Kitsap County

The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office publishes its entire policy manual, 155 documents on a public portal, which makes what is missing from it checkable. There is a body camera policy, a drone policy, and a generative AI policy. There is no license plate reader policy. The EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance records the office as using plate readers since at least 2013, citing a newspaper article we could not read. Washington’s 2026 plate reader law requires agencies to register systems with the Attorney General before operating them and to publish a policy by December 2027, so if the office still runs plate readers, a policy will have to appear in that manual. The records request asks the simpler question first: does it still run them, and under what registration.

The body cameras arrived through the front door. Commissioners approved a five-year, $4.2 million contract with Axon on 4 December 2023, body cameras for every deputy and cameras in every patrol vehicle, deployed from early 2024. Policy 448 governs them under the state body camera statute, and it contains a clause worth reading twice: artificial intelligence may not be used to review or analyze camera footage outside the policy’s authorized cases. A separate policy, added to the manual in 2025, requires approval from an AI coordinator before generative AI is used for any office function.

The drone record is thinner. Policy 613 sets the program rules, warrant or exigency before recording anywhere with a reasonable expectation of privacy, and the Atlas records a single DJI Mavic as of 2018. A policy is not a deployment, and we could not confirm the current fleet from the county’s publications. In 2019 the county drafted a drone ordinance, but not about surveillance: it would restrict launching and landing near the county’s five Navy installations, at the Navy’s request. Whether it was adopted we could not confirm; the county’s code publisher refuses automated readers.

The county government watches its own buildings too. A personnel-manual appendix created in January 2024 governs security cameras at county facilities: continuous recording, posted signage, no cameras where privacy is reasonably expected, administered by the county’s IT department, footage available to law enforcement as authorized by law.

What this record does not cover

The Board of Commissioners’ meeting archive runs on a platform our pipeline cannot yet read, so board deliberations are not swept. The cities (Bremerton, Poulsbo, Port Orchard) and the Suquamish and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribal police are separate agencies with their own Atlas rows, never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 69 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.