Tag: surveillance cameras

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.

 

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.

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.”

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.