Cowlitz County

What Cowlitz County publishes about its Sheriff’s body cameras is the bill. A board resolution set a redaction fee of 61 cents per minute for body camera footage requests, effective 1 January 2026, with a cost study beside it. The paper trail starts earlier: the board’s own 2023 resolution index lists Resolution 23-091, establishing body worn camera redaction fees, with the call for its hearing thirteen resolutions before it. The program behind the fee entered the record earlier through the courthouse: at a May 2023 commissioners’ workshop, the prosecuting attorney said of the cameras that “It provides a lot of good information, but for purposes of process, it creates a lot more work,” and asked for a new staff position to handle it, while the cities’ police departments went first and the Sheriff’s Office worked on its rollout, dash cameras included.

The vendor and the contract are in the board’s minutes. On 24 June 2025 the commissioners took up a contract extension with Motorola Solutions, running August 2027 through August 2030, for service on the Sheriff’s Office body cameras and vehicle cameras, “including video-as-a-service cloud”, at a total of $190,449. The Chief Criminal Deputy presented it. The camera count is still not in anything the county publishes, and the records request asks for it.

Two months later the same office told the board what else it owns. On 18 August 2025 the Undersheriff asked the commissioners to create a Technology Replacement Fund, because only portable radios and mobile data terminals had money set aside for scheduled replacement. The new fund would also cover “body cameras, tasers, drones, digital forensics tools, and GPS trackers”. That sentence is the closest thing the county publishes to an inventory of what its Sheriff’s Office operates.

The pattern repeats what Whatcom County’s record shows in more detail: a camera program’s costs do not stop at the camera. Here the visible traces are a prosecutor’s staffing request, a public defense office that expected nothing, and a per-minute fee schedule for anyone who wants to see the footage.

The drone record used to read as a single aircraft, a DJI Inspire bought for about $2,000 in early 2017, per contemporaneous local reporting and the Atlas of Surveillance. The board’s minutes carry it further. Drones are one of the categories in the 2025 replacement fund, and on 6 July 2026 the Sheriff’s Office applied for a share of about $34,500 in grant money for two drones and the rescue equipment that goes with them. The Undersheriff told the board the equipment would support search and rescue. Four agencies applied for that money, the fire districts among them.

On plate readers, the county’s record is a decision not to make one. Flock Safety sells cameras that photograph passing vehicles and log their plates. On 10 and 11 August 2026 the commissioners “discussed reviewing the use of Flock cameras and whether the county should establish a policy requiring broader discussion before these systems are implemented”. At the next week’s meeting, on 17 and 18 August, the minutes record that they “discussed Flock Cameras and agreed not to pursue a policy or take further action at this time”. The line recording what the board did reads “None”. Neither entry says whether any Flock camera operates in the county, or whose it would be, and the records request asks both.

The county does write rules for technology when it decides to. On 28 April 2026 the commissioners adopted Resolution 26-021, an artificial intelligence policy covering every county department, employee, volunteer, and contractor, requiring the IT department to approve an AI system before anyone uses it. It came with a workshop, two senior deputy prosecuting attorneys, the public records manager, and a citizen comment. Four months later the same board considered whether plate-reading cameras deserved the same treatment and decided they did not.

No facial recognition, cell site simulator, or real-time crime center item appears in the 383 board documents we have now read, or on the county pages. That is a claim about those documents. The board’s agendas live on Issuu, which we cannot read, the local paper’s archive sits behind a paid gateway, 106 board documents are scans awaiting OCR, 27 more could not be read at all, and our sweep of the Laserfiche record is still partial.

What this record does not cover

Part of the commissioners’ Laserfiche record, pending further sweeps, and the Issuu agenda stacks. How many body cameras the Sheriff’s Office runs, and whether the 2017 drone still flies. The cities: Longview’s police department bought Motorola body cameras in 2021, and Kelso and Kalama wear cameras too, all municipal, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 6 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.