Lewis County

Lewis County’s one documented Sheriff’s technology is an aircraft bought for mapping. In December 2020 the county spent $78,564 on a package of a heat-sensing drone, over $30,000 of the total, and a Trimble 3D laser scanner, for mapping major outdoor crime scenes and finding people, lost hikers and suspects alike, by heat signature. The purchase was championed by the county’s chief deputy prosecutor, per the local paper, and the drone replaced an earlier model, so the program predates it. The current fleet and its policy are not in anything the county publishes, and the records request asks.

Beyond that aircraft, the county’s own record is quiet, and we have now tested it rather than assuming it. Lewis County’s commissioners publish every resolution they pass, by number, with a line saying what it does. We read 441 of those documents, eighteen months of them, from March 2025 to September 2026.

The word “camera” appears in none of them. Neither does Axon, Flock, plate reader, drone, or facial recognition.

That is worth stating carefully. It is eighteen months of one board’s record, not the county’s whole history, and the heat-sensing drone above was bought in December 2020, well before this window opens. Twenty-two of the 463 documents we fetched have no text layer. What it does mean is that across a year and a half in which this board approved hundreds of resolutions, none of them bought surveillance equipment or renewed a contract for any.

Whether the Sheriff’s deputies wear body cameras is still a records question. The office is mentioned in 25 of those 441 documents and never in connection with equipment.

The plate readers in Lewis County belong to the cities and the tribe: Centralia’s police run 20 Flock cameras, whose chief has publicly worried that rising jail costs threaten them, the Chehalis Tribe’s police leased 15, and Napavine bought three. All are separate agencies, never merged into county counts.

What this record does not cover

Anything the board did before March 2025, which its own sitemap does not list. Everything the cities and the Chehalis Tribe operate.

Community contributors have mapped 46 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.