Clark County

Clark County’s camera program went through the electorate. The 2022 voter-approved public safety sales tax funded it, and on 20 June 2023 the County Council authorized, in a unanimous vote, a five-year contract with Axon for body-worn cameras, vehicle cameras, and Tasers. Deployment began that fall, and by early 2024 every patrol and specialty unit wore one, with cameras in the permanently assigned patrol vehicles by spring. Of the Washington counties on this site so far, this is the one whose surveillance spending most clearly traces to a public vote.

The drone unit documents itself with unusual candor. The Sheriff’s 2023 annual report, published on the county site, gives the year in numbers: more than 221 flight hours across 830 flights, support for nearly all 87 regional SWAT missions, patrol and traffic and search-and-rescue deployments, a DJI fleet with four new M30s added, and Axon Air licenses folding footage from seven platforms and 21 operators into the same evidence system as the body cameras. Then the unit assesses its own paperwork: “The UAS policy, unchanged since 2017, needs updating.” An agency telling the public its drone policy is stale is rarer than the staleness, and the records request asks whether the update happened.

The same report shows the Special Investigations Unit employing “GPS trackers and surveillance cameras” with federal drug-enforcement funding, and it shows what the record does not contain: no mention of automated license plate readers or facial recognition anywhere in the documents we read, which were the annual report, the body camera program page, and the Sheriff’s site pages. The council’s own meeting archive, self-hosted PDFs with no agenda platform, is not swept in this pass, so that absence is scoped to the agency’s own publications.

The office also publishes its practice of releasing body camera video after deadly use-of-force incidents, at the Sheriff’s discretion and separate from the independent investigations, with five such releases listed for 2024 and 2025.

What this county does not cover

The cities, Vancouver first among them, whose police department is a city agency. The county code, hosted by an outside publisher, is unswept.

Community contributors have mapped 157 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.