Tag: Seattle Police Department

City Council, discrimination, Mayor Wilson, Police

Councilmembers Say Wilson Must Turn On Stadium Cameras by June, Rob Saka Won’t Use His Committee’s Actual Name
And more details about the city’s settlement with an officer who sued over alleged racial and gender discrimination.

1. Highlighting a Monday update to last week’s story about the settlement between the city and SPD officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, who filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging racial and gender discrimination: The city will pay Bouldin $750,000, according to the settlement agreement. 

SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.

Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.”

2.  Citing concerns about potential attempts by ICE and other federal agencies to access camera footage and data, Mayor Katie Wilson said last week that she’ll hold off on expanding the Seattle Police Department’s camera surveillance program until an audit into the privacy and security of SPD’s camera operations is complete.

Some council members, including Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle, expressed concern on Tuesday that the audit will take too long, arguing that Wilson needs to turn on the cameras that will be installed around the stadiums in advance of the World Cup games in June. Wilson said the city will not turn the cameras on unless there’s a “credible threat.”

Committee chair Kettle, a former Navy intelligence officer, said this was inadequate, given how often major terrorist attacks have not involved a credible threat.

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“As somebody who worked in the intelligence security world, I think about 9/11. I think about being in European Command and Germany during the East Africa bombings, we were well aware of al Qaeda and bin Laden. … I was one of those people that read the chatter in the leadup to 9/11 and on 911 was there a credible threat, warning that al Qaeda was going to use planes as weapons to go into buildings? No. No, there wasn’t.”

“And it should be noted too,” Kettle continued, “that we’re in a heightened threat environment especially because of the Iran war. And it’s important to note that Iran was scheduled to play here on Pride weekend. And I think it’s important, among different other reasons, to also look out for LGBTQ+ community.” (Iran’s participation in World Cup games in the US remains up in the air.)

Kettle also chided camera opponents who “think they know the program” but, according to him, don’t. “They think they know all the decisions that went into the program, to include incorporating Seattle values, incorporating the idea that we’re not going to include facial recognition.”

Later in the meeting, the committee approved a “pause” on SPD’s use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on patrol cars and parking enforcement vehicles, which will put Seattle in compliance with a new state law banning the use of ALPRs near places of worship, food banks, immigration facilities, schools, and health care facilities that provide reproductive or gender-affirming health care.

Long before Trump was reelected, the city’s own Surveillance Working Group strongly recommended against installing the cameras at all, based on concerns about privacy and the risk of “disparate impacts … on minority communities.”

3. One of the oddest things that routinely happens at Seattle City Council meetings these days is that Councilmember Rob Saka refuses to refer to his committee by its actual name. For three years running, Saka has headed up the transportation committee, which was expanded this year to include arts and the Seattle Center, giving it the acronym TASC.

But Saka doesn’t use that acronym. Instead, he insists on referring to his committee as “STEPS,” short for “Safety, Transportation, Engineering Projects, Sports and Experiences.” He uses this not-quite-acronym consistently across all platforms—from the City Council dais to his Instagram, where he recently shortened the name to “Sports and Experiences, otherwise known as STEPS.”

Saka’s committee does not deal directly with public safety, engineering (beyond transportation projects), sports, or general “experiences.”

Saka has reportedly been asked more than once to refer to his committee by its actual name. Nevertheless, he persists. He even announced the “informal name” in a formal press release earlier this year.

City Council, Courts, homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

City Pays $750,000 In SPD Discrimination Suit, Council Queues Up Questions on Mayor’s Shelter Plan, King County Employees Push Back on In-Office Mandate
King County’s beautiful Brutalist Administration Building, closed since the pandemic. Photo by Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1. The city of Seattle finalized a settlement last week with Seattle police officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a longtime officer who sued the department in 2023, alleging gender and racial discrimination. Bouldin will receive $750,000 in an agreement that also requires her not to sue the city again over the same claims.

SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.

Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.” Among other allegations, Bouldin said SPD staff refused to give her a parking pass, mishandled her personal property, and retaliated against her when she complained about officers who allowed their dogs to “roam around” SPD’s south precinct.

The size of the settlement is unclear. Bouldin’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.

The City Attorney’s office would not say how much the settlement was for. In the initial tort claim that preceded the lawsuit, Bouldin sought $10 million from the city, according to media reports.

In a statement, City Attorney Erika Evans said Bouldin “is a pioneer at the Seattle Police Department who has been a beloved and deeply trusted presence in our community for decades. The City is thankful this case was able to resolve.”

2. The city council is poised to consider legislation that would make it easier for the city to site and build tiny house villages, but the three bills—sent down by Mayor Katie Wilson without prior conversation with council members or staff—will likely face scrutiny.

Two of the proposals—one that would provide about $5 million in funding for future tiny house villages, and another that would allow the city itself to lease and prepare land for shelters—do not have committee assignments yet. The other, which would increase the maximum size of tiny house villages from 100 people to as many as 250, is sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster and will be heard in Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee.

It isn’t the cost of the proposal itself that’s currently raising eyebrows on the council: Most of the funding would come out of this year’s budget, which already includes money for shelter that can be used to build out the first set of 500 beds Wilson wants to add before the World Cup games in June.

Instead, councilmembers are raising questions about the size of the potential shelters (there’s a big difference between 25 to 50 tiny house units and hundreds), the fact that Wilson seems committed to tiny houses, specifically (Jon Grant, her chief homelessness advisor, worked at the city’s main tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute, immediately before joining Wilson’s office), and the level of services the new shelters will be able to provide for an average cost of $28,000, which is less than existing shelters that provide 24/7 on-site staff and wraparound support for chronically homeless people.

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Behind the scenes, councilmembers have grumbled that Wilson didn’t work with them before dropping her legislation in an announcement that only Rob Saka, whose district includes SoDo and other areas with a large number of unsanctioned encampments and RVs, attended.

3. By June, most King County employees will be required to work from physical offices three days a week, and many employees are pushing back. (Seattle also has varying in-office mandates that we’ve covered extensively.) Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected to reflect that June, not March 30, is the general deadline for Return To Office. According to the county executive’s office, different departments are implementing the new mandate on different timelines.

In a recent internal newsletter, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay expressed his “commitment to building a Better Government includes listening to staff and empowering you to identify challenges and bring forward solutions” [emphasis in original]. Some county employees, taking him at his word, used the newsletter as a forum to express their frustration with the mandate.

King County covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many King County staffers do not live in or near Seattle, where the county’s central office space is located. Several noted that their jobs require them to go to far-flung locations; forcing them to commute to an office downtown will mean sitting in a cubicle and attending meetings remotely instead, they argued.

A number of staffers said the return-to-office mandate takes away valuable family and leisure time, contributes to stress and demoralization, and costs real money. “As a blanket and rigid policy, it disproportionately harms parents and caregivers who must secure new, costly childcare to cover mandated office days,” one staffer wrote. “It places the greatest strain on lower-wage workers and especially single working parents. The mandate forces parents to spend less time with their children, so they can sit in a cubicle alone with a headset, taking the same Teams calls they would at home. It forces employees to budget for new expenses (childcare, gas, parking, etc.) in a burgeoning recession when gas, groceries, and utility prices are on the rise.”

“Many staff moved to more affordable housing when positions were fully remote. That is how many of us are surviving,” another staffer wrote. “The long-term effects of this lowered productivity will negatively impact the work we do and the providers we support.”

Several staffers raised concerns about crowding in the county’s downtown office spaces, including King Street Center and the Chinook Building. The county scaled back on office space during the pandemic, and is now scrambling to find places for workers to sit. One staffer from the Department of Public Defense said staffers will now be forced to conduct client interviews from offices where three desks have been crammed into spaces built for one, compromising confidentiality in the name of “boots on the ground” and office camaraderie.

Asked about the employees’ concerns, Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said the executive wasn’t taking a “one-size-fits-all approach” and has, for example, allowed employees to meet their return-to-office requirements by working from county offices outside downtown Seattle. “Departments are currently developing plans to meet the three-day in-office expectation while continuing to preserve telework flexibility where possible,” Craighead said. “This includes coordinating in-office schedules and using existing space creatively.”

Responding to concerns about new expenses and the need for work-life balance, Craighead said, “The Executive recognizes that employees are balancing many considerations, including commute times and family responsibilities. As the father of a newborn and a toddler, he understands firsthand how important flexibility is for working families. His goal is to strike a thoughtful balance between maintaining the flexibility we value and strengthening in-person collaboration so the County can continue delivering strong results for residents.”

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.

legislature, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ; Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

1.  The Seattle Police Department announced earlier this month that its Real Time Crime Center, which receives live feeds from dozens of police surveillance cameras trained on neighborhoods across Seattle, “Triples the Odds That a Victim Receives Justice.” That’s a bold claim for an operation that just got access to live surveillance footage late last summer, when the City Council approved the controversial cameras.

SPD, which is pushing Mayor Katie Wilson to expand police cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods, is using stats like this to convince Wilson that the benefits of surveilling Seattle residents outweigh privacy and overpolicing concerns. (And it appears to be working).

But what does a “300 percent increase in victims receiving justice” mean? SPD canceled a scheduled interview with PubliCola seven minutes before it was supposed to happen—according to Mayor Wilson’s office, SPD put out their press release before the mayor’s office had a chance to look at the report—so all we can go on is the scanty data they provided us prior to our scheduled interview.

That data shows that the 300 percent increase represents an uptick in how often a dispatch (such as a 911 call) resulted in an arrest, broken down further into arrests that included violent crimes and those that were primarily property crimes. Overall, 11.7 percent of dispatches that “involved” the RTCC in some way resulted in an arrests, while just 2 percent of dispatches where the center was not involved resulted in an arrest. The data does not show whether arrests resulted in prosecutions, the percentage of arrested people who went to jail, the demographics of arrestees, or how the RTCC was “involved” in the arrests.

Even with the lack of information beyond arrests, it’s important to note that SPD is describing arrests in themselves as a form of justice, when they could just as easily represent the kind of over-policing that often results when police concentrate their energy on specific neighborhoods and communities. As SPD’s blog post noted (in order to make the opposite point), the new cameras are not located randomly; they’re trained on “high-crime” neighborhoods, including Aurora Ave. N and downtown; if the planned expansion moves forward, SPD cameras are also coming to the Central District and Capitol Hill.

SPD’s blog post goes so far as to describe every arrested person as an “offender,” regardless of whether they were ever prosecuted or found guilty of a crime.

Unsurprisingly, the data showed that in general, SPD was more likely to arrest a person for calls that involved a violent rather than a property crime.

2. Yesterday, a US federal district judge ruled that three right-wing activists—Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe, and Ari Hoffman—were not entitled to press passes allowing them into the non-public press areas inside the state house and senate. The three had requested day passes from the Washington State Capitol Correspondents’ Association (CC, saying that they were journalists and should be allowed the same access as the rest of the press.

*Except when requesting special access to legislators, apparently

Kruse, a former FOX 13 reporter, has posted over and over (and over) on X, “I am not a journalist.” She frequently speaks at right-wing rallies, including a rally against trans children held at City Hall last year. Choe, a former KOMO reporter, works for Turning Point Media, the campus activism group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the Discovery Institute, the local right-wing think tank that spawned influential MAGA activist Chris Rufo. Hoffman is a onetime City Council candidate who has a talk show on KVI Radio; he also plagiarized PubliCola on at least one occasion, directly stealing quotes and reporting and representing our work as his own.

Both Choe and Kruse recently took part in a cringe-inducing praise circle at the White House, at which Kruse told Trump that supporting him had made her “more attractive.”

The CCA guidelines for press access say, “It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work. This is the spirit in which the Legislature has offered access: The press should act as an independent observer and monitor of the proceedings, not an involved party. This means that we cannot endorse offering credentials to one who is part of, or may become involved with, a party, campaign or lobbying organization,” even if that person worked as a journalist in the past.

The judge in the case, David Estudillo, wrote in his ruling that the CCA rules require media to work for an organization “whose principal business is news dissemination” rather than political activities. Although the three activists accused the organization that issues press passes of being biased against them because of their political views, Judge Castillo noted that the legislature has issued badges to media across the political spectrum; the difference in this case, he wrote, was that all three activists’ main job is advocating and speaking on behalf of political campaigns and causes.

As an example, Estudillo noted that Kruse was a listed speaker at a recent rally outside the state Capitol advocating for two anti-trans initiatives targeting children. The first would overturn state legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids from being outed to their parents if they confide in a trusted adult at school; the second would bar trans girls from participating in school sports. Kruse and the other activists were arguing, in essence, that they should be allowed to headline a rally calling for the repeal of state legislation on the Capitol Steps, walk inside, and demand special access to the state legislators they were just rallying against by claiming to be “media.”

Morning Fizz, Police

SPD’s National Recruitment Push Includes Police Chief’s Alma Mater; Chief Attended Tiny Desk Concert with Security In Tow

1. Seattle Police Department officers are traveling across the country on a college recruitment tour, including a five-day trip this week to the Central Intercollegiate Athletics Association (CIAA)  basketball tournament in Baltimore. The CIAA includes a dozen Division II Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including Police Chief Shon Barnes’ alma mater, Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

A spokesperson told PubliCola last week that the department also “plans one coordinated annual recruitment trip that includes multiple universities in close geographic proximity, including several Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Consolidating multiple campus visits into a single trip allows for efficient use of travel resources while expanding outreach to historically underrepresented populations in law enforcement. These efforts are intentional, strategic, and aligned with our long-term workforce diversity goals.”

The SPD spokesperson said the inclusion of Barnes’ alma mater, which has about 2,300 students, was coincidental.

“The department prioritizes events that provide demonstrated applicant yield, and broad and diverse candidate pools,” the spokesperson said. “Our goal is to use our finite recruitment resources where they will produce measurable impact while expanding awareness of opportunities in Seattle.”

A majority of the CIAA colleges have fewer than 2,000 students, and several have student bodies in the hundreds. The spokesperson said SPD has no specific metric for measuring whether a recruitment event was an effective use of city resources, such as the number of people who applied after an event.

“Recruitment success is measured through overall applicant pipeline growth, diversity metrics, and long-term hiring outcomes rather than a single-event numeric target,” the spokesperson said. “Since implementing a more strategic and dedicated recruitment approach, SPD has seen applicant numbers reach historic levels.”

In fact, recruitment spiked shortly after the city signed a labor agreement with the police guild that boosted starting salaries to nearly $120,000, and more than $126,000 after a six-month training period, making Seattle one of the highest-paying police departments in the country. The raises represented a 42 percent pay boost over just five years.

The recruitment tour has included other stops outside the Pacific Northwest. This month alone, according to SPD’s recruitment events page, SPD has sent recruitment teams to a women’s softball tournament in Clearwater, Florida, as well as a Rutgers University event in Piscatawy, New Jersey; the University of Idaho; Brigham Young University; Utah Valley University; and Utah State University.

With the exception of the CIAA schools and Rutgers, most of the colleges and universities where SPD is holding recruitment events, including those in the Pacific Northwest, have student bodies that are more than 70 percent white.

The spokesperson said Barnes did not participate directly in the recruitment events.

Conservative talk show host Jason Rantz reported today that SPD was the “corporate sponsor” for the CIAA tournament and wrote the group a $25,000 check. We have reached out to SPD to ask whether they believe this sponsorship complies with state law prohibiting gifts of public funds.

Screenshot via YouTube.

2. Barnes did take a trip to Washington D.C. recently, accompanied by his security detail, where he attended a recording of a Tiny Desk Concert by Jill Scott, part of the long-running NPR series. A photo Barnes posted on Facebook shows him in the crowd, along with two members of his security.

SPD did not immediately respond to a question about how much it cost to provide Barnes with security while he attended the NPR concert. A spokesman told us late Wednesday afternoon that Barnes was in D.C. last November to attend the Active Bystander for Law Enforcement conference, “a nationally recognized program that trains officers to intervene when they spot officer misconduct and provides resources for officer health and wellness.”

Mayor Wilson

In State of the City, Wilson Punts on Key Issues—Including Sweeps and Police Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

In her first State of the City speech at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute on Tuesday, Mayor Katie Wilson outlined a policy agenda that was still short on details—and punted major issues, such as how she plans to add 1,000 new shelter beds this year, to the near future.

The speech, which Wilson wrote herself with assistance from staff, was characteristically nerdy. Wilson did not use a basketball as a prop or shout out invited guests who served as symbols for particular priorities. She thanked the city employees who toil in obscurity to keep the city running. And she paid tribute to the city’s diversity, noting that February simultaneously marks Black History Month, the Lunar New Year, Ramadan, and Lent.

At times, Wilson sounded like she was equivocating on campaign commitments after talking to people who opposed her agenda; for example, speaking about neighborhood surveillance cameras, Wilson said she “continue[s] to have concerns” about data security and the use of cameras to target vulnerable communities, but had been “moved by what I’ve heard from families and communities impacted by gun violence.”

Any mayor’s first State of the City speech, traditionally delivered in mid-February, will be necessarily short on policy achievements. But given Wilson’s mandate to undo some of the excesses of her predecessor—who utilized fear of violent crime and “disorder” to crack down on unsheltered people and expand police surveillance of Seattle residents—her speech was more equivocating than determined.

When we wrote about former mayor Bruce Harrell’s first State of the City speech four years ago, we emphasized the new mayor’s talking points on homelessness and the “unacceptable status quo” in the city, which was still recovering from COVID. Harrell committed in his speech to eliminate visible homelessness downtown through a public-private partnership known as Partnership for Zero, telegraphing a commitment to sweeping homeless people out of the downtown business district that continued relentlessly even as Partnership for Zero fizzled.

Harrell also telegraphed his intent to continue raiding the JumpStart tax, which had been earmarked for affordable housing and other progressive purposes, to pay for the city’s general budget—a commitment he would keep for four straight years, padding the budget with personal priorities while ignoring the reasons the city adopted the tax in the first place. Harrell also emphasized his desire to dramatically ramp up police hiring and crack down on “disorder.” Four years later, the speech looks like a preview for his entire term.

Will Katie Wilson’s first major speech as mayor prove similarly prescient about the priorities that will preoccupy her for the next four years? If so, she gave far fewer specifics. The speech was largely a reiteration of the mayor’s campaign priorities—affordable housing, child care, adding 1,000 shelter beds in her first year, and a potential public grocery store—combined with “wait and see” statements about some of the most controversial issues that came up on the campaign trail and were among the reasons voters elected her over the incumbent.

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Wilson, to be clear, never claimed on the campaign trail that she would “stop the sweeps.” But supporters who believed she would dramatically slow down the breakneck pace of encampment removals have been disappointed to see sweeps continue around the city. Wilson noted that she ordered the city’s Unified Care Team, a massive, multidepartmental team that removes encampments, to take more time removing an encampment in Ballard earlier this month, which allowed the city to find shelter for five people who might have otherwise been swept. Most of the encampment residents, however, were told to move along, replicating a familiar pattern from previous administrations.

The incident emphasized for Wilson that “we simply don’t have enough housing, shelter, and services for everyone who is living unsheltered,” she said, promising to work on those issues as part of her “affordability agenda” and separate plan to “introduce legislation to city council to fund shelter expansion and make it faster and easier to build shelter in our city.”

But, she added, it’s also important to keep “public spaces open and accessible,” by “prioritizing encampment removals based on safety issues and neighborhood impacts.” None of this exactly contradicts Wilson’s pre-election positions on homelessness. But it also echoes the rhetoric of her opponent and predecessor, who justified the pace of sweeps (and the expansion of the UCT) on the grounds that all encampments, including those that consist of one or two tents, are dangerous and diminish the quality of life for housed people who have to see them.

Wilson also seemed to walk back her previous support for removing surveillance cameras from several Seattle neighborhoods where they are either already deployed or have been installed but not turned on. Conversations with families harmed by gun violence, Wilson said, had “moved” her to reconsider and slow down any announcement on the cameras.

Police often justify expanding surveillance by promising it will help them prevent and solve the most devastating crimes, including gun violence and human trafficking, and the argument has emotional resonance. That doesn’t mean these claims are true; in fact, there are now decades of evidence that police cameras do not prevent or solve violent crimes. (Police have long relied on private cameras for footage of public spacess; they’re everywhere, owned by businesses rather than law enforcement). It’s the job of elected officials to say no if the evidence argues against a policy (as Dionne Foster, elected to a citywide council seat last year,  already has)—even when constituents directly impacted by crime believe false promises that a new form of surveillance will make their neighborhoods safer.

Wilson did not address the “SOAP” and “SODA” banishment zones for sex buyers and drug users that former city attorney Ann Davison reinstated, with the help of the city council, in 2024. (People accused of using drugs or attempting to pay for sex can be arrested and jailed for being caught inside these areas, even if they haven’t been convicted of the underlying offense). This probably signals that the zones, a 1990s relic the city had long abandoned, are now just another accepted violation of people’s right to travel freely through the city. That fact alone should serve as a reminder that increased police surveillance can turn into dystopian background noise if elected officials fail to listen to constituents who raise valid objections.