Lincoln County

Lincoln County, ten thousand people in the wheat country west of Spokane, has bought more surveillance than any county its size on this site, and nearly all of it with Homeland Security money. The board’s minutes carry the sequence: a 2024 state homeland security grant, passed through Spokane County’s emergency management, put four body cameras with storage and redaction software in the jail. A federal emergency management grant the same summer bought video surveillance for the public safety building’s lobbies, server hallways, evidence rooms, and the courthouse’s common areas and courtrooms. And in November 2024 the commissioners unanimously signed a Homeland Security grant agreement for an automated license plate recognition system, whose vendor, locations, and current status appear nowhere in the readable record. A plate reader network funded through counterterrorism grant streams in a county of ten thousand is the finding; what got built is the records request.

The patrol deputies’ cameras surface obliquely: a February 2026 surplus resolution retired seventeen Axon body cameras “traded per the contract with AXON for updated equipment”, which is how a reader learns the office has an active Axon contract with a refresh cycle. None of these systems, not the jail cameras, the courthouse cameras, the ALPR agreement, or the Axon fleet, appears in the Atlas of Surveillance.

The record’s lighter note: a motorcycle club asked the commissioners in March 2026 to ban drones flown from county roads during its desert race, civilian drone rules arriving by way of event organizers.

What this record does not cover

Thirty-two unreadable documents in the window. Davenport’s police, municipal.

Community contributors have mapped 7 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.