Stevens County

Stevens County’s website is unread, so this page is built from somewhere else. The Internet Archive holds 372 of this county’s published documents dated 2023 or later, mostly the Board of Commissioners’ numbered resolutions, and we read 331 of them there. No request in that reading touched the county’s own website.

What an hour of body camera footage costs here

In October 2023 the commissioners adopted a new public records fee schedule, Resolution 109-2023, and printed it in the resolution. Among the photocopy and postage rates is this line:

Body Worn Video Redaction* $23 per hour RCW 42.56.240(14)(f)

The asterisk is explained directly underneath:

*Body Worn Video Records must be requested on the Body Worn Camera Records Request form provided by the Public Records Officer.

Two things follow from one line. The first is that this office has body cameras, which the county’s own website has never been readable enough to confirm. It fits what we already knew from outside: in 2022 the Sheriff’s Office took $64,203 from the U.S. Department of Justice’s body-worn camera program for small, rural and tribal agencies, enough for about 35 cameras.

The second is the number itself. Three other Washington counties on this site have decided what to charge for redacting body camera footage, and Stevens is the first where we can read the price. Twenty-three dollars an hour of staff time, and the request has to go on a particular form.

State law allows that charge. RCW 42.56.240(14)(f) is written into the schedule beside it. What the figure decides is something the statute does not: whether an ordinary person in this county ever sees the video. Redacting an hour of footage does not take an hour, and nobody publishes how long it does take, which is the next question and the one in our records queue.

The cameras the county has run since 2011

Three of the county’s capital facilities plans carry the same retrospective inventory of what was built and when. One line records:

2012 - Video surveillance equipment for courthouse and jail security completed in 2011 and extended video coverage.

A later table names the platform:

The Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSOM) system was updated for the courthouse (including courts), NEW ACS (including new E&T facility), IS, and Public Works.

and, separately, digital video cameras replaced and added at Martin Hall, the juvenile detention facility Stevens runs jointly with eight other jurisdictions.

That is a named camera platform across a courthouse, its courts, a jail, an information services building, public works and a juvenile detention center, running for more than a decade. In the 331 documents we read there is no retention period for any of it, no access rule, and no policy.

What we could not read, and why the absence here is weak

In those 331 documents there is no plate reader, no facial recognition, no gunshot detection and no camera registry. Discount that twice. Forty-one documents in the same set could not be read at all. And the window is the archive’s rather than the county’s: this is what the Wayback Machine happened to capture, not what Stevens County published. A resolution nobody archived is invisible to us, and we cannot know how many of those there are.

The one Flock in this county’s record is a sheep. It appears in the Fair Book, in the class list for breeding sheep.

What this record does not cover

Whatever the county published that nobody archived, and everything before 2023. The board’s meeting documents sit on a content platform we have not indexed, and the county’s website is unread.

Community contributors have mapped 3 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.