacy.

“Normally this would be an item we would put on the consent agenda, and I asked that we put it on the regular one. I had several folks reach out to me and say, ‘hey, I’m seeing this is coming up on your county commissioner meeting. What are the safeguards on this?’ Folks were a little worried about is this going to violate folks’ Constitutional rights of privacy,” said Edds.

Captain David Earnhardt and Sheriff Travis Allen gave the board information about how they utilize the GrayKey tool in their work. The license that the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office requested the grant for will only allow the deputies to utilize the tool 50 times before it expires. Allen said that this meant that his office will use GrayKey as little as possible.

The other point Earnhardt pointed to in order to address the privacy concerns was the office’s policy on who signs off on the search warrant. Generally, deputies send their search warrants to magistrates or district court judges for other usages. Earnhardt said that for GrayKey warrants, however, the sheriff’s office has a policy that they will only obtain search warrants by three methods, a signed consent form from the owner, an N.C. Superior Court judge or a Federal Court judge.

“It is different than a search warrant for a house because we can get a magistrate to get a search warrant for your house. I can get a magistrate to get a search warrant for you bank account.We use a Superior Court judge or a federal judge on all of our phone searches. And that is with probable cause so it’s very fail-proof on people’s rights,” said Allen.

Allen and Earnhardt both also said that the GrayKey device will not work if it is not in the sheriff’s office building itself. The device tracks its location and will only work if it is one specific place, which in Rowan County’s case is the sheriff’s office.

The grant that the sheriff’s office was approved by the commissioners to accept will pay half of the $18,108, which means that the office is still on the hook for $9,054 of the licensing fee, which Earnhardt said would most likely come from the office’s software funding they saved for the purpose in addition to asset forfeiture funding.