Whitman County Sheriff | Flock Safety license plate readers
Three cameras on grant leftovers, fourteen months of service, and a sheriff who switched them off because his community objected and he had never needed them.
At a glance
- The system
- Three cameras in the Colfax area, installed June 2025; a two-year contract valued at $25,000, paid with leftover grant money from the county Emergency Management Department [1]
- The end
- August 2026: Sheriff Brett Myers disables the cameras after residents raise warrantless-surveillance, privacy, and data-misuse concerns [1]
- The sheriff, on privacy
- "Look, I value my privacy. I value those things." And on the disruption: "If this is causing a major disruption right now in our community, there's just no reason to go forward with it." [1]
- The sheriff, on the technology
- "I've never needed this technology in 30 years of law enforcement" [1]
How it happened
- Deployment
Three cameras on grant leftovers
The cameras go up around Colfax, funded from the Emergency Management Department's remaining grant money on a two-year, $25,000 contract. [1]
- Decision
Disabled at the sheriff's direction
After citizen concerns, Sheriff Myers directs the cameras disabled. A supporter's counterpoint in the same reporting: "Don't break the law and you're fine." [1]
Switched off by its own buyer
Of the six county plate reader endings in this site’s Washington coverage, Whitman’s is the only one driven neither by a statute nor by a court ruling but by the community’s objection and the sheriff’s own judgment. The program also never generated a paper trail: it was bought from grant remainders without a board item we could find, ran fourteen months, and ended before the Atlas of Surveillance recorded its existence. A surveillance system can now come and go in a county without the record ever catching it while it runs, which is an argument for reading procurement leftovers as closely as procurements.
What we do not know
- The contract's remaining term and cost, and whether disabled means removed.
- The disposition of fourteen months of collected plate data.
- The Emergency Management grant whose leftovers funded the purchase.
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 Whitman County.
What we have documented in Whitman 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.
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