King County

King County’s record runs in both directions: a legislature that banned a surveillance technology, and a sheriff’s office that publishes a log of every drone flight it makes.

In June 2021 the Metropolitan King County Council enacted Ordinance 19296, now chapter 2.67 of the county code: county administrative offices and executive departments may not acquire, retain, access, or use facial recognition technology or information. The carve-outs are narrow, and an employee who receives facial recognition information inadvertently has seven days to log it with a supervisor and must delete it. Washington’s state law regulates government facial recognition; King County’s own code prohibits it for county departments.

The Sheriff’s Air Support Unit publishes an annual report of its small uncrewed aircraft operations, and the 2024 edition is a machine-readable table of 1,072 flights, each with a date and time, an incident number, takeoff coordinates, air time, the aircraft’s name and type, and its maximum altitude. The fleet in the log is DJI, from pool aircraft at SeaTac to unit-assigned airframes, and the log records assists to Seattle police SWAT and to Skagit County. No Washington statute requires any of this paper to exist. It exists because the agency publishes it.

The body camera program has both halves on the record: the council’s ordinance (2023-0366, enacted that December as Ordinance 19718) and the Sheriff’s policy, which governs department-issued Axon body-worn and in-car cameras, requires deputies issued a camera to wear it on duty, and has a review team audit twenty-five randomly selected recordings each quarter.

Plate readers are the unresolved part of the record. The Sheriff’s manual carries a June 2026 ALPR policy written clause by clause to the state’s new statute: a 21-day retention cap, prohibited uses led by immigration enforcement, registration with the Attorney General by late September 2026, and the annual public report with camera locations that the law requires beginning December 2027. What we could not find, in the 1,486 documents we read, is any record of a deployment: no council item, no contract, no agency page. A dataset row saying the Sheriff uses Flock cameras exists, and its only source is another city’s meeting document, so it stays a lead. This site does not treat a policy as evidence of a deployment. The statute’s own registration list, requestable from the Attorney General after the September deadline, will answer the question for every agency in the state at once, and our request is drafted.

A further 427 council documents did not download and five of the archive’s links are dead, so every absence claim above is scoped to the 1,486 documents we read.

What this county does not cover

Seattle, whose police department is a city agency holding most of this county’s Atlas rows, and every other city in the county. The Port of Seattle’s police, a special district with its own Flock row. The face recognition the Atlas records CBP operating at Sea-Tac, a federal deployment. The Washington State Fusion Center, sited in Seattle but a state body. Each is real, none is county government, and a county-keyed site records the boundary rather than blurring it.

Community contributors have mapped 2,396 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.