Category: Privacy

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Wilson Turns Off Stadium Surveillance Cameras, Homeless Authority Director Tells Staff Not to Trust the Media

1. As PubliCola first reported on Bluesky yesterday, Mayor Katie Wilson is turning off the police surveillance cameras around the downtown stadiums now that the final World Cup match in Seattle is over. In an official announcement this morning, Wilson said the decision “follows through on the commitment I made last month that these particular cameras would only be turned on for the duration of the FIFA World Cup in Seattle, because of its high global profile and the unique circumstances surrounding the event.”

In March, Wilson approved the installation of the cameras but said she would not have them turned on, and connected to the Seattle Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center, unless there was a “credible threat.” After months of pressure to tur.n the cameras on before the World Cup, Wilson announced that there had been a credible threat and she was ordering SPD to turn the cameras on.

Anti-surveillance activists, who had planned a rally and press conference today demanding Wilson to turn the cameras off today, praised the decision. But they said they were still skeptical that the cameras are fully off, posting video showing a camera unit near the stadium still plugged in. Asked to clarify what Wilson meant by “off,” a spokesperson for her office said, “The cameras were turned off via a PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch. As the cameras are not receiving power, they are not operational, and not capable of recording.”

For some anti-surveillance activists, that isn’t enough; they want visual evidence that the cables have been disconnected, which would require workers to go up to each camera unit and physically disconnect the lines. Noah Williams, a Transit Riders Union member who works in cybersecurity, said one of the challenges with camera systems like SPD’s is that technical specs vary from system to system, and SPD has not shared how its cameras, which are provided by Axon, work. (The TRU, which Wilson co-founded, is part of a coalition called Community Not Cameras, which planned today’s press conference and rally).

“It is really hard to verify that the mayor’s intent is being carried out because of the nature of the way these systems are designed and installed,” Williams said.

Wilson’s spokesperson said there are “other electronics in the camera cabinets (router/modem, Linux box, a cooling fan, etc.)” and that shutting these electronics down would require the city to send out bucket trucks, costing time and money. “Regardless of the power status of any of those devices, the cameras themselves are not operational,” the spokesperson said.

Wilson said she still plans to wait until the NYU Policing Project completes its data and security audit of the surveillance camera system later this year before deciding whether to turn on the stadium cameras and put other neighborhphoods, including parts of Capitol Hill and the Central District, under camera surveillance. Cameras have remained on in other areas, including Aurora Ave. North and downtown.

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2. Late last month, Mayor Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay announced that the city and county will be taking over almost all of the region’s homeless shelter and service contracts, a change that will result in an initial 20 to 25 layoffs, according to city and county officials who briefed reporters on the “right-sizing” effort late last month.

In an all-staff email about the announcement on Friday, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison didn’t focus on her employees’ understandable concerns about their jobs. Instead, she suggested that the press were wrong about the number of potential layoffs, noting that she was the only person who had control over how many people would lose their jobs.

“A lot of information is floating around in the media and among various levels of our partner organizations,” Kinnison wrote “In particular, there is much speculation about the number and timing of a KCRHA reduction in force.”

But Kinnison assured staff: They shouldn’t trust the media. “Please remember that the media frequently get facts slightly or very wrong,” she wrote. “Especially outlets with low journalistic standards with a history of one-sided, agenda-driven, or incorrect reporting.” As the outlet that has covered the KCRHA longest and most doggedly (going back to the “One Table” meetings that eventually led to the KCRHA’s formation), PubliCola stands by our years of reporting on the agency.

“As I said yesterday,” Kinnison continued, “my actions to reduce our workforce will come from discussions with Department Chiefs, HR. Protec17, and our partners and funders. I have full authority to manage our workforce to align with our budget and labor agreements short of a new resolution passed by our entire Governing Board that curbs that authority.”

A reduction of 20 to 25 staffers would represent about one third of the agency’s current 73 staff, leaving around 50 people on the agency payroll.

It seems unlikely that the layoffs will stop with the initial round. After the local contracts that made up the vast majority of its work go back to the city and county, KCRHA will be left with just a handful of official duties: Serving as the organization that applies for federal contracts, overseeing the emergency “activation” of overnight winter shelters, and conducting the Point in Time Count of the region’s homeless population next year. All Home, the organization that previously did all this work except the winter shelters, had between 7 and 10 people on staff.

Guest Contributor, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Seattle Turned on the Surveillance Cameras Before It Wrote the Rules
Screen shot of footage from a police camera that was looming over a Planned Parenthood clinic on Aurora Avenue N, obtained by Our Seattle through a records request.

By Phil Mocek

On Friday, Mayor Katie Wilson activated the Stadium District surveillance cameras for the duration of the FIFA World Cup, reversing the pause she announced in March. Invoking a briefing from Seattle police and the FBI, her late-afternoon public announcement identified “general but credible threats” to justify the deployment.

Two days earlier, at a Seattle CityClub event, she had defined a credible threat narrowly: Information that a specific person “has the intention to cause harm” and that “it is believable that they might be able to carry it out.” A “general” threat at a large event is not the narrow thing she defined. It is the ambient condition of hosting a mega-event, present at any gathering of this scale, identified by no one in particular, aimed at no one in particular. As a justification for recording crowds of people suspected of nothing, it has no natural limit, and will return every time the city hosts the world.

The standard Wilson set on Wednesday did not survive even until Friday.

What she conceded in the same breath as her announcement matters as much as her reversal. Even as the cameras go on, Wilson said, the city will “continue honing our policies and protections to safeguard the data these videos capture.”

Those protections have not been written. The cameras are on anyway, recording everyone who passes by, without any suspicion of wrongdoing. That is the entrance built before the exit: the sequence that quietly turns a temporary emergency measure into permanent infrastructure. 

The city already has a working example of the alternative: SPD has suspended its patrol-car license-plate readers while it works out how to comply with a new state law restricting collection near schools, clinics, and courts. Rules first, then the system. For the stadium cameras, though, the city reversed that order.

The debate that produced this was flattened into a single question: On or off. But “on or off” was always the wrong question. The consequential questions are who controls the switch, under what written rules, where the footage goes, how long it is kept, and who can access it. On Friday the city answered “on” and left the rest blank.

Strip away the World Cup  urgency and the case for the cameras rests on one claim: that the footage might help after something goes wrong. Wilson acknowledged  as much at CityClub, where she said cameras are “less” useful for “preventing or deterring crime” than for solving it.

That concession should end the prevention argument the camera hawks on the City Council are making. But investigative usefulness was never the test. Almost any sufficiently invasive practice is useful to investigators: Door-to-door searches would be, document checkpoints would be, unfettered access to medical records would be. We restrict those not because they don’t  work but because a free society does not make its residents prove their innocence to a camera. The burden is on the government to justify watching a population suspected of nothing. “It might help” does not carry that burden.

By turning the cameras on, Wilson added to a system that already sits in constitutionally uncertain territory. Washington’s constitution forbids disturbing anyone’s “private affairs … without authority of law,” and the State Supreme Court reads that guarantee as broader than the federal Fourth Amendment—broad enough to require a warrant before police track a car’s movements (State v. Jackson), and explicit that the protection does not shrink merely because people have grown accustomed to being watched. 

Federally, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that assembling a record of a person’s movements over time can constitute a search even when each movement happens in public — while declining to decide whether ordinary security cameras cross the same line. A permanent, recorded, searchable network trained on public crowds sits squarely in the space those rulings left open. The cameras on Aurora already sat there; the stadium network enlarges it. What changed on Friday is not the constitutional question but the mayor’s posture toward it: In March, she hit “pause” precisely to avoid feeding that uncertainty, and on Friday she fed it anyway, before the safeguards she promised exist.

None of this is a complaint about cameras in general. The stadium district was never going to be unwatched: The city’s emergency operations center already takes continuous feeds from hundreds of SDOT traffic cameras, and police routinely pull footage from private businesses after an incident. What is different about the stadium cameras—20 installations, each consisting of four fixed lenses forming a 360-degree view, plus one pan-tilt-zoom camera, for 100 distinct feeds—is what becomes of the images: They feed SPD’s Real-Time Crime Center. 

As City Councilmember Bob Kettle approvingly noted in his statement commending the activation, the decision “connect[s] them to the Real-Time Crime Center.” There, the footage is recorded, retained, and searchable. What sets it apart from a live traffic feed is not the lens but the system behind it: images pulled into a police database, held, and made available for investigative use rather than passing through and vanishing.

Because this database is hosted by a private vendor, it can be retrieved by subpoena, including from out of state. The city’s own surveillance law already says as much: Data may be shared “to the extent required by court order, subpoena, or as otherwise required by law,” no matter what data protections the city has promised. And the footage need not wait for a subpoena in order to escape: Anyone can request and receive it under the Public Records Act—including, as advocates have noted, out-of-state authorities checking who drove past a reproductive health care clinic. It is a different object from a live traffic feed, and it is the object now switched on.

A spokesperson clarified to PubliCola that once the games are over, the city will turn the cameras back off until a long-term decision is made about the original pilot program. That is welcome, but it is not a sunset date or a binding protocol, and switching cameras off is not the same as deleting what they recorded. The fine print the city skipped is still missing: published activation criteria, a single named official accountable for making  the call, a retention-and-deletion schedule for everything captured or derived from it, a firm decommissioning date, and a binding commitment that the data will be purged and never shared for immigration enforcement purposes. None of that requires waiting. All of it could be published before the first World Cup match on June 15.

The council’s majority spent months pressing Wilson to turn the cameras on. But it cannot compel a mayor to run a surveillance system, and no one should want it to. That power would effectively bind every future mayor to operate every funded system, no matter what later comes to light.

Wilson says she cares about privacy, and that her team is working on the rules. A published protocol, a firm deletion date, and a decommissioning plan before June 15 would prove it. Until then, turning the cameras on is not a public-safety policy. It is the absence of one.

Phil Mocek is a software engineer and civic technologist who researches government surveillance and public-records compliance in Washington.

Mayor Wilson, Privacy, public safety, Taxes

Wilson Backs Down on Tenant Protection Rollbacks, Fire Department Funding Plan Fizzles, Privacy Advocates Push Back on Surveillance During World Cup

1. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed that Wilson will not be proposing changes to the city’s just cause eviction ordinance that housing developers, including the Housing Development Consortium, had been pushing for months. Tenant advocacy groups opposed the potential changes and met with Wilson the week before last to urge her not to move forward with the changes.

Some affordable housing developers have argued for years that the city’s landlord-tenant protections, which are stronger than the state’s,  have made it impossible for them to evict tenants who don’t pay rent or break the law. Specifically, they wanted Wilson to roll back the city’s roommate law, which allows renters to add roommates without asking their landlords’ permission, and and align the requirements to evict a tenant with three days’ notice with the more landlord-friendly state law.

“The Mayor is not proposing changes to the roommate law or the three‑day notice,” a Wilson spokesperson said. “Her office has received proposals and perspectives on a wide range of economic, health, safety, and operational issues.”

Former City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she would introduce legislation that would have rolled back the roommate and three-day notice provisions but resigned before she actually introduced it.

Had Wilson introduced the rollbacks, tenant advocates argued, it would have given centrist councilmembers the opportunity to reopen the entire just cause eviction law, which includes many other provisions landlords oppose. The optics of Wilson—a tenants’ rights activist before becoming mayor—proposing landlord-friendly legislation that even her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, didn’t support would also be terrible, for obvious reasons.

Wilson does plan to propose legislation, in collaboration with Councilmember Dionne Foster, to curb rental “junk fees” in July, her spokesperson said. Wilson wrote about these fees, which include “notice fees,” fees for going month-to-month, and monthly “billing fees,” for PubliCola in 2023.

2. A proposal to create a special taxing district to pay for the Seattle Fire Department is dead, at least for this year, PubliCola has confirmed.

Creating a fire district would have allowed the city to fund much of SFD’s budget through a new property tax, moving that money out of the city’s general fund and helping to close a budget deficit Wilson recently said would be close to $175 million. The district, authorized by a new state law this year, would have had the ability to levy taxes outside the existing property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed property value, making it an appealing way to offload a big chunk of city spending.

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The firefighters’ union, however, did not get on board, effectively killing the proposal. The plan would have made much of the fire department’s funding subject to regular voter approval; it would have also moved SFD under the direct control of the city council, acting as the fire district’s board; the union reportedly wanted SFD to have direct participation on the board, at a minimum.

PubliCola exclusively reported on the potential fire district proposal last month. At a City Club event last week, Wilson said the city is facing a budget deficit of “about $175 million next year.” Without the fire district serving as a relief valve, Wilson will likely introduce additional taxes this year, including a local capital gain tax opposed by business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber and Downtown Seattle Association.

3. In response to Wilson’s announcement last week that she will turn on police surveillance cameras in the stadium district for the upcoming World Cup games, the anti-surveillance advocates at Community Not Cameras questioned the mayor’s claim that police and the FBI had presented evidence of a “credible threat” to public safety. Wilson previously said she would not turn the cameras on without evidence of a credible threat, but did not clearly define what she meant by that term; last week, she cited “general but credible” threats to justify activating the cameras.

“By activating an Axon-backed surveillance grid in Seattle, the City is risking this data being handed over to a weaponized federal intelligence apparatus,” the coalition said in a statement.

“[R]egardless of whatever bureaucratic policy or verbal assurances the Mayor hides behind, the City of Seattle does not have the power to stop the federal government from obtaining this data once it exists. Any local safeguards or policy limitations the City claims SPD follows are completely meaningless against the collection capabilities and legal mechanisms available to the federal government.  If you build it, and if you turn it on, they can take it.”

Our Seattle, a group of Wilson supporters who organized to hold the mayor accountable to her campaign promises, requested footage from one of the surveillance cameras, which SPD has maintained is deleted after five days and only accessible to a handful of people. They received and posted the footage on Instagram on May 28.

 

 

Affordability, Mayor Wilson, Privacy

At City Club Event, Mayor Answers Questions Like “Why Isn’t Pizza Cheap Yet”

 

By Erica C. Barnett

FOX 13 anchor Han Kim interviewed Wilson last night at an event sponsored by City Club Seattle, hitting the mayor repeatedly with bad-faith questions such as “why should we increase the sales tax for transit when so many bus seat are empty” and “why is eating out still expensive when you said you would lower the cost of pizza?”

Kim even posed a couple of questions Wilson has answered ad infinitum at this point: Why did she dismiss the idea that rich people will leave Seattle over the statewide high-earners’ income tax (a story that made international news , thanks largely to nonstop, breathless coverage by right-wing local news outlets in Seattle) and is she still boycotting Starbucks (shortly after the election, Wilson appeared at a workers’ rally and said people shouldn’t buy from the anti-union company)?

Wilson did say she bought a disgusting-sounding “blueberry muffin” coffee drink the other day when she went to the Pike Place Market Starbucks to talk to workers about their labor concerns—hardly breaking news. but now we know.

I live-posted the entire event on Bluesky, including questions from a parade of angry audience members who wanted to know why homelessness and crime haven’t been fixed and seem to have gotten worse. Wilson had some nuanced responses to these perennial rhetorical questions, but she also seemed a bit frustrated with her interrogators, who interrupted her repeatedly mid-answer in a way that—I AM JUST SAYING—I never saw the public address former mayor Bruce Harrell.

Kim also spent several minutes demanding that Wilson respond to comments by former reality TV star and current LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who claimed recently that a third of LA’s homeless population was “bused in from other states” by “body brokers” and would move 1,200 miles north to Seattle once he cracks down on their ability to access social services. Pratt also wants to force people with addiction into 72-hour mental health holds, which he referred to as “mandatory rehab.” None of this is worth dignifying.

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With the World Cup games just a few days away (and City Councilmember Bob Kettle insisting that the mayor had no right to place a “pause” on the new cameras under the camera expansion legislation the council adopted last year), Wilson was asked again about what circumstances would constitute a “credible threat,” which she has said would trigger the city to turn on cameras already installed in the stadium district.

“A credible threat is if we get information, as our law enforcement agencies often do, that someone has the intention to cause harm to people or property… and it is believable that they might be able to carry it out. That is a credible threat for us,” Wilson said.

The mayor also noted that to the extent that surveillance cameras are useful, it’s generally to provide evidence after a crime has been committed, not to stop crimes in progress. And she pointed out, as PubliCola has, that there are already many city-operated and private surveillance cameras around the stadiums.

Camera proponents have generally been more interested in anecdotes than quantitative data. Last year, Kettle opposed an amendment to the police surveillance plan that would have required an analysis to determine whether the cameras were accomplishing their stated goals before any additional expansions. The council approved new cameras just two weeks after the first set was installed.

 

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.

podcasts, Police, Privacy

Seattle Nice: Does Police Surveillance Make Us Safer?

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice is back after a couple weeks away, and we’re talking about police surveillance in the age of Trump. As PubliCola readers are surely aware, the Seattle council just passed legislation sent down by Mayor Bruce Harrell to install live, 24/7 police surveillance cameras in several new neighborhoods—a rapid expansion of a “pilot” program so new that the city has no data on its efficacy.

Civil rights and privacy groups, immigrant rights organizations, and the city’s own civil rights office, surveillance working group, and Community Police Commission opposed the expansion, as did virtually all of the people who showed up last week to express their opposition before the council’s lopsided 7-2 vote.

In our discussion of Seattle’s expanding web of police surveillance, we debated whether police cameras are effective at preventing and solving violent crimes—the stated purpose of the legislation—and if the loss of privacy is worth it to have a safer city.

You probably know where I come down on all this stuff. I’m not a fan of police surveillance, particularly when it targets so-called “high crime” neighborhoods while allowing residents of “safe” neighborhoods to go about their lives without cameras on every corner .But the potential downsides go much further than standard cop-brain overreach (i.e.: if cameras don’t make you feel safer, maybe it’s because you’re doing something wrong) at a time when the Trump administration and red states are seeking to use footage like the kind SPD is now collecting to target immigrants and people seeking abortions and gender-affirming care.

 

Not surprisingly, Sandeep and David had a somewhat different view—Sandeep says bring on the surveillance state (“I use Clear” at the airport, he said gleefullyy, in perhaps the most shocking revelation on this week’s show), and argued that the council has “built safeguards” into the legislation, like a provision that says the city can turn off the cameras for up to 60 days if the Trump administration issues a subpoena for footage.

David said a lot of people probably feel safer knowing police are watching, and suggested that my headline, “City Expands Police Surveillance Despite Overwhelming Opposition, Concerns About Civil Liberties,” was unsubstantiated, because the people who show up at public comment only make up a small percentage of the population. In other words: There could be a silent, unseen majority who supports police surveillance because it makes them feel safe.

We also discussed the mayor’s recent proposal to use city funding—$20 million a year—to help Black Seattle residents buy houses. Harrell didn’t release any specific details about his proposal at an announcement last week, and it seems likely that the money will come out of existing Office of Housing funds. Sandeep said the proposal is a sign Harrell’s campaign is taking affordable housing seriously; I argued that it’s more important to look at a candidate’s record than their rhetoric—particularly with Harrell, who’s been in elected office for most of the last 20 years but perennially campaigns as the candidate of change and new ideas.