Jefferson County

The last time Jefferson County’s record spoke about body cameras, the Sheriff’s Office didn’t have them. At a May 2021 joint meeting on policing, Sheriff Joe Nole told the public that cost kept his deputies without cameras while Port Townsend’s police had worn them since 2019, and the county commissioners voiced interest in budgeting for them. Eight months later the state’s recording mandates took effect, the law that pushed most Washington sheriffs into cameras within two years. Whether Jefferson followed is still open: no Atlas of Surveillance row exists for any agency in the county, and no press we found revisits the question. In August 2026 we began reading the commissioners’ record from the county’s Laserfiche system, served, as it happens, from a subdomain named “test”. The board minutes read so far, from 2021 into 2022, do not mention a camera purchase, and most of the window is still queued for later sweeps. The bodycam question leads the records request.

Beyond that open question, the county’s readable record holds no surveillance technology at all: no plate readers, no drones, no cameras, on the county pages we read, in the board minutes read so far, or anywhere in the Atlas. That is a claim about the documents read, not about the county, and the records request asks for the full inventory.

What this record does not cover

Most of the board’s Laserfiche record: the first sweep reads the minutes and agendas from 2021 into 2022, and the rest of the 2021-to-present window is queued. Port Townsend’s police, whose 2019 cameras are the city’s, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 10 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.