By Erica C. Barnett
Editor’s note: This post has been updated with comments from Mayor Katie Wilson’s office.
On Tuesday, Seattle City Councilmembers Rob Saka and Bob Kettle trashed Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision, announced in March, to leave newly installed police cameras turned off in the absence of a “credible threat” to public safety during the upcoming World Cup games, suggesting that the mayor is “afraid, apparently, to use technology from the World War II era” (Saka) and deriding the “credible threat” standard as “not a professional standard” (Kettle).
“Ask the mayor of Atlanta during the ’96 Olympics, was there a credible threat notification on that bombing? There wasn’t,” Kettle said. The Atalanta Olympics bombing, infamously, was falsely blamed on an innocent security guard, Richard Jewell; the real bomber wasn’t caught until 2003, after setting off several more bombs in Georgia and Alabama.
“Reacting after the fact is not going to get us there, and so, as someone who’s worked in this field, I do have to say, I do not understand the [mayor’s] position related to credible threat,” Kettle said.
In a statement Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the mayor’s office said, “Identifying a credible threat involves multiple experts from federal, state, and local agencies monitoring and assessing various streams of information. In collaboration with one another, they weigh incoming intelligence and jointly recommend whether to elevate security operations. Mayor Wilson’s decision whether to activate the Stadium District cameras will be informed by this group’s recommendation.”
Saka, who showed up to this morning’s public safety committee meeting decked out in 2013 Boston Marathon gear (he held up his finisher’s medal, seen above, through much of his 12-minute speech), said he “didn’t know how to protect my wife” when the bombs went off that year, shortly after the two had finished the race. “I was there. … I know what chaos feels like.”
“I don’t think that our city is is as ready as it could be to host the world for such a global event of this scale,” Saka continued. “The good news is that the solution is simple. There’s a quick fix available. This council has previously authorized and funded the expansion of critical security cameras in key areas throughout the city.”
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Saka accused Wilson of wishful thinking. Waiting for a credible threat, he said, “falsely assumes and incorrectly assumes that the purported threat will always pop up on a radar every single time with no fail rate whatsoever. As someone who’s a former intelligence officer who did this work, I wish that were true. It’s just not.”
As Office of Emergency Management Director Curry Mayer reminded councilmembers this morning, the Seattle Department of Transportation already provide live camera surveillance feeds to the city’s Emergency Operations Center from hundreds of locations around the city, including more than a dozen traffic cameras around the stadiums and several around Seattle Center. The EOC, which will be heavily staffed during the World Cup, is activated during all major events in Seattle and will serve as the central hub for live monitoring and emergency response during the World Cup games.
“The cameras that we rely on in the EOC are the cameras that SDOT uses all throughout the city,” Mayer said, and are “very helpful for any kind of event.”
The EOC, notably, does not have any ability to access any of the surveillance cameras operated by SPD, which feed into a separate Real Time Crime Center at SPD headquarters.
Wilson is clearly feeling the pressure to turn the cameras on, whether or not they will actually add significant coverage to the existing web of surveillance surrounding the stadium district. Her spokesperson said the mayor “continues to consult public safety officials regarding circumstances that might warrant use of the expanded set of cameras during the FIFA World Cup. We appreciate councilmembers’ perspectives, and those will be part of ongoing discussions.”