By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest for this week’s episode of Seattle Nice (don’t worry, we’ll get back to our traditional bickering format soon) is new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, who beat Position 9 incumbent Sara Nelson in a blowout last year. Foster, like fellow newcomers Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who’s been there a year), is a progressive, with a resumé and policy priorities to match.

Since Foster heads up the council’s Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights committee, we started out by talking about homelessness: How’s new Mayor Katie Wilson doing so far, and does Foster want to see fewer encampment removals?

Wilson is expected to release plans for a “shelter surge” in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the city has continued moving unsheltered people from place to place, though now—according to Wilson’s office—in a way that attempts to “minimiz[e] harm.”

We also talked about laws passed by the previous council that increase penalties for using or possessing drugs in public, which include “stay out” orders banishing people from certain “drug areas” before they’re found guilty of any crime. Foster affirmed that she doesn’t plan to propose repealing the law, but did say she expects police to limit arrests to situations where someone poses a threat of harm to themself or others—a concept that’s codified in the law, but that remains troublingly vague.

We turned next to the Seattle Police Department’s use of 24/7 surveillance cameras, which Foster unequivocally said “should be turned off and come down.” Wilson’s office hasn’t made an announcement about the cameras yet, but Foster noted that the ones installed most recently have not been turned on yet. In addition to concerns about police surveillance generally, opponents have pointed out that the federal government can easily demand access to camera footage, putting immigrants and other vulnerable people at risk.

SPD claims the cameras deter and help them solve crimes, but has not presented specific, compelling evidence that camera surveillance helped them solved a crime that could not have been solved using other methods, including private surveillance cameras and traditional police work.

Nor, Foster noted, do they seem to address violent crime, one of SPD’s most frequent justifications for putting them around the city. “When we’re thinking about the technology matching the challenge, that’s where I see sort of a misalignment,” she said. “I do want to make sure that we’re … making sure our tools match the issues that we are trying to solve.”

We also squeezed in time to talk about the upcoming library levy, the new neighborhood centers, and former mayor Harrell’s “deeply unsustainable” budget, which sets up Wilson and the council for budget cuts—and potentially new revenue options, like a local capital gains tax.