Skagit County Sheriff | Axon's evidence platform, on both sides of the case

One company, three county offices

Skagit County buys its body cameras from Axon Enterprise. In December 2024 it bought 66 Officer Safety Plan bundles, cameras and tasers together, at not more than $1,142,449.09 over five years, and in the same meeting another 20 body worn cameras at not more than $139,849.80. Both purchases ran on Washington State Contract No. #05720.

A week later it put the prosecutors on the same company’s software:

“Agreement with Axon Enterprise, Inc. to provide Axon Evidence Justice Services software subscription services for fifty (50) licenses with unlimited storage to include API access for use by the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office with the Karpel Solutions Case Management System.”

Ten years, not to exceed $397,320. Two weeks before that, the board had waived the competitive bidding requirements of RCW 36.32.245 to authorise the purchase of Axon Evidence Services.

In October 2025 the prosecutors’ subscription was joined by a second one, 31 licences at not more than $670,000. Three weeks after that, the Public Defender’s Office was authorised to buy 39 licences to Axon Justice Premier Cloud.

Why that arrangement is worth naming

Nobody in this story did anything improper. Public defenders need access to the evidence, and giving them a licence to the platform it sits on is the practical way to do that. A county that did not buy those licences would be a county whose defenders had a harder time getting the footage.

The observation is structural. A single company now sells this county the cameras that record the evidence, the cloud that stores it, the software the prosecution works it in, and the software the defence answers it in. The decisions that produced that were made one consent item at a time, across eleven months, in four meetings, and no document in the county’s record considers them together.

That is not a Skagit County peculiarity. It is what buying from a platform looks like when the platform grows and the purchases stay routine.

The state contract underneath it

Both December 2024 camera agreements name Washington State Contract No. #05720. That is the same instrument Benton County used in July 2026 to buy 19 Axon plate readers to replace the Flock system it had terminated.

A state master contract is doing the work a county competitive process would otherwise do, in at least two Washington counties, for two different technologies. It is worth asking of every county on this site: what did you buy on #05720, and did your board ever compare it to anything.

What the county has not said

How the two offices are kept apart inside a shared platform. What “unlimited storage” means for how long footage exists. What justification the bidding waiver recorded.

Washington sets a floor and not a ceiling: RCW 42.56.240(14) requires body camera recordings to be kept at least 60 days. Nothing in this county’s record says what happens after that.