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.”

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.