Chelan County

Chelan County announced sixty plate reader cameras and stands at twelve. In August 2024 the Sheriff’s Office described a plan for roughly sixty solar-powered Flock cameras across the county, funded by $85,000 in state auto-theft and police-association grants, part of a regional push with Douglas County and the Wenatchee and East Wenatchee police. Two years later the office operates twelve, by the sheriff’s own account to a Seattle station, and his tone had cooled: “We see it as a force multiplier, but you know, unsure. Any technology, you get past the advertisement and more of the hype of it, and see what it practically does.” The same interview carries his sharper line about the vendor’s data-sharing controversy: “I really do point the finger towards Flock on that.”

The cameras’ most telling appearance in the record is an absence the sheriff volunteered himself. Asked about the 2025 manhunt for Travis Decker, he said that had the cameras been up and running, “we would have seen him driving through Leavenworth and turning down High School Road.” The system the county announced in 2024 was not yet watching when the case it was made for arrived. Washington’s plate reader law now requires registration with the Attorney General by the end of September 2026, and whether the office has filed is a records question.

The drone program is the office’s own news. Two days before we read its site, the Sheriff’s Office announced the addition of a Dronetag RIDER, a drone-detection receiver, to what it calls the CCSO Drone Team, for event safety. The team’s aircraft inventory and policy are not published; the Atlas of Surveillance recorded a single drone as of 2020.

The county’s own paper trail, now that we have read it

The reporting above came from newspapers. The board’s minutes carry the decisions underneath it, and they are short lines on consent agendas.

On 5 August 2024 the Sheriff appeared before the commissioners for a “Flock Safety Camera Presentation”. On 12 November 2024 the board unanimously approved, as a consent item:

Resolution #2024-101 RE: Authorizing sole source purchase of license plate reader from Flock Safety

No dollar figure appears in the minutes. Sole source means the county found the purchase legitimately limited to one supplier and skipped competitive bidding, which is the same route four other Washington counties took to a camera vendor in the same period.

Then, on 30 June 2025:

Letter of Agreement with Chelan County PUD – Flock Safety Camera

A plate reader has to stand somewhere, and somewhere belongs to somebody. Chelan needed an agreement with the Public Utility District. Kittitas County, in the same summer, needed an agreement between its Sheriff’s Office and its own Public Works department for the use of county right-of-way.

That is a question worth asking of every county with cameras on poles: who owns the pole, and what did they agree to.

What it costs to watch the footage

On 23 December 2024 the board adopted, again on the consent agenda:

Resolution #2024-120 Re: Adoption of Fees for Staff Time Associated with Redacting Chelan County Sheriff’s Body Worn Camera Footage Requested Pursuant to a Public Records Request

So deputies do wear body cameras, which the record could not previously show, and the county has priced the work of releasing what they record. Six months earlier, in June 2024, the Undersheriff had discussed “Body-Worn Camera Grant Funds” with the board, and that same month the commissioners authorized, by Resolution #2024-44, the purchase of Axon equipment, software and services “as a single source supplier”.

Chelan is one of three Washington counties on this site now known to have set a price for body camera footage. Cowlitz adopted its schedule effective January 2026 and Adams was still asking what others charge in March 2026. Chelan got there in December 2024.

The fee itself is not in the minutes line. The resolution number is the handle for a records request, and that request is in this county’s queue.

Two drones that are not the sheriff’s

In February 2023 the board awarded an informal bid to General Pacific to purchase an unmanned aircraft system. In April 2024 it approved an “Equipment Purchase Exceeding $10,000: Drone and Radiometric Thermal Camera”. In August 2024 it signed a cost-share with the US Forest Service for “Upper Wenatchee Watershed Restoration Drone Monitoring”.

None of those lines names a department, and the Forest Service one is watershed restoration rather than policing. They are not merged here with the CCSO Drone Team, which the Sheriff’s Office documents separately on its own site.

How much of this county we have read

The 148 documents the Board of Commissioners published for 2023, 2024 and 2025, all of them machine-readable. The county’s 2026 archive returned nothing on the day we looked, so this record stops at the end of 2025 while the Sheriff’s Office is posting news into August 2026.

In those 148 documents there is no facial recognition, no gunshot detection and no camera registry.

What this record does not cover

Anything the board did in 2026, whose year archive returned no documents. Wenatchee’s police, who shut their own Flock cameras off after a public-records ruling and hold older plate reader and body camera rows in the Atlas, are a city agency, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 31 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.