Washington

Every county in Washington has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. Counties marked researched have also had their local records read, and their pages carry Orwell Index findings. On the rest, what you see is two published datasets, dated and attributed, and the gap between them is part of what they show.

Five counties have no community-mapped devices at all: Asotin, Columbia, Garfield, Pacific and Wahkiakum. That is a fact about what volunteers have mapped, not a finding that those counties have no cameras. Asotin’s map tells a border story: the six devices nearest the county are plate readers across the Snake River in Lewiston, Idaho, and they appear on Idaho’s side of the line, not here.

Five counties, five routes to the same vendor

Reading the board records of six Washington counties in one week turned up the same shape six times, and no two of them reached it the same way.

Skagit County waived competitive bidding by resolution in December 2024 to buy Axon’s evidence software. Pacific County adopted single-source resolutions reciting the state exemption, twice, in 2023 and 2025. Chelan County authorized an Axon purchase by single-source resolution in June 2024. Adams County’s sheriff brought two quotes to his board in September 2025 and the board signed one of them the next day. Kittitas County has bought Axon vehicle video systems on the consent agenda in four separate years.

Every one of those is lawful. Washington’s RCW 39.04.280 provides the exemption and the counties applied it as written, several of them printing their reasoning in full. What the pattern shows is not misconduct, it is momentum: once an agency is on a platform, the software, the docks, the training and the next camera are all specified by the company that sold the first one, and the single-source finding follows from that rather than preceding it.

Two counties bought on Washington State Contract #05720 without any county process at all: Skagit for 86 body cameras in December 2024, Benton for 19 plate readers in July 2026.

What the footage costs, in three counties so far

Chelan County adopted fees for staff time spent redacting body camera footage for public records requests in December 2024. Cowlitz County adopted a redaction fee schedule effective January 2026. Adams County’s E-911 coordinator was still surveying what other jurisdictions charge in March 2026.

A price list for watching what a body camera recorded is one of the more useful documents a county produces, and we now know three Washington counties have one.

The counties still at baseline

The counties listed below as source baseline have not had their board records read. Their pages carry the two outside datasets only, and nothing on them should be read as an absence.

Unlike Oregon’s dataset, Washington’s tribal police agencies appear in the Atlas under the counties where they operate, so the Chehalis, Quinault, Nooksack, Kalispel, Sauk-Suiattle, Stillaguamish, Tulalip, Puyallup, Nisqually, Lummi and Shoalwater Bay tribal departments each show on a county page. Tribal governments are their own jurisdictions; a county page records what the dataset files there and claims nothing more. One Atlas row labeled Washington belongs to Eugene, Oregon, an upstream mislabel we exclude rather than assign to a Washington county.

Washington’s statutes are in the State law section below, read from the codified Revised Code of Washington and the passed bills. The 2026 plate reader act (RCW 10.130, effective 30 March 2026) is the strictest on this site: plate reader use is unlawful except as the chapter provides, non-case data cannot be kept past 21 days, every system had to be registered with the state Attorney General by late September 2026, and from December 2027 every agency using one must publish an annual report on its own website naming its camera locations and everyone its data was shared with. Facial recognition has been regulated since 2021 (RCW 43.386): a public accountability report, community meetings, and a warrant for ongoing surveillance. Drones have no Washington surveillance statute; the bill that would have created one passed both chambers in 2014 and was vetoed, and body camera policies are required by RCW 10.109. California’s and Oregon’s statutes are listed on their own pages and do not apply here.