Yakima County

Yakima County’s plate reader network was assembled in one summer, sole-sourced, and paid for with other people’s money. In July 2024 a commissioner’s allocation of federal pandemic recovery funds added eight Flock Safety cameras to the Sheriff’s budget. In August the board advertised its intent to buy from Flock without competition. In September it awarded the sole-source purchase and signed two agreements the same day: eleven camera systems funded by a state auto-theft grant, and eight funded by the pandemic-recovery grant. In November it advertised another sole-source purchase. No general-fund dollar appears in any of the fiscal impact lines.

When Washington’s 2026 plate reader law arrived, the Sheriff’s Office kept its cameras and published the paperwork. Policy 426, revised in July 2026, tracks the statute clause by clause: a 21-day retention default, bans on immigration enforcement and out-of-state reproductive-health investigations, no collection at schools, clinics, churches, courts, or food banks, annual audits, and no sale of data. The office runs its own transparency pages and links a Flock-hosted portal. Among the Washington counties on this site, Yakima sits with Snohomish in the kept-and-papered column, opposite Pierce and Spokane, which switched their cameras off. And it is not merely keeping: a week after the statute took effect, local reporting described a plan for roughly 300 more cameras across the county, cities included, bought with pandemic-recovery money. No agreement for that expansion appears in the board record we read.

The body cameras came earlier. Deputies began wearing Axon cameras in August 2022, 60 of 70 ordered, paid from a million dollars in state money earmarked for compliance with the legislature’s recorded-interrogation mandates. The board record carries the maintenance tail: a $47,250 Axon equipment agreement and a contract extension in August 2024, and a $27,810 “TAP refresh” of the camera fleet that October. We found no published body camera policy on the county site.

The Sheriff’s Office also flies drones. A deputy gave the board a twenty-minute drone presentation in February 2025, which is how the record documents the program’s existence; no procurement or policy appears in the two and a half years of board records we read.

What this record does not cover

Board records before 2024. Twenty-nine of the 1,251 documents in our window could not be read, so absences are claims about the readable rest. The county code was not swept. The cities run their own systems, Yakima, Selah, Zillah, Grandview, Sunnyside, Moxee, Mabton, and Toppenish all carry Flock or camera rows in the Atlas, and the Yakama Nation’s police are a separate sovereign jurisdiction, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 427 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.