Until Monday, Police Chief Shon Barnes was on the board of the Policing Project, which Mayor Wilson has tapped to do a security audit of police surveillance cameras here.
By Erica C. Barnett
On Monday, PubliCola exclusively confirmed, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes abruptly stepped down from the advisory board of New York University’s Policing Project— the organization that Mayor Katie Wilson tapped to perform a data and security audit of Seattle’s police surveillance cameras. Barnes joined the board in late 2025.
We reached out to the mayor’s office about the potential conflict of interest first thing Monday morning. Initially, a spokesman for Wilson told PubliCola that the “mayor is aware of the chief serving on that board” but did not indicate she had any concerns.
Late this morning, the spokesman, Sage Wilson (no relation), said Barnes “was not consulted in the selection of the NYU Policing Project. He chose to resign from the advisory board after the decision on the audit was made to ensure the audit process instills the highest degree of confidence.” The mayor’s office did not say whether they asked Barnes to step down.
In a statement, Barnes said he stepped down to “avoid any potential conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety. … I do not want my service to cast any doubt on the auditors’ work, which I am confident would meet the highest ethical and professional standards regardless of my service on the advisory board.”
Barnes noted that he hasn’t actually met yet with the board, which holds meetings infrequently, adding that “advisory board members do not influence or have insight into the research conducted by The Policing Project.”
Wilson (the spokesman, not the mayor) said Barnes was on the board “because he is nationally recognized as a leader on police accountability issues.”
The NYU Policing Project has done many surveillance evaluations, including a 2020 analysis of a Baltimore aerial and ground surveillance program that captured footage from an airplane and retained it indefinitely. That audit concluded that the program, which allowed police to track individual people both in real time and after the fact, had the strong potential for violating people’s civil rights and was subject to likely “mission creep.” After it came out, the Fourth Circuit found the program violated the Fourth Amendment.
According to the Policing Project’s founder and faculty advisor, NYU Law professor Barry Friedman, the Policing Project’s audit team generally looks at things like “retention limits, who has access [to footage], what kind of training they need to have, [and] what kind of logging is there about the reason databases were reviewed,” along with questions about a department’s use of AI analysis and algorithms to make decisions that result in arrests. “And at the end, we write a report.” Often, Friedman said, that report will include an analysis of potential harms and recommended “guard rails”—policies that can prevent a technology from being misused by the people operating it.
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For instance, the Policing Project has raised questions about how long a department is retaining footage or other personal information and for what purpose. In Baltimore, which had a 45-day retention period for aerial footage, their audit revealed that the department was actually holding on to footage more or less indefinitely. SPD’s current policy allows the department to retain license reader footage that’s “flagged” by a license reader for 90 days, although a new state law will reduce that to 21 days.
One thing the Policing Project’s audit won’t cover is whether SPD’s surveillance system is accomplishing its stated goals, which, at various times, have included deterrence and crime prevention as well as solving crimes that couldn’t be solved without police surveillance. “You really need social scientists to do that work,” Friedman said. “I’m super interested in that question, and it turns out how to be really hard social science, because you have to figure out [things like ‘What’s a control group?’ and ‘How do you know they couldn’t have solved it in other way?'”
The city is contracting with the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab to do an analysis of the cameras’ effectiveness. According to SPD’s website, “Successful implementation of CCTV will be “indicated by a decrease in violent crime, priority one response times, no increase or a decline in measures of police over-presence, measure of disparate impact, and an increase in perceptions of trust and safety.”