Category: Privacy

City Council, Elections, Privacy

Mayoral Challenger Katie Wilson Closes In on 51 Percent; Council Moves to Expand Police Camera Surveillance

1. Katie Wilson, the labor organizer and transit advocate who’s challenging Mayor Bruce Harrell, is on target to come out of the August primary with around 51 percent of the vote, with Harrell trailing 10 points behind at 41 percent. It’s a huge political victory—passing 50 percent against an incumbent mayor backed by almost $800,000 in pre-primary spending sends a strong message that voters want change—and puts Wilson in an extremely strong position to win in November.

A look at historical vote totals shows why Wilson is on track to win.

To start with, Seattle has not reelected a single incumbent mayor since 2005, when Greg Nickels defeated a nominal challenge from a UW professor named Al Runte, beating him in the primary by a 35-point margin. (Nickels got his comeuppance in the following election, when two challengers, Mike McGinn and Joe Mallahan, nudged him out in the primary).

Additionally, it’s been almost 25 years years since a mayoral candidate has come in second in the primary and won in the general election, which happened most recently in 2001. In that race, the two frontrunners, Mark Sidran and Greg Nickels, were neck and neck, and both advanced to the general after knocking out incumbent Paul Schell. Nickels went on to beat Sidran 50-48.

You have to go back even further, to 1997, to find a comparable gap between the two mayoral frontrunners. In that case, though, the ultimate winner, Paul Schell, won decisively in the primary, beating neighborhood activist Charlie Chong by just under 6 points going into the general. As a weak incumbent, Harrell appears more likely to follow the path of his five most recent predecessors who each failed to win reelection.

2. The city council’s public safety committee unanimously approved bill expanding police camera surveillance into three new neighborhoods on Tuesday, rejecting one accountability-focused amendment from progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and passing an amendment from Joy Hollingsworth that limits the new CCTV cameras around Garfield High School and Playfield, which is in her council district, to three arterial streets—East Cherry, 23rd Avenue East, and South Jackson St.

Rinck isn’t on the committee, so she couldn’t vote; committee chair Bob Kettle sponsored her amendments as a courtesty.

Another amendment from Rinck, aimed at ensuring that police report back on whether SPD had provided camera footage to any outside entity in response to court orders or subpoenas, passed unanimously.

The expansion of camera surveillance is now on a glide path for approval by the full council.

Once the new cameras are up and recording, Hollingsworth said, “I’m going to continue to be listening to community and trying to address a lot of concerns that they have with the cameras and making sure that we are not violating people’s civil liberties.”

An amendment from Joy Hollingsworth restricted surveillance cameras around Garfield high school to the arterials marked by the blue lines on this map.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Council President Sara Nelson asked a staffer if the cameras would ever be trained on “residential streets.” In reality, they already are—because of Seattle’s zoning laws, apartments are heavily concentrated on arterial roads, and streets where Seattle is currently placing most of its new surveillance cameras are no exception. Although SPD has said it will blur out images of residential buildings, renters coming to and from their homes will frequently be caught on SPD’s surveillance cameras, along with anyone who patronizes businesses, goes to (or has kids in) school, spends time in parks, or visits a public library branch in the areas under SPD surveillance.

The committee also rejected two amendments by progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck. The first would have required any future evaluation of the cameras to include a controlled assessment to determine whether the cameras were meeting the city’s stated goals for deploying them—deterring violent crime, human trafficking, or persistent felony crime.

If the assessment found that the cameras were failing to meet those goals, the mayor would “consider” discontinuing them. “We, as an elected body, should be instilling trust in our community and not pushing for expansions of programs before getting data and information about their effectiveness,” Rinck said.

Committee chair Bob Kettle said it was likely the cameras would accomplish lots of other important goals, beyond the ones supporters have used to justify their expansion, such as aiding in prosecutions, reducing response times, and improving the relationship between SPD and the public, much as Saka said body-worn police cameras have. Juarez added that the city “would have a hard time measuring and enforcing whether or not the cameras are actually deterring violent crime, because if we could do that, we would have done that.”

Nelson then piled on the anti-data train, saying that “it’s very difficult to draw causal conclusions based on an evaluation because many things could be impacting the trends that we have seen.”

Nelson, Kettle, and other council members have consistently blamed the previous city council for causing police to leave the city for by demoralizing them with talk of reducing SPD’s budget in 2020, despite the lack of data to support this claim.

 

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

Police Roll Out Expansion Plans for Surveillance Cameras

By Erica C. Barnett

Just weeks after rolling out live camera surveillance in the Chinatown/International District, downtown, and along Aurora Ave. N, the Seattle City Council took up legislation this week that would expand the surveillance zones to include Garfield High School in the Central District and a section of Capitol Hill that includes the Pike-Pine corridor and Cal Anderson Park, a residential area that police have dubbed the “Capitol Hill Nightlife District.”

The purpose of the cameras, according to SPD, is to reduce and help solve major crimes in places where “gun violence, human trafficking, and persistent felony crime is concentrated.”

SPD Captain Jim Britt, who heads up the Real-Time Crime Center, the division of SPD that’s overseeing the implementation of the cameras, said the department hopes to incorporate camera footage from other city and regional departments, such as the Parks Department, the Seattle Public Library, King County Metro,, Sound Transit, and “anybody that has a camera in the Seattle area.” (SPL confirmed it does not have surveillance cameras, and SDOT director Adiam Emery said the department already shares its camera footage with SPD).

Attached to the legislation, almost as an afterthought, is a mandatory Surveillance Impact Report analyzing the potential impact of widespread camera surveillance, which was not yet finished when the city deployed the first cameras earlier this month. The report includes more than 110 pages of comments submitted by Seattle residents over a two-week feedback period, most of them opposing increased police surveillance of their neighborhoods. Many of the commenters argued that police cameras foster an environment of fear and control and violate civil liberties, particularly for marginalized groups.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

During Thursday’s meeting, council members attempted to dismiss these concerns by suggesting that people who support the cameras, such as homeowners and business groups, are underrepresented in public comment. District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth said most of the people she has talked to on Capitol Hill and around Garfield High School support the cameras, but are afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation from opponents, including the media.

“Many people don’t feel safe to come down to City Hall to tell us they don’t feel safe [in their neighborhoods] because of the backlash that they get from online media, from reporters, from people … because they’ll be a target,” Hollingsworth said. “They’re scared to come down to say that because of what they feel the backlash is going to be at their business.”

Defending their push to expand camera surveillance so soon after the initial pilot began, officials from SPD and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said the cameras have already demonstrated their usefulness.

However, a video SPD produced to show that the new cameras are already achieving their goals didn’t include any examples of gun violence, human trafficking, or major felony crimes.

In the first video, a man in a car chased down a driver who had stolen his truck, allegedly shooting out the window of the car he was driving without hitting or injuring anyone. According to Britt, SPD used the footage to track down the vehicle and return the car to the driver, making one arrest.

The second video shows a man with a visible knife that a 911 caller said he was using to “threaten” people in the area; the man wasn’t arrested because the 911 caller declined to cooperate, according to Britt. The third video showed a driver hitting a pedestrian; however, Britt said, the video was too blurry to register the license plate, so “the investigation is ongoing.”

Council members who support the cameras assured their constituents that they’re already common in other cities, and won’t be used to violate anyone’s privacy. “This is not the People’s Republic of China,” Councilmember Rob Saka said,  “where we have social scores that have facial recognition technology built in, on top of the CCTVs on every block, and they’ll track if you don’t do something for the party or the state, and they’ll monitor you and assign you a score. This is not that.”

SPD has said it will not provide camera footage to federal authorities seeking, for example, to track down women seeking abortions, trans people seeking gender-affirming care, or immigrants.

Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was sitting in on the committee, asked what would happen if a court ordered Axon, SPD’s out-of-state camera contractor, to hand over footage to the federal government. SPD Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey said the city, not Axon, owns its camera footage, and that “under federal law, any request falls to us,” not the company. Citing a case in which Axon defended another city’s right to control its own footage, Maxey said it was unlikely (though not impossible) that the company would violate its commitment.

Beyond cracking down on so-called crime hot spots, the surveillance impact report includes another, more generalized justification for the cameras: As of January 2024, according to the report, the city only had 913 deployable officers, hindering the department’s “effectiveness in solving cases and holding violent criminals accountable,” according to the report. But January 2024 was more than a year and a half ago, making it an odd date to include in a July 2025 report; since then, city officials, including Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Harrell, have repeatedly taken credit for what Harrell called “record-breaking” police hiring numbers.

If hiring remains on pace and SPD brings on 250 new officers this year, it will be well on its way to addressing the “staffing crisis” used to justify the cameras in the first place. Undoubtedly, if that happens, the city will come up with another reason to add more cameras to more neighborhoods. But it’s certainly worth asking why the city is celebrating its success at hiring more police, while simultaneously claiming that anemic police hiring means Seattle residents must  submit to indefinite police surveillance.

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

This Week on PubliCola: July 19, 2025

Elections, graffiti, police surveillance, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, July 15

PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Ry Armstrong

Ry Armstrong, one of seven candidates seeking to unseat incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell, says that if elected, they’d stop sweeps of homeless encampments and pass progressive revenue to pay for shelters around the city. Armstrong also wants to make it easier to build child care centers and help people purchase their first homes.

Seattle Nice: Seattle Solved All the Crime, So We’re Talking About Graffiti

Our main topic on Seattle Nice this week was one of the mayor and council’s top current priorities: Cracking down on graffiti—which is already a crime—with a new fine of up to $1,500 for each individual “tag.” We also discussed a new pro- Harrell message testing poll pushing the idea that mayoral candidate Katie Wilson is the second coming of socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant.

Wednesday, July 16

Council Passes New Laws Against Graffiti, Expanding Police Power to Shut Down Businesses for Off-Premises Violations

The City Council passed two bills cracking down on “disorder” this week. The first empowers the City Attorney to pursue civil actions for graffiti and fine individuals $1,500 per tag, and the second expands the city’s nuisance property law to allow police to penalize property owners and shut down businesses for off-premises activities, such as drug use or other illegal activities in the vicinity of a nightlife venue.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

As Police Roll Out Live Cameras in Purported Crime “Hot Spots,” Not Everyone Is Thrilled to Be Under Surveillance

At a press event, police chief Shon Barnes and the mayor touted new cameras that allow police to keep a watchful eye on dozens of locations around the city. Officials have promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not everyone who’s now under 24/7 police surveillance considers the cameras a benign crime-fighting tool.

Thursday, July 17

Election Fizz: City Employees Back Wilson for Mayor, Harrell Slams “Wilson’s Defund Movement,” and More

Professional and Technical Employees Local 17 (PROTEC17), made up of thousands of city workers, endorsed their boss’s opponent Katie Wilson Thursday after years of fighting Harrell for better wages and working conditions. Plus, Harrell’s campaign blamed his opponent “Wilson’s Defund movement” for an “exodus from SPD and a dramatic rise in violent crime,” and more election news from the final weeks before the August 5 deadline for voters to send in their primary ballots.

Friday, July 18

Seattle Nice: Is the Progressive Left Back?

We recorded the latest episode of the Seattle Nice podcast at the 43rd District Democrats’ meeting, where we discussed the primary election, offered some unsolicited advice to a local candidate who happened to be in the audience, and discussed the latest battle over nudity at a longtime LGBTQ+-friendly nude beach.

Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy, Uncategorized

As Police Roll Out Live Cameras in Purported Crime “Hot Spots,” Not Everyone Is Thrilled to Be Under Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the uses of new closed-circuit cameras that currently allow police to surveil 57 locations around the city, from Aurora Ave. N to the Chinatown International District, at a press event at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center on Tuesday. The department plans to add cameras in additional locations soon, including the area around Garfield High School, in Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor, and around the two downtown stadiums.

The city council funded the cameras, along with the expansion of SPD’s existing Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), last year, adding 21 full-time police positions and expanding the program beyond its originally proposed boundaries at an ongoing cost of several million dollars a year. SPD plans to integrate feeds from private cameras, such as surveillance cameras outside local businesses, into the system.

At Tuesday’s event, SPD Captain James Britt showed reporters how RTCC staff could use a live, map-based feed to monitor the cameras in real time, zooming and panning to see an area up close and from different angles. A six-minute video showed how footage from one camera at Aurora Ave. N and N 100th St. was used to apprehend a shooting suspect, along with footage from King County drones, private businesses, and the top of an apartment building.

Barnes said the cameras had been used in “600 incidents” and more than 90 investigations, but SPD did not provide a further breakdown of those incidents or say whether the city’s cameras duplicated the private surveillance footage that the police have always used in investigations.

City officials took pains to reassure residents that SPD won’t hand its surveillance footage over to ICE for use in immigration raids. “I can’t say enough, we’ll make sure everyone’s rights are protected and the right constitutional safeguards are in place,” Harrell said.

As a city council member, Harrell added, he was “the first person who proposed body cameras” for police and the “author of the privacy surveillance ordinance”—an apparent reference not to the far-reaching 2017 surveillance ordinance, authored and sponsored by then-councilmember Lorena González, but a 2013 law Harrell co-sponsored with then-councilmember Nick Licata that required council approval for new surveillance technologies.

The city has promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not every business owner in the areas under surveillance considers them a benign crime-fighting tool.

PubliCola spoke with Cory Potts, who owns the Center for Bicycle Repair near 12th and Jackson— a longtime “hot spot” for drug use and sales of both drugs and stolen goods. One of the new cameras faces his shop, which is located in a nearly 100-year-old building that was occupied by Japanese businesses before Seattle’s Japanese population was removed from the area and interred in concentration camps during World War II.

After a mass stabbing in front of his building, Potts said, a representative from the mayor’s office showed up at a community meeting to tell them the city was installing the cameras, which Potts later learned was not actually a response to the violence, but a plan that had long been underway.

The city had already made what Potts considered some troubling decisions in the neighborhood, which was historically known as Japantown. First, they placed signs around the areas banning “buying or selling merchandise” in public spaces. “I was struck  by the historical similarities,” Potts said. “There was no outreach about the signs whatsoever—all of a sudden, they went up.”

Shortly after that, city trucks began cleaning the streets with a foaming disinfectant that seeped into Potts’ building. A worker with the Seattle Department of Transportation told Potts the foam was meant to clean up urine, but “based on observation” and talking to the people who hang out near his business, “I don’t believe that was the actual purpose for the foaming,” he said.

“The city doesn’t give those people enough credit for how sensitive they are to the neighborhood and the stuff that happens here. I think they know what it means when a city truck drives by them and shoots foam at the place where they spent most of their time.”

As a business owner in the area since the pandemic, Potts says he doesn’t see how cameras will benefit him, given that he’s seen police hanging around all day without interacting with people on the street. The police department, and Harrell, promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking, but the building that used to house Viet Wah burned down after the building was improperly secured against intruders for months, Potts said, and no one did anything to address the situation.

He’s asking the city to blur out his business on footage from the cameras as a way to “stand up for what the building represents and what the history of the neighborhood represents.” On Tuesday, Captain Britt told PubliCola SPD generally only blurs footage of residential property, because commercial buildings are open to the public. “We would want to be cautious about [blurring out] businesses that front onto a sidewalk, because the sidewalk is an area that we would want to make sure that we had good footage of,” Britt said.

The RTCC expansion was one of many mayoral priorities that added $100 million in costs, most of them ongoing obligations, to the 2025-2026 budget despite a known revenue gap of around $250 million. In April, the City Budget Office issued a new revenue forecast showing that the city will need to close an additional, previously unanticipated budget shortfall of $241 million during 2025 and 2026. (The budget already assumed deficits starting in 2027).

On Tuesday, Harrell said his 2026-2027 budget proposal could include more funding to add more cameras and expand surveillance into additional neighborhoods. “We think this is good technology, and there could be a push to expand its citywide,” Harrell said. “Everyone in this room understands we have some constraints on our budget, and so it becomes a question of priorities.”

The city’s surveillance ordinance requires agencies like SPD to complete a Surveillance Impact Report, or SIR, before deploying any new surveillance technology. In its SIR for the new surveillance cameras, SPD said it was in the process of creating a new “omnibus surveillance policy” that would include a specific policy for CCTV. To date, an SPD spokesperson confirmed, the department has not completed either the omnibus policy or specific camera and real-time crime center surveillance guidelines, and has “no firm timeline” to finish the work.

According to the spokesperson, SPD’s two-person policy shop has been busy drafting new crowd-control policies but has already begun the work of researching and drafting the new policies around the RTCC.”

The city’s Office of the Inspector General has hired researchers from the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a two-year assessment of the RTCC and the new camera surveillance program.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

Council Splashes Out on Surveillance Cameras and Cop Hiring Bonuses, Lashes Out at Civil Rights Office for Raising Equity Concerns

 

Photo by Ben Schumin from Montgomery Village, Maryland, CC BY-SA 2.0

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council, which includes six new members who campaigned on the premise that the city spends too much money and isn’t “data-driven”, just approved new $50,000 hiring bonuses for police who transfer from other departments, along with a new video surveillance pilot that will cost millions of dollars a years, and require the city to hire 21 more officers to monitor the cameras, just in its initial, “pilot” phase.

The city has never conducted a study to determine whether its existing hiring bonuses, which began in 2019 and have been expanded several times since then, have been effective at recruiting qualified officers. Hiring fell, then stagnated, during and after the 2020 COVID pandemic, and bounced back only after the police union negotiated a minimum starting salary of $103,000, suggesting that high pay, not one-time bonuses, is an effective recruitment incentive.

By shoveling more money at transferring officers without any data to back up this new spending, the new council is contradicting its promises to engage in fiscal responsibility by, for example, “auditing the budget” of every department to identify waste and misused funds. In contrast, the council has placed intense scrutiny on programs designed to help disadvantaged communities, like the Equitable Development Initiative, which provides funds to community organizations for capital projects.

Earlier this year, eight councilmembers voted for a budget amendment, sponsored by Councilmember Maritza Rivera, that imposes special reporting requirements on EDI projects. (The amendment was a downgrade from  Rivera’s original plan, which would have gutted EDI by pulling funds from dozens of projects). But police hiring bonuses, and programs to expand the police department in general, are rarely subject to any kind of fiscal scrutiny, usually on the explicit grounds that hiring police is more important than how much the city spends or whether specific incentives are working.

The council would probably disagree with this assessment. Councilmember Rob Saka, for example, insisted that the hiring bonuses are “data driven.” (He did not cite any data.) Council president Sara Nelson said she was confident the bonuses are “working” and that the city should build on that success by making them bigger, clarifying that “it depends on how you look at what ‘working’ means. To me, ‘working’ means the number of people who are applying here. … We do have proof that this is attracting more officers, and so we should keep it going to continue our success.”

Councilmember Tammy Morales was, as usual these days, the only voice of dissent. “I’m concerned that this legislation privileges SPD over every other city worker, by increasing their hiring bonus to the amount of about a down payment on a house, in this city where too many people can barely afford rent,” she said. Then the council voted 6-1 in favor of the bonuses (Councilmembers Cathy Moore and Joy Hollingsworth were absent).

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

The vote was similarly lopsided on the surveillance pilot, which will allow the city to install cameras in several “high-crime” neighborhoods and create a “real-time crime center” to monitor these cameras 24/7, at an estimated cost of more than $6 million over the biennium. The legislation directs SPD to come up with an expansion plan for placing other parts of city under police surveillance, but does not require the department to collect data or report back on the cameras’ effectiveness at reducing crime.

The bill also takes as a given that SPD will provide camera footage in response to subpoenas and records requests, leaving open the possibility that out-of-state activists—those seeking to prosecute women for leaving the state for an abortion, or anti-immigration activists, for example—will be able to use SPD’s surveillance footage to harass or prosecute people caught on camera in Seattle.

The only concessions to this concern are various notice requirements; a clause asking SPD to require its private surveillance vendors to notify SPD if they receive a warrant or subpoena, and retain legal council “to challenge any such warrant or subpoena”; and an amendment requiring SPD to follow its existing redaction policy when providing surveillance videos to people who request it.

Council members argued that 24/7 live camera surveillance will make it possible for ” desperate” people and business owners in the International District to feel safe again (Tanya Woo); that the cameras are an “automated” technology that will help SPD do more with less (Rob Saka, inaccurately); and that people are already under constant surveillance, due to technologies like FaceTime, so shouldn’t see this expansion as a big deal (Cathy Moore).

Councilmember Bob Kettle, who sponsored the legislation, lashed out at the city’s Office for Civil Rights whose director, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, wrote a memo to the council saying there had been “insufficient outreach to pilot communities” and suggesting more community engagement before deploying the cameras.

“I read the letter from OCR, Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights… [which mentions] ‘insufficient outreach to pilot communities,'” Kettle began. “Really? Do you know how many times I’ve been in [District] 7, all over the place, talking to community?” Kettle added that he’d talked to “a couple dozen people, each one expressing their challenges in public safety” and ultimately supporting the cameras.

Raising his voice, Kettle continued: “Do you think we’re not engaged with the pilot communities? Who’s gonna be more engaged than council member Moore on Aurora? Seriously? ‘Expand outreach to pilot communities’? I say expand your outreach to the Seattle City Council and talk to us, who are representatives of our districts! Again, back in 2012 there was no [council] district representatives. Now we do [have them]. Last year, [this] cohort ran on public safety. We know our communities. We know our districts.”

OCR’s memo was part of a mandatory Racial Equity Tool Kit analysis of the surveillance proposal, and—in contrast to Kettle’s tirade—is written in dry, bureaucratic language. The memo, Wheeler-Smith wrote in his summary, “highlights SOCR’s concerns about the [surveillance pilot] and offers suggestions for limiting the technologies’ harm, should they be implemented. We also offer suggestions for reaching impacted communities and focusing on racial equity in stakeholder engagement.”

City Council, Police, Privacy

Council Committee Approves 24/7 Police Surveillance of Neighborhoods Across the City

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s public safety committee approved legislation that gives police access to two new surveillance technologies—live CCTV cameras that will monitor at least five Seattle neighborhoods—and a new “Real Time Crime Center,” provided by the company Axon, that will allow police to simultaneously monitor many different sources of live information, potentially including private cameras such as Ring cameras.

The legislation gives police, for the first time, the ability to conduct live, remote surveillance of several areas the city has identified as “hot spots,” including Belltown, downtown, the Chinatown-International District, and Aurora Avenue North. An amendment from Councilmember Rob Saka called for a future expansion of the areas under surveillance to include Harbor Avenue and the Alki neighborhood, where he said there has been “lawlessness,” “tomfoolery,” and “nonsense,” along with other parts of the city.

SPD estimates that the initial surveillance plan will cost $1.8 million, but the true cost of the entire project remains unclear. Council president Sara Nelson noted Tuesday that she expects the city will expand the surveillance areas in the future.

The new surveillance areas overlap with several of the new exclusion zones for drug users and sex work, effectively enabling SPD to monitor “drug areas” and “areas of prostitution” for violators in real time. In fact, Councilmember Cathy Moore, whose legislation reinstated a repealed law against “prostitution loitering” and created a “Stay Out of Prostitution Area” on Aurora, amended the Aurora surveillance zone so that it’s identical to the SOAP zone, which stretches from N. 85th to N. 145th, the city’s northern border.

Moore said her intent in expanding the boundaries of the Aurora surveillance zone was to address shootings, sex trafficking, arson, and other crimes. However, Saka’s amendment also asks SPD to study expanding their use of the cameras to other, lower-level crimes, such as street racing (which is illegal under state law, but which the council also recently made a misdemeanor, allowing local enforcement.) “From our constituents’ standpoint, they want us to focus on what is infringing upon their safety and wellbeing,” Nelson said.

People traveling through, or living in, these areas will be subject to live police surveillance as soon as they come within range of the cameras, which will be capable of capturing images hundreds of feet away—a scenario that raises obvious privacy concerns with groups like the ACLU of Washington, which has come out strongly against the proposal, as well as the city’s Office for Civil Rights (SOCR) and the Community Surveillance Working Group, established to advise the city on the privacy and civil rights impacts of new surveillance technologies.

In an official assessment—required under the city’s surveillance ordinance—the surveillance working group recommended strongly against approving the cameras. However, Mayor Bruce Harrell did not mention the working group’s recommendation to “pause” the legislation in his group summarizing community feedback, and the council did not invite the group to present their findings publicly.

At the same meeting where Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess and police department representatives made a glowing case for the new surveillance tools, the chair of the panel, René Peters, was reduced to raising the work group’s objections during a two-minute public comment slot. On Tuesday, committee chair Bob Kettle said the council had done “an incredible amount of public outreach” and that their support for camera surveillance was based on “countless interactions” with the public.

“The city clearly has not conducted sufficient public engagement,” said Tee Sannon, Technology Policy Program Director for the ACLU-WA. Instead of months of meetings to get public feedback on the cameras, particularly from people of color living in the targeted areas, the city held a handful of poorly publicized meetings over the summer, including one held during the work day. Even so, Sannon says, “the overwhelming majority of folks who showed up were in huge opposition to this technology.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Nelson said the council was skillfully “threading this needle” between civil liberties and concerns for public safety. She added that other “extremely progressive” cities, like Washington D.C., already have real-time camera surveillance systems, adding that Seattle needs to “get with the program and recognize that this can help.”

In a memo submitted as part of the mandatory Racial Equity Toolkit analysis of the proposal, SOCR director Derrick Wheeler-Smith raised eight high-level concerns about the cameras.

The cameras and signs alerting people about surveillance, “may create a feeling of being constantly watched that prevents residents from enjoying public spaces,” Wheeler-Smith wrote. “For example, while residents of wealthier, whiter neighborhoods enjoy their parks undisturbed (such as by using them for political expression, or having a beer at a barbecue), residents of the pilot neighborhoods may be deterred from such activities that are their constitutional right, or that are customary, if not legal.”

Having large “area under surveillance” signs all over an area, along with audible warnings for people with limited or no sight, would also create a “dystopian atmosphere” in surveilled neighborhoods, the memo says.

The neighborhoods that will be under camera surveillance are largely communities of color; the downtown area includes Westlake Park, frequently the site of public protests and a place where many unsheltered people hang out.

In response to questions from a public meeting about the potential for cameras to have a disproportionate impact on people of color, SPD responded that the department has a policy in place that “forbids bias-based policing and outlines processes for reporting and documenting any suspected bias-based behavior and other accountability measures.” In his memo, SOCR’s Wheeler-Smith noted that “while such a prohibition is a necessary policy, it did not prevent the disparities that have kept SPD under a federal consent decree for more than a decade.”

The working group, and the city’s civil rights office, also raised objections to SPD’s claim, in response to public comment, that the cameras couldn’t violate people’s right to privacy because they will only “people who choose to be in a public place where the technologies are being used,” as if people could choose not to be in public in their neighborhoods.

“People living in these communities, especially those who are unhoused, do not have a choice as to whether they are in a public place while going about their daily lives,” the working group wrote, adding that it “creates a disparate impact to make people in these neighborhoods choose between enjoying public spaces and avoiding constant surveillance while residents elsewhere do not face such a choice.”

The ACLU’s Sannon notes that it isn’t clear what capabilities SPD’s expanded Real Time Crime Center will have, nor does the proposal say how SPD will avoid sharing data collected in Seattle with organizations, including law enforcement agencies, outside the state—such as anti-choice groups attempting to enforce laws against traveling outside a state to obtain an abortion.

“It raises concerns… for people who come to Seattle looking fro reproductive health care, gender-affirming health care undocumented immigrants—it would be compiling this data in a central database and storing it in the cloud with a vendor that isn’t in Washington state,” Sannon said.

Although SPD has said repeatedly that they won’t “cooperate in criminal or civil enforcement of laws related to immigration or reproductive or gender-affirming health care services,” there’s no guarantee the city or an out-of-state vendor will prevail in a legal case outside Washington, or how much they will be willing to spend to do so.

Representatives from SPD said Tuesday that footage will only be stored inside the cameras themselves, and only for a maximum of 30 days, which Kettle said he found reassuring; however, a broad, preemptive public records request (for all footage of the Planned Parenthood clinic inside the north surveillance zone, for instance) would require SPD to pull video from the cameras, subverting the purported intent of short-term storage.

Opponents of the bill also point out that after decades of studies, there’s no evidence that camera surveillance prevents, or helps solve, the “gun violence, human trafficking, and other persistent felony crimes” SPD and the mayor’s office are claiming the cameras will help them address. Councilmember Rob Saka said yesterday that the cameras would reduce gun violence and help address the”deplorable low” number of police officers in Seattle.

Citing a systematic review of 40 years of research on CCTV surveillance, Wheeler-Smith—Harrell’s appointee to lead the the Office for Civil Rights—noted that the study found “no significant effects” on violent crime. In Newark, one city where CCTV implementation preceded a reduction in violent crime, the city also invested in staffing up a live monitoring center and sent extra patrols into surveilled areas, and ultimately didn’t find these costly approaches sustainable.