Franklin County

Franklin County’s Sheriff bought its cameras the same January its neighbors did, and for the same reason. Washington’s recording law took effect in January 2022, and the office signed a multi-year contract with Axon, body cameras, dash cameras, and Tasers together, between $1.3 and $1.5 million over five years. Supply delays held the dash cameras back, and Sheriff Jim Raymond told the Tri-City Herald he had “no desire to piecemeal the process,” so the whole package rolled out together in March 2022. The cameras activate on emergency responses, when a weapon is drawn, and when any other officer’s camera activates at the same scene, per the same report.

The drone record is one aircraft: a DJI Matrice 210 as of 2019, in the Atlas of Surveillance. We found no county document on it.

Like its neighbors up the Columbia, this county’s paper record resists reading, and in more ways than most. Of the 120 board documents in our two-and-a-half-year window, the minutes are scanned images with no text layer, most agendas are Word files in a 1997 format, and the county’s server timed out on ten more. The 75 documents we could read produced exactly two keyword matches: a storage building described as unmanned, and flocks of flies in a dairy-permit comment. We make no claims from that record, and the first records request asks for the minutes and agendas in readable formats.

What this record does not cover

The board’s substantive record, as above, and everything before 2024. Pasco, the county seat, runs its own police department with Flock plate readers and a body camera program dating to a 2016 pilot, municipal and 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.