By Erica C. Barnett
After dozens of Seattle residents testified in opposition to legislation authorizing the expansion of 24/7 police camera surveillance on Tuesday—the bill, which PubliCola has covered extensively, passed the full council on a contentious 7-2 vote—several councilmembers used most of their speaking time to chastise and criticize their constituents for speaking out against the bill—apparently more offended by overwhelming public opposition than by the likelihood that federal law enforcement officials will use the camera footage to crack down on vulnerable Seattle residents.
The city just created the surveillance “pilot” last year, but is already expanding it before the city can collect any data about its effectiveness.
The new law, introduced just weeks after the city rolled out live camera surveillance in the Chinatown/International District, downtown, and along Aurora Ave. N, expands the pilot to include a swath of the Central District centered on Garfield High School, the area south of downtown around the stadiums, and a section of Capitol Hill that includes the Pike-Pine corridor and Cal Anderson Park. It also incorporates hundreds of cameras maintained by the Seattle Department of Transportation into the Real Time Crime Center, a facility at SPD headquarters where police monitor the cameras in real time.
Opposition to the new surveillance program is widespread. Candidates who came out ahead in this year’s primary elections, including mayoral frontrunner Katie Wilson and City Council Position 9 frontrunner Dionne Foster, have opposed expanding the pilot program as have the ACLU of Washington, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Asian Counseling and Referral Services, and the city’s own Community Police Commission and Office for Civil Rights.
They argue, with substantial evidence, that CCTV cameras don’t help prevent or address violent crime, that they violate people’s civil rights and foster an environment of fear, and that provide new opportunities for the Trump Administration to subpoena or otherwise obtain camera footage to target immigrants and people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.
This week, 17 members of the state legislature wrote to the council opposing the expansion of police surveillance at a time when the Trump Administration is targeting blue cities, including nominal “sanctuary” cities like Oakland, with subpoenas for surveillance footage and other data that cities have no authority to deny the federal government.
Seattle, similarly, will have to comply with any federal subpoenas for surveillance footage. The fact that local laws prohibit police from volunteering this information does not make the federal government subordinate to Seattle’s local regulations, any more than it has in other blue cities that have policies prohibiting police from voluntary cooperation with ICE and other federal agencies.
Meilani Mandery, a resident of the Chinatown/International District, said that since the council approved 20 cameras on nearly every intersection in the area, “people can’t enter or leave the neighborhood without being surveilled. You did this to a poor immigrant community that remembers the racist surveillance of the 20th century, when the government surveilled Japanese Americans before sending them to concentration camps, and the cops had books of Chinese mug shots to profile and justify police violence.”
Expanding police surveillance, Mandery continued, “rolls out the red carpet for ICE to kidnap our families, friends and neighbors. Do we not deserve safety?”
Only a few people have spoken out, over numerous public meetings, in favor of the cameras and the expansion of the Real Time Crime Center, and emails to the council have been overwhelmingly opposed to the program. Nonetheless, several council members claimed that they have heard directly from constituents who haven’t provided public comment that they support the cameras, particularly constituents of color who believe surveillance will make their neighborhoods safer.
Debora Juarez, an appointed council member who represents North Seattle, dismissed opponents of the legislation as people “with a lot of god damn privilege.”
“You can go on and on about the Trump regime. We all watch the news. We get it. We know. I’m not going to go with fear. I’m going to go with facts. I’m going to go with subject matter expertise.”
In fact, the city’s own Surveillance Working Group recommended strongly against the cameras and Real-Time Crime Center before Trump was elected to a second term, noting that they had the potential to violate people’s Constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure as well as the First Amendment, which protects the right to protest and assemble in public. Public comments, the group noted in its report opposing the original program pilot, “were overwhelmingly negative and voiced a serious concern and lack of trust within the community as a whole of the Seattle Police Department’s plan to expand the use of surveillance technology.”
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Although the police department has said repeatedly that the cameras are effective tools for preventing crime and solving crimes after the fact—and the legislation itself says the primary purpose of surveilling Seattle neighborhoods “is to prevent crime [and] collect evidence related to serious and/or violent criminal activity”—some council members suggested the idea that the cameras would prevent crime was a red herring invented by opponents of surveillance.
Calling himself “one of the few people on this dais who understands the technology,” appointed Councilmember (and former SPD crime prevention coordinator) Mark Solomon said, “Cameras are not a crime prevention tool. They’re an investigative tool.”
“I hear folks say this isn’t going to do anything—well, tell that to family whose house has gotten broken into, because while the stats say that things are getting better, stats don’t mean nothing when it’s your house has gotten broken into, or when it’s your neighborhood that’s been shot at,” Solomon continued. “And I hear that from the people in my neighborhood. I hear that from my community, who are the ones who are saying, yeah, if we had cameras that could help.”
Council President Sara Nelson and public safety committee chair Bob Kettle were also quick to dismiss overwhelming public opposition to the surveillance expansion. Kettle said he had just talked to 24 people in Interbay, and “every single one of those 24 people, those two dozen people, would have been happy to have a CCTV program. So this idea that [there is] overwhelming opposition is false.”
The bills the city is passing to expand police surveillance, Kettle continued, “are not standard bills. They do not reflect what you see in other jurisdictions across the country and they are definitely not red state, red county American bills. They are Seattle bills.”
The council rejected several amendments that would have limited the expansion of surveillance to fewer areas of the city and created new evaluation requirements that would help the city better understand the impact of the cameras on civil rights and crime. In a mostly symbolic acknowledgement of public concerns, they did pass an amendment authorizing the city to pause the cameras for 60 days if the federal government issues an order to turn over camera footage for immigration purposes.
Only Dan Strauss and Alexis Mercedes Rinck opposed the legislation. In comments prior to the vote, Rinck said it was reckless to expand surveillance of Seattle residents at the precise time when the Trump Administration is targeting progressive cities and without any data showing that the pilot program has accomplished any of its goals.
In San Francisco, she noted, the police department itself shared data from automated license plate readers with police from red states, “in contradiction to all of their local policies and state laws that purport to shield their citizens.” Similar incidents are occurring across the country, including in Denver, Nashville, Washington, D.C., and cities across California, she noted.
“Sure, no city has done it exactly the way that we have. We have different contractor providers and different companies, and we all have different safety protocols,” Rinck said. “But this is happening across the board. Do we know with 100 percent certainty what happened in each of these cases that caused their systems to fail? Why do we think we’re so special, so across all across the US, in other liberal and blue cities where communities live, hoping that their government that their government will serve and protect them?”
“I do not look forward to the day where we have to sit back up here on this dais and deal with the aftermath of our data being handed over to other actors,” Rinck continue. “I do not want to be sitting up here in the future telling people telling people, ‘I’m sorry we put your community in danger,’ when we could have stopped it today. It is a matter of when, not if, our data will be handed over to the federal government and other actors.”
Rinck, currently the council’s only consistent progressive, could soon be joined by Eddie Lin (District 2) and Dionne Foster (Position 9). Debora Juarez, appointed to replace District 5 short-timer Cathy Moore, will be off the council next year, and the incumbents who won in the backlash election of 2023—Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, and Kettle—will be up for reelection in 2027.
If some of the council’s more conservative members are replaced by progressive challengers that year (and if Wilson defeats incumbent Bruce Harrell, as she seems on track to do), it’s likely that some of some of the heavy-handed police-state legislation passed by this council will be reversed—though not in time to prevent any privacy and civil-rights violations that take place as the result of expanded police surveillance between now and then.
