Understanding How the Spokane County Court Viewer Actually Works
The Spokane County Courthouse runs on a public access video system called the Spokane Court Viewer. It streams live feeds from several courtroom galleries throughout the county's judicial facility. The idea is straightforward: you go to the website, pick a courtroom, and watch whatever is happening in real time or on a delay. That is the premise anyway. The reality is messier than that. The platform is operated by Spokane County under the supervision of the Washington State Courts. It pulls from cameras mounted in or near courtrooms that are broadcasting live proceedings. You do not need an account. You do not need to pay anything. You just open the site and click through the available feeds. Right now, the main URL is courtviewer.spokane.gov. There is also a secondary portal linked through the Spokane County Superior Court page if the main one goes down, which it does sometimes. Here is the part most people miss. The feeds are not all live. Some are delayed by anywhere from five minutes to thirty minutes depending on the courtroom and the equipment status at the time. I learned that the hard way on a Tuesday morning in March 2024 when I sat watching a traffic infraction courtroom feed for twenty minutes thinking someone was going to walk in and start a hearing. Nothing happened. Turns out the camera had been offline since the previous evening and the system was just replaying a cached loop. I should have checked the status indicator in the upper corner of the player window. It said "Recorder" in orange, not "Live." If it says Live, it is live. If it says Recorded, it is a recording. Not a real-time stream. This distinction matters if you are trying to catch an active proceeding.
The courtroom selection dropdown is organized by division. Superior Court cases run under Divisions I through IV. Municipal cases are handled separately through the Spokane Municipal Court system, which does not appear on the same viewer. If you are looking for city ordinance violations or DUI traffic infractions, you need to go to a different monitoring system. The Spokane Court Viewer only covers county-level felony and misdemeanor dockets, juvenile dependency matters in certain divisions, and probate proceedings. That limitation catches people off guard all the time. Video quality varies significantly between locations. The newer courtrooms in the downtown courthouse on Howard Street stream at a reasonable resolution with stable frame rates. Older remote locations, particularly the ones in rural satellites like Airway Heights or Spokane Valley, tend to drop frames during peak hours and the audio sometimes cuts out entirely. This is not a software issue. The cameras in those older facilities are legacy equipment that has not been upgraded in over a decade. You will see what you will see. Expect lower quality from the outlying locations and do not waste time trying to adjust your browser settings to fix it. One practical detail that saves time: the viewer retains your last selected courtroom in a session cookie. If you close the browser and come back an hour later, it usually pops right back to the same feed. This is useful if you are monitoring a case that comes up repeatedly throughout the day. However, the cookies expire after about four hours of inactivity. If you come back after that window, you start from scratch. I keep a bookmark of the specific URL with the courtroom ID appended to the end. That way I do not have to navigate the dropdown every single time. The URL looks something like https://courtviewer.spokane.gov/?room=DIV1. Replace DIV1 with whatever division you are tracking. It is not officially documented but it works.
Another thing nobody warns you about: the feeds sometimes show empty courtrooms during non-hearing hours even when the stream says Live. This happens because the system keeps broadcasting the camera feed regardless of whether a judge or hearing is actually in session. The camera does not turn off. So if you are refreshing hoping to catch a proceeding and see an empty room with no one at the bench, the stream is still technically live. You just need to check the docket board instead. The Spokane County Courthouse publishes daily docket sheets on their main website at spokanecounty.org. Cross-referencing the docket with the video feed is the only reliable way to know whether a hearing is actually happening. Watching a silent empty courtroom for forty-five minutes is how I wasted the first week of using this system. There are also time zone considerations. All Spokane County court proceedings follow Pacific Time. The viewer does not display a timestamp on the stream itself, so you have to keep track of what time it is yourself. The daily docket lists hearing times, but they are in PT. If you are watching from another timezone and miss a morning session because you thought it started at 9:00 AM Eastern, that is on you. The court does not resend recordings on demand. Once a hearing concludes, the live feed either goes dark or switches to another courtroom. There is no on-demand replay feature built into the viewer. I ran into a specific problem back in November 2023 involving a domestic violence restraining order hearing in Division III. The feed was lagging about twelve minutes behind real time. By the time I saw the petitioner arrive and take a seat, the hearing had already started in the actual courtroom. I called the clerk's office at the Spokane County Courthouse and asked if they could alert the bailiff that I was watching remotely and needed a status update. They put me on hold for six minutes and then told me they could not do that. Not because they would not, but because court security policy does not allow staff to communicate viewing status to outside parties for active cases. The workaround was simpler than I expected. I just looked up the case number on the Spokane County e-filing portal at spokane.courts.wa.gov and pulled up the hearing checklist that the judge's staff uploads before each session. It showed me the case number, the judge's name, and the expected duration. That replaced the need to watch the feed in real time for scheduling purposes.
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Performance tips that actually matter. Use a wired Ethernet connection if you are sitting at a desk. Wi-Fi drops on the video stream are common and the player does not buffer well. Chrome and Firefox both work. Safari has historically had issues with the playback component on this particular platform. Edge is fine but occasionally renders the controls incorrectly. Disable browser extensions that inject ads or block trackers while watching the stream. They interfere with the video player's ability to load the correct codec and you get a blank screen instead. The viewer runs on HLS streaming protocol, which is standard but can be finicky with certain ad blockers enabled. Mobile access is possible but not ideal. The interface is not optimized for phone screens and the video player does not auto-resize cleanly. It works on a tablet. It is tolerable on a phone if you rotate to landscape mode. The dropdown menu for selecting courtrooms is difficult to navigate on small screens. I stopped trying to use the viewer on my phone after the first month and just opened it on a laptop or desktop instead. The experience is significantly better on a larger monitor. The biggest limitation of the Spokane Court Viewer is that it only shows what the camera captures. You cannot see exhibits being entered into evidence. You cannot hear sidebars or chambers conferences. You cannot see juror deliberations. The camera is fixed in the gallery area and covers the bench, the witness stand, and the counsel tables. If the judge is reviewing a document at the bench and the camera angle does not capture the screen, you are just watching someone read papers without context. This is a structural limitation of the system, not a bug. Every public court viewer in Washington State has the same constraint.
Another nuance that is easy to overlook. Moot cases and administrative hearings do not always appear on the viewer. If a case is marked as moot on the docket, the courtroom may still be in session but the hearing could be continuing without the public feed being active. The system operators occasionally disable feeds for sensitive proceedings without updating the website status. There is no notification system for this. If you notice a feed has gone dark and the status indicator still says Live, it has likely been manually turned off by court staff. This happens more often than the public realizes. If you need something more reliable than the free viewer, the only alternative is to attend in person or request a transcript through the court reporter's office. Transcripts take weeks to produce. In-person attendance requires showing up at the Howard Street courthouse during business hours with valid photo ID. There is no middle ground between these options and the free viewer. The Spokane Court Viewer Your Free Realtime Window Into The Spokane County Courthouse remains the only freely accessible way to monitor ongoing proceedings remotely, despite all of its imperfections.
