Starting in September, game wardens in Washington state will be required to wear body cameras while on duty. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announced the new program on Monday, saying the introduction of body cameras is intended to strengthen accountability, increase transparency and improve public safety.
“It’s really about getting an unbiased witness to the events,” says Steve Bear, WDFW’s law enforcement director. Outdoor living“Gamekeepers often work alone in areas where there are no witnesses, and this simply creates clarity in the situation.”
While the program is new for WDFW, it is far from the first of its kind. Several state fish and game agencies already require or allow their game wardens to wear body cameras. This is part of a larger trend among law enforcement agencies across the country. A 2022 report from the National Institute for Justice found that about half (47 percent) of all police departments and most large police departments (80 percent) in the U.S. are now required to use the devices.
Bear says WDFW’s new bodycam program is part of a broader law that affects all law enforcement officers in the state — not just game wardens — and in many cases requires them to record their interactions with the public. But he says WDFW game wardens had been asking for bodycams even before the new law was passed.
“I think it has a lot to do with the general feeling that a lot of people don’t trust law enforcement. And they want people to see what they’re actually doing.”
Under the new program, which takes effect Sept. 1, Bear said all 152 game wardens in the state will be required to record any interaction they have with a member of the public, such as during a wildlife stop. They can do this by simply pressing a button on the camera. Bear says the cameras will also automatically start recording when an officer draws their Taser or pistol.
“We have the cameras here in the office and they will be trained over the next few days,” Bear says. “We should be ready to use them next week.”
Game wardens need body cameras just as badly as a regular police officer, if not more, Bear says. In addition to spending more time in remote areas with few witnesses, game wardens regularly interact with people carrying firearms and often find themselves in dangerous situations. He says capturing video footage also strengthens evidence they can use to support investigations and protect Washingtonians’ shared natural resources.
“We’re here to serve the public. We want to be open about what we do,” Bear says. “And I think this is just another way to do that.”
Some hunters and anglers are already used to seeing this philosophy in practice. Officials with the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission have been using body cameras in some form for about a decade. A 2014 law gave full-time game wardens and water protection officers in Pennsylvania the authority to use body cameras, and a new bill in June seeks to extend that authority to deputies as well. Importantly, these laws do not impose regulations, but rather allow agencies to use body cameras at their discretion.
“She’s a neutral, objective witness to what happened. What statements were made, what actions were taken,” Jason Raup, deputy general counsel for the PGC, said in a recent interview, explaining that the benefits of body cameras go both ways. He said the use of cameras has allowed the PGC to “eliminate and reduce” the number of false complaints from the public.
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Over the past 10 years, at least nine state fisheries and game departments have implemented their own body cam programs. This period also coincides with the previously mentioned adoption of body cams by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Although some agencies were already experimenting with the technology, the New York Police Department was one of the first major departments to implement body cams in 2013, according to the Related PressOne of the triggers was a federal judge’s ruling that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy was unconstitutional. Many other police departments followed suit in 2014 after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a wave of public protests.
Game wardens in Georgia, for example, began wearing body cameras in 2020. Oklahoma and Arkansas followed suit in 2022, the same year the U.S. Department of the Interior required U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officers to wear body cameras. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency began equipping game wardens with body cameras earlier this year, and unlike in Washington, the TWRA’s program was created entirely by the agency itself, not by a legislative mandate.
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This is by no means an exhaustive list. Bear says neighboring agencies to the south and north — the Oregon State Police and Alaska Wildlife Troopers — already use body cameras. And there will likely be other state fish and game agencies that implement their own programs as body cameras become more common in local police departments.
