By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Katie Wilson announced she’ll proceed with an expansion of police surveillance in the Central District, Capitol Hill, and SoDo (where cameras are already installed), subject to a handful of new requirements that were outlined in the NYU Policing Project’s civil-rights audit, released yesterday. The decision, Wilson said, was part of “making Seattle the safest big city in the country—safe from gun violence and serious crime, and safe from authoritarianism from the federal government.” The expansion was proposed by former mayor Bruce Harrell but put on “pause” shortly after Wilson took office.
Like Harrell, Wilson framed her defense of mass surveillance in terms of community safety and justice. “Our city has too many grieving families, too many communities who rightfully expect crimes to be solved, but are losing hope of their day in court,” Wilson said. “Justice means protecting from harm and preventing it. It means delivering accountability afterward. My decision today strikes that balance.”
At a press conference with the mayor on Tuesday, interim police chief Andre Sayles said the cameras were a big part of the reason there were no homicides in June and that the World Cup was safe; Wilson turned on the cameras near the stadiums during the monthlong event, citing an unspecified “credible threat.”
But the Policing Project audit found that there was “thin” evidence that indiscriminate surveillance—their term for surveillance that applies to everyone in a public place, rather than people suspected of a crime—helps police solve or prevent crime. About 300 communities currently have Real Time Crime Centers like Seattle’s, which layer CCTV surveillance feeds with other data and live communications in an attempt to respond to crimes more quickly and solve them after the fact. The audit also found that while Seattle police often claim the RTCC was instrumental to solving a crime, the reality is that SPD counts any interaction with the system, such as an officer calling up a single camera, as a successful intervention.
The statistics SPD provided “reflect that in 2025, the RTCC assisted in 17 homicide cases, with its support helping to close 10 of these cases. In SPD’s data analysis, however, it defines RTCC “support’as a case in which an RTCC analyst takes any action (such as checking a camera), regardless of whether that action yielded any useful information or meaningfully impacted the investigation,” the report found.
Asked about this at a press conference on Tuesday, Wilson seemed confident that the cameras help police address crime, despite the lack of a “controlled experiment” proving that they do. She was especially compelled, she said, by arguments that police are short-staffed and need all the help they can get, including from camera footage and the ability to view crime scenes in real time and after the fact.
“I do believe, from my conversations with our RTCC staff and officers, that the cameras are helpful both in investigations and in real time incidents,” Wilson said. “And you can argue about how helpful. But I think [the cameras are] an efficient, effective use of our resources.”
Many opponents of police surveillance have expressed concerns that camera footage could be obtained by ICE or outside law enforcement agencies to track down immigrants or target people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.
The report itself pointed this risk out explicitly, noting that all that’s required to obtain footage is a subpoena or simple records request (which can be anonymous, and don’t require a requester to state the reason for their request). Wilson, however, said she would “not allow the data that the city collects to be used to harm immigrants, LGBTQ plus people, or others who may be targeted by federal agencies or other bad actors.”
Asked how she would accomplish this, Wilson noted that the report recommended limiting the amount of time camera footage is retained in a system owned by Axon, the company that provides Seattle’s camera system, when SPD proactively retains footage for investigations. Currently, that footage is stored indefinitely.
Wilson also noted that Seattle does not use Flock cameras, which are more widely used than Axon’s, adding that she believes Axon is a more “responsible” company. “Axon will continue to be a partner in designing a system for Seattle that meets our specific needs, fits our policies, and is consistent with our values,” Wilson said. In a video posted on X, Wilson emphasized the fact that there are “no Flock cameras in Seattle.”
“Flock, no. This is a different system managed by a different company,” Wilson said in the video.
But there’s really no difference between Flock and Axon. In an interview, NYU Policing Project’s director of technology law and policy, Max Isaacs, said that while Flock and Axon have focused on different segments of the market, “it’s not like one is good and one is bad, or either one is better than the other. They’re both trying to do a similar thing, adopting similar business models” in an attempt to become “the Apples of surveillance tech.”
On Tuesday, Wilson acknowledged that “there’s no such thing as zero risk,” adding that Seattle (like Washington state) has directed police not to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts or help other states track down people who get health care here. “If the city gets a request from law enforcement that it can’t legally refuse, “we will shut down the camera system at least for 60 days,” she said.
Wilson’s announcement did not include the most ambitious recommendation from the NYU report, which said Seattle should require police to get a warrant before they go through footage “retrospectively” to track a person’s past movements. The report said this step was important to protect people from unlawful searches, and noted that it would only apply in the relatively rare circumstances when police want to track where someone went as part of an investigation, not in situations like a real-time response or to look at a crime scene remotely.
Wilson brushed a question (from the Urbanist) about why she didn’t include a warrant requirement in her announcement, saying Seattle police don’t use the RTCC to track people after the fact. An SPD spokesman confirmed that they have not used the cameras this way, largely because it would be a cumbersome process to track someone from camera to camera, given the current limits of the RTCC technology. However, the department does not have an explicit policy preventing them from using footage in this way, which was what the proposed warrant requirement was meant to address.
Among other commitments, Wilson sad SPD had agreed to complete and publish a dashboard on its usage of the RTCC and create an “omnibus surveillance policy,” two commitments the department made in 2024 and in 2025, respectively, but has not completed. Wilson also announced that SPD “will clarify and strengthen its policies and practices around permissible uses, access criteria and logs, data retention periods, requests from outside agencies, regular internal audits, and more.”
The city is also setting up an advisory group that will meet over the next few months to “develop additional policies around private camera integration, usage of the RTCC during large-scale events, protests and other First Amendment activity, and criteria guiding any future CCTV camera placements,” according to the announcement. Currently, 23 privately owned cameras at three locations feed directly into the Real Time Crime Center; individuals and business owners have voluntarily registered another 900 cameras at 159 locations, saying they will let SPD to use their private footage on request.
Meeting with the press immediately after Wilson’s announcement, City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle had measured praise for Wilson’s decision, which he said made obvious sense based on the conclusions of the study. (Previously, Kettle called Wilson’s decision to hold off on installing new cameras until the audit was complete “unconscionable.”
Kettle said he “disagree[d]” with the Policing Project’s finding that real time crime centers and surveillance do little to prevent or solve crime. In Seattle, he said, “Everybody thinks if you have 100 instances of crime, that you have 100 people doing it,” Kettle said. “That’s not the case. You may have 10 people doing 10 crimes, and then if that one person, if you’re catching them on crime two out of ten, then you’re preventing those next eight.”
Councilmember Eddie Lin said he was disappointed with the decision, and wished that the mayor had waited until the results of an additional audit by the city’s Office of Inspector General and the University of Pennsylvania come out early next year. That study will look into how the RTCC is used and whether Seattle’s surveillance system is effective at addressing crime.
“We were supposed to be getting these reports before we expanded further,” Lin said. “I think this recent report only reinforces the the need for us to have better protections and oversight in place,”
In a statement, the OIG said the NYU report and recommendations “reinforce and further inform issues that OIG identified in its first annual surveillance review; risk of improper data sharing with outside agencies, unclear criteria for expansion of RTCC technologies, and the need to enforce privacy protections on integrated cameras.”