Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Wilson “Pauses” Police Camera Surveillance Expansion But Keeps Existing Cameras On

By Erica C. Barnett

In an announcement that she immediately noted will please no one, Mayor Katie Wilson announced Thursday that she is pausing the expansion of an existing police camera surveillance program until the city gets the results of a “privacy and data governance audit” that will be conducted by researchers at New York University’s Policing Project, a process she said will take a few months. In the meantime, the city will install, but not turn on, 26 new cameras in the stadium district south of downtown, which can be switched on if there is a “credible threat” that warrants their use, such as an attack during the upcoming World Cup games in June.

In addition, SPD will switch off all the Automated License Plate Reader systems installed on patrol cars—about 400—as well as six used by SPD’s parking enforcement division. A recently passed state law prohibits the use of ALPR, which identifies the owner of a vehicle based on their license plate, around schools, places of worship, food banks, and courthouses. SPD’s crime and community-harm reduction director Lee Hunt said SPD is figuring out how to “geofence” these locations so that its license plate readers, made by Axon, can turn off and on as they pass by on the street.

Wilson acknowledged that her half-measures announcement would probably make everyone a bit unhappy.

“For some people, seeing CCTV cameras in a neighborhood where they live or work or attend school makes them feel safer. For others, those same cameras make them feel less safe,” she said. “But precisely because different people and different communities experience the cameras differently, it’s important to base a decision on more than feelings. It’s important to ground our actions in a thorough understanding of how the cameras are being used, of the public benefits they are providing, and of any harm they are causing or could cause.”

The Seattle Police Department is currently waiting for the results of an analysis by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who are looking into the efficacy of surveillance cameras for solving crimes. The separate analysis Wilson announced today will look into questions like how data is being stored, who can access it, and how secure the footage is once it’s transferred to an offsite server, evidence.com.

“There’s no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve some crimes, including serious ones like homicides, but also, cameras are not the one key to making our neighborhoods safe,” Wilson said. “And on the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about privacy, oversurveillance and potential misuse of surveillance technologies. But also, these cameras are not the primary threat to immigrants, trans people or people seeking reproductive health care in our country right now.”

Concerns about surveillance cameras are not just about keeping data safe from ICE and other federal authorities. Back in July 2024, the city’s own surveillance working group urged the mayor and council not to install police surveillance cameras, arguing that the cameras raised concerns about privacy and First Amendment rights.

The group also argued that training cameras on “high-crime” neighborhoods—SPD’s current deployment strategy, and one Wilson has praised as a way of targeting crime where it happens—could result in overpolicing and a “risk of disparate impact … on minority communities within Seattle.”

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Wilson said that if the reviewers at NYU don’t raise major concerns about data privacy, she’s inclined to expand the surveillance network.

“I think that if, if the audit comes back and says everything’s totally secure, we’re not at all worried about this data getting into the hands of federal government I think likely my decision at that point would be to move forward with the expansion of the pilot,” Wilson said, adding that it’s “legitimate” to ask whether “we want to live in a society where there’s cameras on every corner.”

Hunt, from SPD, said turning off the cameras on parking enforcement officers’ vehicles will result in lower revenues from parking tickets issued by PEOs using those vehicles.

Police cameras come at a significant cost, at a time when Wilson has asked all city departments to come up with potential cuts to address a budget shortfall of more than $140 million. In 2024, the city added 21 new police positions, at an ongoing two-year cost of $6.5 million, to expand SPD’s police surveillance program; last year, after the city expanded the program, the budget added another $1.3 million to add new cameras around the stadiums and the “Capitol Hill Nightlife District” near Pike and Pine.

Transportation

Pioneer Square Bike and Scooter Parking Plan Runs Into Road Bumps
The offending potential bike racks (rendering via SDOT)

By Erica C. Barnett

The Pioneer Square Preservation Board and local businesses have raised objections to a Seattle Department of Transportation proposal to install bike and scooter parking spaces in 21 curbside locations in Pioneer Square, calling the proposal too much, too fast and claiming white lines and flex posts are out of keeping with the historic character of Pioneer Square. The Urbanist wrote about an initial briefing on the plan, which raise “a litany of objections” from the board, last month.

The proposed “bike corrals” would serve a dual safety purpose, according to bike and micromobility advocates. First, they would provide more places for people using shared bikes and scooters (primarily from Lime) to park the vehicles on the street instead of on sidewalks, making sidewalks more passable for pedestrians and people with sight and mobility limitations. Second, by blocking off illegal parking spaces, such as those directly in front of stop signs, the “corrals” will improve sightlines for drivers and other road and sidewalk users, “daylighting” intersections and reducing collisions.

“We are supportive of bike corrals at street interections in general, full stop, because they daylight intersections so it makes ti safer for all cyclists,” said Lee Lambert, executive director of the Cascade Bicycle Club. “We also recognize that poorly parked micromobilty devices are a hazard for sidewalk users, and corrals are a solution to that problem. … I would put corrals on every corner if I could.”

But opponents of the SDOT proposal, including the Alliance for Pioneer Square, say the markings and flex posts will be visually disruptive and may be unnecessary, at least in the numbers SDOT is proposing. Alliance director Lisa Howard says her organization prefers a “pilot” of three or four corrals initially to see if people are using them.

“We have been fully supportive of the daylighting and the safety measures. Our feedback has been that the corrals themselves are not a one-size-fits-all response,” Howard said. “Even though it’s white lines and flex posts, if you put 40 of those up and down First Avenue, it’s going to have a major impact.”

Howard said it’s unclear if Pioneer Square proper is even the right location for a large number of new scooter and bike parking areas. “If you’re using a scooter to go to a Sounders game” at the stadiums south of downtown, “you’re not necessarily going to park at First and Yesler and walk the whole remaining quarter mile.”

Lambert said a pilot that small wouldn’t produce good data on how much people use the new corrals, since “the more places you have people to place scooters and bikes, the more likely people are to use them.”

Gordon Padelford, head of Seattle Streets Alliance (formerly Seattle Neighborhood Greenways), said the objections the preservation board and neighborhood advocates have raised so far have largely amounted to a “classic” case of “parking loss weaponized as neighborhood preservation.” (Pioneer Square already has its own neighborhood-specific iron bike racks, a costly if attractive addition won by preservationists in a previous battle over sidewalk space.)

The objections to the loss of these illegal parking spaces are ironic, Padelford pointed out, since the law that created the Pioneer Square Preservation District specifically cites “avoid[ing a proliferation of vehicular parking and vehicular-oriented uses” among the reasons for creating the district in the first place.

Local transportation advocacy groups, including Cascade, Seattle Streets Alliance, Transportation Choice Coalition and Futurewise, plus Lime, sent a letter to the preservation board this week urging them to approve the new corrals. The board is expected to take up the proposal again at its meeting on April 1.

 

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson’s “Path to 500” New Shelter Beds: $17.5 Million, With First Units Opening In April
The Wilson Administration’s ambitious schedule for opening up 500 new shelter beds.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday, the Seattle City Council got its first, partial look at Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to build 500 new shelter units by the end of May, and 1,000 before 2027. The mayor’s office is waiting until later this month to announce the sites they’ve identified for the first few new tiny house villages, so the briefing was mostly an opportunity for the council to ask questions about the proposal—including how much new money it will require, how the mayor’s office plans to get buy-in from neighborhood residents, and why the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), which manages the region’s shelter contracts, has been effectively cut out of the proposal.

The biggest news to come out of the briefing was the total estimated price tag for the first 500 units. According to city Budget Director Aly Pennucci, the mayor’s office has identified about $17.5 million to pay for the first 500 units. That number includes$4.8 million Wilson’s team previously identified from an underutilized Community Development Block Grant revolving loan  ($3.3 million) and unused funds from a downtown development fee program dating back to the 1980s ($1.5 million), plus shelter funding from the city’s 2026 budget that hasn’t been spent yet. The average annual operating cost for each new shelter unit, according to Pennucci, will be around $28,000 for each new shelterbed.

That number is be lower than the cost of tiny house villages that feature the range of services, including case management, meals, and 24/7 on-site staff, that Wilson said would be among distinguishing features of the new shelters. For instance, the city allocated $5.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute to add about 100 new tiny houses last year.

According to the mayor’s office, the $28,000 figure assumes that some shelters will cost less than the ones serving “high-acuity” clients, while some will cost more. In addition, some that are located on publicly owned land may end up paying essentially no rent, if the city can work out a deal with the owners.

At the same time, the legislation would allow the city to lease land at market rate, opening up more potential sites at a higher cost.

“We know that without services, these shelters are not successful, [and] because the people who cause the most disorder and have the highest impact on our community are people who have high needs and high acuity, we know we need 24/7 staffing,” Wilson’s chief of staff Kate Kreuzer said. “We want case management. We want integrated behavioral health support, so that when people come inside, they have the services they need, and then that is getting them on a pathway to housing.”

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In addition to a bill that would allocate the $4.8 million, Wilson’s office sent legislation to the council that would allow the city’s Human Service Department to select shelter providers directly and allow the department of Finance and Administrative Services to lease the property for new shelters itself. If it’s approved, this streamlined procedure would sidestep the KCRHA and bypass the usual 9- to-12-month process for siting shelters, which includes a competitive bidding process and requires providers to negotiate their own leases, permitting, and site preparation.

Nicole Vallestero-Soper, Wilson’s director of policy and innovation, said the first shelters could open as soon as next month. Wilson’s land use bills will likely go through Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee, and the financing will probably go through Dan Strauss’ budget committee.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, seeming to conflate “housing first” with tiny house villages, said he supported the idea of “housing first” if it was a “photo finish with wraparound services” that would not include the kind of “actions that really allow [unsheltered people] to not be ready” to come inside. (Wilson’s plan is more “shelter-first” than “housing first,” in that it consists mostly of new shelter, not rapid rehousing for chronically homeless individuals).

“I really think that the services piece is key, and then setting [people] up for success is the encouragement piece, as opposed to making it easier to stay outside, for example, because there’s a lot of service-resistant folks,” Kettle said. Service providers generally reject the notion that unsheltered people are “service-resistant” or that people live outdoors because it’s “easy,” arguing that there are valid reasons people avoid shelter and services that have failed before, such as shelters that prohibit pets and programs that kick people out for failing to maintain sobriety.

As we reported earlier this month, Wilson’s office did not preview the shelter proposal for the council or secure support in advance, which has been the practice with previous administrations. According to Lin’s office, he has outstanding questions about how the Wilson administration plans to rapidly scale up shelter, how the mayor’s office will measure success, and what role the city will play in engaging with the people living near new shelter sites.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

Crime, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 14, 2026
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center last year

A criminal case backlog, the mayor’s big shelter push, the state of downtown Seattle, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 9

Facing Thousands of Backlogged Cases, New City Attorney Says She’ll Reorg Her Office for Faster Results

After taking office, new City Attorney Erika Evans discovered a backlog of thousands of cases left over from her predecessor, Ann Davison. The reasons for the backlog are complex, but Evans says she’s taking one step she believes will help: Reorganizing the city attorney’s office so that each case is handled by a single attorney from the beginning.

Tuesday, March 10

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

This week’s podcast was all about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to add 1,000 shelter beds—primarily by building more, and larger, tiny house villages—before the end of 2026. We talked about what it will mean if Wilson is successful, particularly for those living in tiny houses while they wait for actual housing, which is expensive and challenging to site.

Wednesday, March 11

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ

The Seattle Police Department announced a still-unreleased report showing that when its Real Time Crime Center (home to SPD’s controversial surveillance cameras) is involved in a criminal case, SPD is three times as likely to make an arrest. Although SPD framed an increase in arrests as “victims getting justice,” they did not respond to our questions about whether these were justified arrests or if they led to prosecutions or convictions.

Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

Three local right-wing activists (including one, former FOX13 reporter Brandi Kruse, who has posted repeatedly on X, “I am not a journalist”) got big mad when they were denied access to a special press area in the state House chamber. They sued, and are currently losing. The guidelines for press credentials in Olympia are content neutral, but they do require that reporters are primarily engaged in news gathering and not working on behalf of political campaigns or for advocacy groups—a low bar all three activists failed to meet.

Thursday, March 12

KIRO Radio Ran a Segment Attacking My Reporting. They Still Haven’t Responded to My Efforts to Correct the Record.

KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” invited guest Angela Rye on their show to attempt to discredit my reporting about staff complaints against the director and deputy director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. In a 10-minute segment, Rye claimed, inaccurately, that I had written an “unsourced” story with false information as part of a broader effort by Mayor Wilson and her deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, to remove Black leaders and other Bruce Harrell appointees from city departments. (Both Harrell and Wilson, like all mayors, replaced some of their predecessor’s department heads.) This week, KIRO ignored all my efforts to correct the record and explain my reporting process.

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, Mayor Wilson cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event—framing a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority.

 

 

Economy, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event
View from the cheap cheap cheap cheap seats at Wednesday’s State of Downtown Seattle event.

By Erica C. Barnett

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, I got a kick out of Mayor Katie Wilson’s speech, in which she cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event. Wilson spoke after King County Executive Girmay Zahliay, who touted his three-day-a-week return-to-office mandate to surprisingly tepid applause.

It wasn’t that Wilson didn’t kowtow a bit to her corporate audience—saying, for example, that she wants to “keep our parks and public spaces welcoming and accessible to all” by “finally … putting people inside in large numbers.” People experiencing behavioral health crises “can make  the people around them feel less safe,” Wilson said. “We have to acknowledge that, and we have to do more to make all of our streets and public spaces feel more welcoming for people of all incomes and backgrounds, whether they live downtown or tourists visiting our city for the first time.”

But Wilson also used the occasion to frame a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority. “As a progressive and as a socialist— as a progressive and as a socialist—I believe it’s very important for people to have faith in their government, and that means, among other things, being able to trust that it is a good and effective steward of our collective resources. We can’t be afraid to stop funding things that aren’t working well.” (Ahem.)

The keynote speaker, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, was the co-author (along with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein), of Abundance—the book every pro-market urbanist in your life was urging you to read last year. Sounds like this was happening to Wilson, too, and she finally get around to reading it after the election.

It was pretty clear Wilson wasn’t as taken with the book as those who embraced it as a clever takedown of progressive dogma. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because she saw through its paper-thin thesis—that if liberals would only become libertarians, we’d live in an age of abundant housing, transportation, consumer products, and energy.

“Some of you might know that in my prior career, in addition to being a community organizer, I was also a columnist who’s written for some of our local publications, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t been running for office last year, I would have found time to write my critical take on the abundance framework,” Wilson said. “Now I’m in a role where I have to muzzle myself a little bit, so I’m going to resist the temptation, having an audience with Derek, to give my Abundance TED Talk.”

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Instead, she said, she’d focus on some things she liked from the book, like the Urbanism 101 argument that NIMBY land-use restrictions prevent housing from being built.

“I have to say, I also really love the abundance vision of the world, in the not-far-off year of 2050, when we’ve achieved such abundance and productivity that the work week has been shortened to just a few days,” Wilson continued. “I do hope that 10 or so years from now, when AI has thoroughly disrupted the job market, and you start hearing a national rally cry for a 24-hour work week, that many of the far-sighted business leaders here today will hop on board that train.”

I haven’t reviewed Abundance, and I’ll try not to here, but the few minutes I saw of Thompson’s PowerPoint presentation before I had to leave for an event across were pretty misleading examples—tailored for a a roomful of business elites who are inclined to oppose taxes and believe in the awesome power of free markets.

Thompson extolled Lakewood, a suburb of L.A., as an example of the dense housing that can happen in the suburbs when government gets out of the way. (Lakewood, as a contrast to Petaluma in Northern California, is a central example in the book.) But Lakewood sits on an artificial oasis in what would otherwise be harsh, unwelcoming desert, and that oasis was made possible by government intervention in the early 20th century, when Los Angeles diverted water from farmland, destroying farmers’ livelihoods to build a city in an otherwise uninhabitable area. The conflict became known as the Water Wars.

Similarly, Thompson’s praise for Texas and its vast solar farms would be inspiring, except that Texas (where I’m from) has a notoriously unreliable power grid—a fact that the dominant Republicans in the state, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have falsely blamed on renewable energy. They’ve also been working steadily for the past decade to undermine wind and solar while doubling down on fossil-fuel subsidies—but never mind that, look at this slide of a solar farm!

Thompson brushed past another example of what he considers anti-“abundance” waste—the fact that affordable housing for low-income and formerly homeless people costs more to build than market rate apartments—by saying there was no reason for this to be the case. While it’s true that rules for affordable housing can increase costs, a bigger cost driver financing, which typically comes from many public and private sources and can take months or years to secure. Eliminating unnecessary regulation is important, but it’s only part of the story—and  “abundance” advocates often simply ignore the reasons for some regulations, such as building codes and accessibility requirements.

As I said, I ducked out of Thompson’s talk after about two minutes (remember, I did read the book.*) But I hope the mayor will elaborate at some point—maybe on Seattle Nice!—about her reaction to the “libertarian, but make it pro-social” argument at the center of this bestseller.

*  Which, by the way, also lacks any substantive class or racial analysis and conveniently elides the experience of poor people in the US and the rest of the world. Somebody’s gotta mine all those rare-earth metals, pose as AI sexbots, and pilot those “autonomous” delivery robots, after all, and it ain’t gonna be the elites who write bestselling books promising us a frictionless technotopia is right around the corner.