Fremont County Sheriff | The courthouse and jail cameras

Cameras in a courthouse are the least controversial surveillance a county owns. People come to a courthouse to pay taxes, get married and answer charges, and a camera in the entryway is a normal thing to find. What makes Fremont County’s worth reading is not the cameras. It is the paperwork.

Bought in the open

The jail cameras came first. In September 2004 the Sheriff laid three quotes in front of the commissioners, at $17,134.05, $19,193.75 and $14,995.00, and the Board took the lowest of the three.^[1]

The courthouse took longer. A vendor pitched a phased plan in 2007, telling the Board it would be cheaper to do the security and the cameras in increments over five years, and the commissioners talked about sixteen cameras, three of them outside, being enough for the building.^[8] The proposal that came back in 2008 put cameras in hallways and entryways and none in the offices.^[2]

By 2010 the price for the cameras was $18,500, and the vendor recommended fixed cameras rather than pan-tilt-zoom ones to avoid blank times, which is the sort of detail a county only hears if somebody is explaining the trade-off.^[3] The same minutes record where the pictures would go: the feed would go to the sheriff, while the equipment would sit in the IT room.

In August 2010 the Board approved the bids, at $17,400 and $2,300, after deciding that the prosecutor’s office should get better locks rather than a camera.^[4] Three months later the commissioners were still asking where the monitors had ended up, having been under the impression they would be stationed at the sheriff’s office.^[5]

That is a county doing this properly: quotes, a discussion of what the cameras can and cannot see, a decision about where not to put one, and a question about who ends up watching.

The rule that was rewritten

Then came the recordings.

In April 2016 the county’s IT administrator asked the commissioners a practical question: what should her department do if somebody walks in and asks to see the video? The commissioners said a public records request would have to be submitted. The Deputy Prosecuting Attorney said he did not believe video is a public record. It was also stated that law enforcement should have access.^[7]

Seven months later the same attorney brought the Board a resolution laying out the procedure for obtaining footage when a county employee or someone from law enforcement requested it.

The Sheriff objected. He said a full-time bailiff would be stationed in the courthouse, that he did not want his officers or the bailiff having to go through the process for requesting footage, and that he believed law enforcement should have access to video footage whenever they needed it. The minutes record the outcome in one sentence: the attorney was going to rewrite the resolution so it excluded the bailiff and the Sheriff’s Department officers.^[6]

We searched the Board’s minutes from that day to 8 September 2026 and could not find the resolution again. No adoption, no resolution number, no further discussion. Every later use of the word footage in the county’s record is square footage in a property assessment.

So the position, as the written record leaves it, is this. The county’s cameras record the people who come into its courthouse. The county’s own lawyer did not think those recordings were a public record. The rule he wrote for who may watch them was sent back to be narrowed, and never came back.