Snohomish County

Three Washington sheriffs ran Flock plate readers when the state’s ALPR statute took effect on 30 March 2026. Pierce County’s shut its readers off the next morning. Spokane County’s disabled nearly a hundred cameras two days later. Snohomish County’s kept flying: the Sheriff’s Office published a fresh ALPR policy on 4 August 2026, four months into the new law, and its own website still links the office’s Flock transparency portal. One statute, three counties, three records, and this is the county that adapted instead of going dark.

The contract is on the council’s record in full. Motion 25-007, a Master Services Agreement “for vehicle identification cameras with Flock Group, Inc.”, moved through the Community Safety and Justice Committee in mid-January 2025 and passed the General Legislative Session on 22 January, with a Flock community engagement manager in the room answering councilmembers’ questions, the minutes note. An amendment followed that April. What the record does not carry is a camera count or locations: the office’s transparency portal sits behind a bot challenge we do not cross, the policy carries no inventory, and the statute’s registration list at the Attorney General, due by late September 2026, is the clean answer our drafted request targets.

The August 2026 policy itself reads like the statute: queries limited to stolen vehicles, missing or endangered persons, and felony or gross-misdemeanor matters; a hit alone is not reasonable suspicion for a stop; sharing only with other Washington agencies authorized to collect plate data, each release documented; annual audits. Its retention clause defers to a separate ALPR standard operating procedure the office does not publish, so whether practice meets the statute’s 21-day cap is a records request away.

The rest of the Sheriff’s stack is published too. The full Law Enforcement Policy Manual is on the county’s site, and its Policy 706 states the program plainly: “The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) uses body cameras to contemporaneously and objectively document citizen contacts.” The policy names no vendor; the council record holds a Master Services and Purchasing Agreement with Axon Enterprise amended twice in 2024 and 2025 without stating what it covers, so the pairing stays a question for the records request. Policy 612 and a standalone operating procedure govern a small unmanned aerial system program with a Sheriff-appointed coordinator; the state aviation dataset dates the office’s drone use to 2019.

The county’s buildings are in the record as well: a $665,919 surveillance camera bid award to Far West Technologies in June 2023, department unnamed in the motion, and a jail camera and intercom replacement funded that July.

What this county does not cover

The cities, which hold most of this county’s Atlas rows: Everett, Lynnwood, Edmonds, Marysville, Lake Stevens, Arlington, Monroe, Mukilteo, Stanwood and Mill Creek. The Stillaguamish and Tulalip tribal police departments are their own jurisdictions, recorded on this page’s dataset as the Atlas files them.

Community contributors have mapped 387 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.