Spokane County

Spokane County built its surveillance stack fast and on unusual money, and the record shows both halves: the assembly, item by item in the Board’s 2023 packets, and the disassembly, announced by the Sheriff two days after the state’s plate reader statute took effect.

The assembly first. In March 2023 the Board waived competitive bidding, RCW chapter 36.32’s default, and awarded Flock Safety an estimated $205,750 sole-source contract for the Sheriff’s plate readers; the declaration’s stated reason was that Flock alone integrates with systems the county had already bought, and no bids had arrived on the county’s procurement site. In May 2023 the Board appropriated $3,997,000 of federal American Rescue Plan money for the Sheriff’s Real Time Crime Center, alongside a $110,000 consultant contract to design it. The same May packet bought BriefCam video analytics for the Sheriff, $148,484, through the City of Seattle’s contract with a reseller, another path that involves no county competition. A pandemic recovery fund and two procurement shortcuts assembled a real-time surveillance center in a single spring, every step lawful and on the record, and almost none of it arriving as an item a resident would recognize as a surveillance decision.

Then the statute. On 1 April 2026, two days after RCW 10.130 took effect, the Sheriff’s Office disabled its readers: 70 fixed cameras, 18 on vehicles, and a handful on radar trailers, by the Spokesman-Review’s count. Sheriff John Nowels: “These imposed restrictions have made it nearly impossible for law enforcement agencies across the State of Washington to continue using ALPR systems as currently designed and implemented, and that is unacceptable.” The county called the shutdown temporary in its own announcement, which has since rotated off the county site; the Sheriff indicated the vehicle-mounted readers likely will not return. The Real Time Crime Center the cameras fed was not announced as closed.

The camera count itself tells a growth story the record supports at each point: 39 cameras in the April 2024 dataset snapshot, more than 60 by an independent count in 2025, and nearly a hundred at shutdown. The count roughly two-and-a-half-folded in two years, and we could not find an intervening board item describing the expansion as such.

What this county does not cover

The cities, above all Spokane, whose police department has its own Axon body cameras, gunshot detection grant, and drones in the dataset rows. The Spokane Regional Emergency Communications agency, whose 2023 planning materials note its dispatchers’ use of the Flock system, is a regional body outside the county model.

Community contributors have mapped 220 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.