Pierce County

On the morning of 31 March 2026, the day after Washington’s plate reader statute took effect, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office deactivated its automated license plate readers: roughly two hundred Axon dashboard cameras on most deputies’ patrol cars, by the Seattle Times’ reporting. The office said it could not ensure mobile readers would avoid collecting data near the places the new law puts off limits, schools, courts, food banks, places of worship, and facilities handling immigration matters or protected health care. Its spokesperson put it this way: “the way the law is written, we don’t have the technology to just turn them off and on every time we’re driving through a school zone or by a hospital.”

That is the second plate reader program in this site’s coverage to end in 2026, and the two endings differ in kind. Josephine County, Oregon’s sheriff ended a contract citing a community that was not willing to accept the technology. Pierce County’s sheriff, reported as a vocal opponent of the statute, shut readers off because the equipment could not comply with it. One program ended by consent, one by operation of law, and both records are now on this site.

What this page cannot draw on is the county’s own website. piercecountywa.gov answers our requests with a refusal, and the county’s code publisher closes itself to crawlers, so the Sheriff’s pages, the county’s drone program pages, its body-worn camera page, and the code chapter titled “Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance” that the code publisher’s index advertises are all unread here. We honor both refusals. The council’s own legislation application is open, and we used it to check two leads the search engines offered for that chapter’s origin; neither survived the fetch, which is why this page names the chapter’s title and nothing else about it. The records requests, drafted, ask for the chapter, the drone program’s use-case rules, the body camera policy, and the shutdown’s paper trail.

Two records from state-level sources do reach this county. The office’s use-of-force filing on the Attorney General’s portal shows its policy manual is Lexipol’s format. And the EFF Atlas carries a face recognition row, vendor Idemia, dated to 2008 at roughly $6,500 a year, under an agency name, “Pierce County Police Department”, that does not exist as written; it likely means the Sheriff’s Office, and it stays a lead. Washington has regulated government facial recognition since 2021, which makes the question of whether that software still runs, and under what accountability report, a precise one for the records request.

What this county does not cover

The cities, which hold most of this county’s Atlas rows: Tacoma (plate readers since 2013, a cell-site simulator acquired in 2008, and predictive policing software), Lakewood, Buckley and DuPont.

Community contributors have mapped 294 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.