Stevens County Sheriff | Body cameras, and the price of watching them
Stevens County took federal money for body cameras in 2022 and set a fee for redacting the footage in 2023. The fee is the first hard number this project has for what a Washington county charges to release what a body camera recorded: $23 an hour.
At a glance
- What it costs to get the footage
- "Body Worn Video Redaction* $23 per hour", cited to RCW 42.56.240(14)(f) [1]
- How a request has to be made
- "Body Worn Video Records must be requested on the Body Worn Camera Records Request form provided by the Public Records Officer" [1]
- Where the cameras came from
- A $64,203 award in 2022 from the U.S. Department of Justice's body-worn camera policy and implementation program for small, rural and tribal agencies, enough for roughly 35 cameras [2]
- The vendor
- not established. No county document we could read names one, and this dossier does not guess [3]
- The RCW 10.109 policy
- none found. Washington requires a body camera policy; nothing in 331 readable documents is one, and the county's website refuses our reader directly [3]
- Retention
- not stated anywhere we could read. RCW 42.56.240(14) sets a 60-day floor and no county document names a ceiling [3]
- How long a redaction actually takes
- not published, which is what makes the hourly rate hard to read. An hour of footage does not take an hour to redact and nobody says how long it does take [1]
How it happened
- Procurement
Federal money buys the cameras
The Sheriff's Office receives $64,203 through the Bureau of Justice Assistance body-worn camera program for small, rural and tribal law enforcement agencies, an amount that covers roughly 35 cameras for an office of this size. [2]
- Decision
The county prices the redaction
The Board of County Commissioners adopts Resolution 109-2023, establishing a new public records fee schedule. Among photocopy, scanning and postage rates sits a line for body worn video redaction at $23 per hour, cited to RCW 42.56.240(14)(f), with a note that such records must be requested on a specific form supplied by the Public Records Officer. [1]
A price is a policy
Washington decided in 2021 that the public may have body camera footage, and left the cost of getting it to the counties. RCW 42.56.240(14)(f) lets an agency charge for the staff time spent redacting a recording before release. What that costs is a local decision, and most counties make it quietly, in a fee schedule attached to a resolution nobody reads.
Stevens County made it in October 2023, in Resolution 109-2023, between the photocopy rate and the postage rate:
“Body Worn Video Redaction* $23 per hour RCW 42.56.240(14)(f)”
The asterisk leads to a second sentence:
“*Body Worn Video Records must be requested on the Body Worn Camera Records Request form provided by the Public Records Officer.”
What that line establishes
It establishes, first, that this office has body cameras. Stevens County’s website refuses this project’s reader, so until now everything about its equipment was inference from a federal grant record: $64,203 from the Department of Justice in 2022, enough for about 35 cameras. A county does not price the redaction of video it does not record.
It establishes, second, a number, and numbers travel. Chelan County adopted redaction fees in December 2024; Cowlitz adopted a schedule effective January 2026; Adams was still asking in March 2026 what other jurisdictions charge. Stevens is the first Washington county where this project can read the actual figure.
What it does not establish
Nothing here is improper and the charge is expressly allowed. The county is doing what the statute contemplates.
What no document says is how long the work takes. An hour of recorded footage does not take an hour to redact, and it may take longer. Without that, $23 an hour is a rate rather than a price, and the person who has to decide whether to ask for the video cannot know what asking will cost them until after they have asked.
That is the question in this county’s records queue, and it is the question worth asking of every county with a schedule like this one.
How this page was read
Every document behind it came from the Internet Archive. Stevens County’s own website answers this project with a refusal, and the same refusal, byte for byte, now comes from three unrelated Washington county sites, two of them from a shared load balancer rather than from anything a county configured. So the refusal is almost certainly not a decision anyone in Stevens County made, and the records themselves are public.
What that costs in accuracy is worth stating: the archive holds what it happened to capture, not what the county published. Absences on this page are weaker than absences elsewhere on this site.
What we do not know
- How long redacting an hour of body camera footage actually takes in this office, which is what turns an hourly rate into a price.
- What the camera vendor is, and what the RCW 10.109 policy says about activation, retention and release.
- How many body camera records requests this county has received since October 2023, and what the average bill was.
- Whether the 35 cameras the federal award covers are all deployed.
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 Stevens County.
What we have documented in Stevens 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
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