Skagit County Sheriff | Body-worn cameras
Sixty-seven cameras on deputies by the state's January 2022 recording deadline, $540,000 over five years, a quarter of it federal grant money.
At a glance
- The deployment
- 67 cameras by 1 January 2022: one per deputy, plus five for corrections deputies who transport inmates to and from the Community Justice Center (Skagit Valley Herald) [1]
- The money
- About $540,000 over five years, approved by the county commissioners along with two staff positions for recordings and disclosure requests; a federal BJA body-camera grant of about $134,000 offset it [1] [2]
- Why
- House Bill 1223 (2021) required recording interviews with adult felony suspects and all juvenile interviews from the new year [1]
- The vendor
- Axon (the federal award record names 67 Axon 3 cameras; the Atlas concurs) [2]
How it happened
- Coverage
The program announced
Undersheriff Chad Clark, to the Skagit Valley Herald: "It protects both the deputies and the citizens." And of the state mandate: "Now, where it's being forced upon us, we have no choice." [1]
- Deployment
Cameras on by the deadline
Deployment timed to the state recording law's start. [1]
Bought for the mandate, kept for everything
The program’s cause is on the record twice over: the state’s 2021 recording law set the deadline, and the undersheriff said plainly that the office was acting because it had to. The cameras that satisfy an interview-recording mandate also record every stop and every call, and the commissioners’ funding decision included the two staff whose whole job is managing what the cameras produce.
The office’s own annual reports say almost nothing about the program beyond the records unit that indexes camera metadata, so the policy, the retention settings, and the current contract all sit in the records queue.
What we do not know
- The body-worn camera policy, which neither the county site nor the annual reports publish.
- The current contract status as the original five-year term runs toward its 2026 end.
What you can do
Show up
Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in Skagit County.
What we have documented in Skagit County →Protect yourself
Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.
Surveillance Self-Defense →Sources
- 1.
- 2. Bureau of Justice Assistance, Body-Worn Camera Program award 15PBJA-21-GG-04426-BWCX, Skagit County Sheriff's Office · Primary document · accessed
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