Whitman County

Whitman County’s plate readers lasted fourteen months and were switched off by the sheriff who bought them. Three Flock cameras went up around Colfax in June 2025, paid for with leftover grant money from the county’s emergency management department on a two-year, $25,000 contract. In August 2026, after residents raised concerns about warrantless mass surveillance and the potential misuse of the data, Sheriff Brett Myers, twenty-four years in the office, disabled them. His reasoning, given to the Spokesman-Review, needed no statute and no court ruling: “Look, I value my privacy. I value those things.” And: “If this is causing a major disruption right now in our community, there’s just no reason to go forward with it.” His summary of the technology itself is the plainest sentence any sheriff has given this subject: “I’ve never needed this technology in 30 years of law enforcement.”

The program never touched the board’s record. In 291 readable board documents across our window, no camera item appears, which is consistent with a system bought from grant remainders and retired by the office that bought it. The Atlas of Surveillance never recorded it either; it came and went faster than the datasets that track these systems. The records request asks for the contract, the camera locations, the fate of fourteen months of collected plate reads, and whether disabled means removed.

What this record does not cover

Sixty-seven scanned-image minutes in the window. Pullman’s police and Washington State University’s police, both separate agencies, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 5 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.