Whatcom County

In Whatcom County the cost of the body camera program shows up in three budgets. The Sheriff’s Office records the video: a January 2026 contract amendment with Axon replaced 90 cameras and 12 docking stations and added three years of cloud storage for $236,734. The Prosecuting Attorney’s Office reviews it: a five-year, $302,588 Axon Justice Premier subscription for 41 users, approved in December 2025 after Axon had provided the office a complimentary version of the software for roughly four years, by the office’s own memo. And the Public Defender’s Office buys access to the evidence against its clients: a five-year, $229,668 Axon subscription, approved in March 2025, because the volume of body camera video is too large for the county network and downloading it to DVDs consumed the office’s time. One vendor holds the recording, the prosecution’s access, and the defense’s access.

The Sheriff’s drones come from the same company. In August 2024 the county awarded Axon a bid for two Skydio X10 drones with software and training, $57,484, for high-risk operations, search and rescue, and technical investigations, per the Sheriff’s memo to the council. The office publishes its own drone policy, in its house directives format, requiring command authorization for deployments; the published PDF’s effective-date field is blank.

The office publishes its policy index in the open: body camera policy, drone policy, a jail full-body-scanner policy, and no license plate reader policy. In the two and a half years of council records we read, no plate reader, Flock, or facial recognition item appears. Both absences are scoped to what we could read, seven of the 540 council documents in our window are listed by the county’s system but return errors, and Washington’s 2026 plate reader law will require any operating agency to publish a policy by December 2027.

Since 2023 the Sheriff’s Office of Professional Standards has published quarterly data on use of force, vehicle pursuits, traffic stops, and complaints.

What this record does not cover

Council records before 2024. The county code, whose two hosting services refuse automated readers. The cities, Bellingham first among them, and the Nooksack and Lummi tribal police, which are separate agencies with their own Atlas rows.

Community contributors have mapped 16 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.