Deschutes County

In December 2025 the Deschutes County Office of the Internal Auditor published a report on the Sheriff’s Office body-worn and in-car camera program. Its title is the finding: “Foundations in Place, Improved Oversight and Reporting Needed”.

The county auditor works for the county, has access no member of the public has, and was authorized to do this by the Audit Committee in its own work plan. This is not an outside critic. And the central sentence of the report is that the auditor could not answer the question the audit was asked.

“Due to a scope limitation, auditors could not verify whether deputies consistently recorded and categorized footage in line with policy which is crucial for the program to meet accountability and operational goals.”

Why that sentence matters

The Sheriff’s Office has used body cameras since May 2021. Every deputy carries one and every patrol car has a dash camera. The two devices turn on differently, and the report states the difference plainly: in-car cameras are activated automatically when a deputy switches on the flashing lights, while body cameras must be actively turned on by the deputy.

A camera that a person has to remember to start is only as good as the checking behind it. So the policy requires supervising sergeants to review two randomly selected recordings for each deputy reporting to them, every quarter.

The auditor looked at how often sergeants actually opened footage. Between July and September 2025, 62 deputies uploaded recordings. Twenty-six of them, 42 percent, had fewer than two reviews. The Office, the report says, “did not have formal processes in place to ensure these reviews took place.”

The review requirement had been added to the policy in March 2025. The program started in May 2021. For most of its life there was no requirement to check it at all.

The county collected the numbers and did not publish them

The auditor also found that “camera reporting was not published, replicable, or evaluative”, and asked the Sheriff’s Office why.

The answer, recorded in the report, is that accreditation standards do not require publishing, and that staff “were not aware of any other west coast law enforcement agencies that published body and auto camera statistics. Auditors found only one example, a report on surveillance technology from San Diego.”

The auditor did not accept that as a reason:

“Regardless of whether accreditation standards require it or how common it is, publishing statistics on the body and auto camera program would promote trust and transparency with the community. It would also offer justification for the monetary investment the Office has already made and any increases that might be associated with a new vendor. Staff were already collecting data on a quarterly basis. Incorporating it into existing reports or publishing the data on the website should not take too many additional resources.”

That is the whole argument, made inside the county by one of its own employees. The data existed. It was gathered every quarter. Publishing it would have cost almost nothing. The reason it stayed unpublished was that nobody else was doing it.

Two further findings round out the report. Public records requests were fulfilled according to policy, but the tracking of them was incomplete. Information security controls fell short. The recommendations are to publish reports on the program, build a process that monitors whether sergeants are doing their reviews, replace the records-request tracking system, and design proper procedures for the information system that holds the footage.

The report includes a management response from the Sheriff’s Office. What we read does not establish whether any of the recommendations were carried out, and no follow-up audit appears in the records we have.

What we could not reach, which is most of it

This is the narrowest county record on this site, and the limits need stating before anything is read into it.

What we read is the county auditor’s own series: internal audit reports and audit committee minutes from 2019 onward, 115 readable documents out of 122. Seven are scanned images with no text layer, so they can be read a page at a time but not searched.

What we did not read is the Board of Commissioners. The Board’s modern record lives on a separate meeting portal, and we have not read it. The copy of the Board’s older meetings in the records repository stops in 2015.

So nothing here tells you what the Board of Commissioners approved, discussed, or was told.

Because of that, and because seven documents in scope could not be searched, we are not making any negative claim about Deschutes County. In particular: OpenStreetMap contributors have mapped 17 automated plate readers in this county, the third largest cluster in Oregon, and the EFF Atlas lists eight entries for agencies here. None of that is confirmed or contradicted by anything we read. The auditor examined body cameras and car cameras. Plate readers were not the subject.

One loose thread is worth naming for anyone continuing this. The auditor refers in passing to costs “that might be associated with a new vendor.” Nothing we read says who that vendor is.

Bend, Redmond, Sisters and La Pine have not been swept at all.