Recording Police in Washington: All-Party Consent and the Announcement Rule

RCW 9.73.030(1) makes it unlawful to intercept or record a private communication transmitted by telephone, telegraph, radio or other device without the consent of all the participants, and separately unlawful under subsection (1)(b) to record a private conversation by any device electronic or otherwise without the consent of all the persons engaged in it. Two features of that sentence matter for anyone filming a police encounter. First, the prohibition binds the state of Washington, its agencies, and political subdivisions by name, which is why the Legislature had to write express police carve-outs into RCW 9.73.090 rather than assume officers sat outside the Act. Second, the operative word is private. The Act neither defines it nor bans the recording of every conversation, so an exchange conducted on a public street, in the open, in front of bystanders is a very different thing under this text than a conversation behind a closed door.

Because the boundary of the word private is not drawn in the statute, the practical answer for a Washington resident is subsection (3), which is unusually generous for an all-party state. Consent is considered obtained whenever one party has announced to all other parties, in any reasonably effective manner, that the conversation is about to be recorded or transmitted, with the proviso that the announcement must also be recorded. There is no form of words prescribed, no written notice, and no requirement that anyone agree. Announcing at the start of a traffic stop that you are recording, while the device is already running, satisfies the section on its own terms and takes the question of privacy out of the case.

RCW 9.73.030(2) supplies a separate one-party consent route that covers a large share of real encounters. Conversations of an emergency nature, which the statute illustrates as the reporting of a fire, medical emergency, crime, or disaster, may be recorded with the consent of one party. So may conversations that convey threats of extortion, blackmail, bodily harm or other unlawful requests or demands, conversations that occur anonymously or repeatedly or at an extremely inconvenient hour, and conversations relating to a hostage holder or barricaded person as defined in RCW 70.85.100. A resident calling in or reporting a crime is inside that carve-out.

Subsection (4) covers working journalists on different terms again. An employee of a regularly published newspaper, magazine, wire service, radio station or television station acting in the course of bona fide news gathering duties, whether full-time, contractual or part-time, is deemed to have consent if consent is expressly given or if the recording or transmitting device is readily apparent or obvious to the speakers. A visible camera is enough, and the section adds that withdrawing consent after the fact does not stop the journalist from divulging what was said.

The police side of the ledger is set by RCW 9.73.090, and reading it tells you what officers owe you. Sound recordings that correspond to video from a camera mounted in a patrol vehicle are exempt from the Act only if the officer wearing the sound recording device is in uniform, the audio runs simultaneously with the video once the system is activated for an event, and the device is not intentionally turned off during the recording of the event. The officer must inform any person being recorded by sound that a sound recording is being made and that statement must be in the recording, unless the recording is made under exigent circumstances; there is no matching duty to announce video. The same subsection bars a law enforcement agency from duplicating and releasing such a recording to the public until final disposition of any criminal or civil litigation arising from the recorded events, and forbids any commercial use. Recordings of arrested persons under RCW 9.73.090(1)(b) carry their own script: the arrested person must be told, the statement telling them must be in the recording, the recording must begin and end with an indication of the time, the person must be fully informed of their constitutional rights at the commencement, and the recording may only be used for valid police or court activities.

Custodial interrogation is handled by a separate 2021 chapter. RCW 10.122.040 provides that notwithstanding RCW 9.73.030 and RCW 9.73.090, an officer conducting a custodial interrogation does not need consent to record but must inform the individual that an electronic recording is being made, and that the chapter does not permit recording a private communication between an individual and the individual's lawyer.

Washington has set no buffer distance around a working officer. Chapter 9A.76 RCW, which houses the obstruction offenses, contains no distance rule of the kind some states adopted after 2023, so the only limit on how close a person may stand while filming is the general offense of obstructing a law enforcement officer under RCW 9A.76.020, which requires willfully hindering, delaying or obstructing an officer in the discharge of official powers or duties.

080(1). 020 supplies the maximum: up to three hundred sixty-four days in the county jail, a fine of up to five thousand dollars, or both. 090(1)(c). 060 lets any person whose business, person or reputation was injured by a violation sue for actual damages including mental pain and suffering, or instead take liquidated damages computed at one hundred dollars a day for each day of violation, capped at one thousand dollars, plus a reasonable attorney's fee and other costs of litigation. 050. 020, a gross misdemeanor. Cases are prosecuted by county prosecuting attorneys or city attorneys in district and municipal court.