Grant County

Grant County’s plate readers entered the record through a legal notice. In August 2024 the county advertised a public hearing on a $59,000 budget extension “for the INET purchase of Flock Cameras and the receival of the Washington Auto Theft Prevention Authority (WATPA) Reimbursement Grant”, heard 27 August 2024 in the commissioners’ hearing room in Ephrata. A state auto-theft grant reimbursed the purchase, and the line item routes it through INET, the regional narcotics task force. Local reporting in 2026 describes the Sheriff’s Flock readers producing arrests and recoveries, and notes the new state law forced the city of Moses Lake to deactivate some of its own cameras; whether the Sheriff’s system changed under the same law is not in anything we could read, and the records request asks.

The rest of the Sheriff’s inventory rests on the Atlas of Surveillance: Axon body cameras, and two DJI drones as of 2016. We found no county document for either.

This is a county whose paper record resists reading. The commissioners publish their agendas as cover sheets that name no items, and their minutes as scanned images with no text layer, so we read 86 documents from two and a half years of board meetings and learned almost nothing from them. The absence of surveillance items in that record is a fact about the record’s format, not about the county, and the first records request asks for the minutes in their native electronic form.

What this record does not cover

The board’s substantive record, as above. The cities: Moses Lake’s police run about 20 Flock cameras plus a camera registry, and its school district has Flock rows of its own; Warden, Mattawa, and Royal City carry Atlas rows too. All municipal, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 28 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.