Tag: surveillance

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

Police Roll Out Expansion Plans for Surveillance Cameras

By Erica C. Barnett

Just weeks after rolling out live camera surveillance in the Chinatown/International District, downtown, and along Aurora Ave. N, the Seattle City Council took up legislation this week that would expand the surveillance zones to include Garfield High School in the Central District and a section of Capitol Hill that includes the Pike-Pine corridor and Cal Anderson Park, a residential area that police have dubbed the “Capitol Hill Nightlife District.”

The purpose of the cameras, according to SPD, is to reduce and help solve major crimes in places where “gun violence, human trafficking, and persistent felony crime is concentrated.”

SPD Captain Jim Britt, who heads up the Real-Time Crime Center, the division of SPD that’s overseeing the implementation of the cameras, said the department hopes to incorporate camera footage from other city and regional departments, such as the Parks Department, the Seattle Public Library, King County Metro,, Sound Transit, and “anybody that has a camera in the Seattle area.” (SPL confirmed it does not have surveillance cameras, and SDOT director Adiam Emery said the department already shares its camera footage with SPD).

Attached to the legislation, almost as an afterthought, is a mandatory Surveillance Impact Report analyzing the potential impact of widespread camera surveillance, which was not yet finished when the city deployed the first cameras earlier this month. The report includes more than 110 pages of comments submitted by Seattle residents over a two-week feedback period, most of them opposing increased police surveillance of their neighborhoods. Many of the commenters argued that police cameras foster an environment of fear and control and violate civil liberties, particularly for marginalized groups.

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During Thursday’s meeting, council members attempted to dismiss these concerns by suggesting that people who support the cameras, such as homeowners and business groups, are underrepresented in public comment. District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth said most of the people she has talked to on Capitol Hill and around Garfield High School support the cameras, but are afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation from opponents, including the media.

“Many people don’t feel safe to come down to City Hall to tell us they don’t feel safe [in their neighborhoods] because of the backlash that they get from online media, from reporters, from people … because they’ll be a target,” Hollingsworth said. “They’re scared to come down to say that because of what they feel the backlash is going to be at their business.”

Defending their push to expand camera surveillance so soon after the initial pilot began, officials from SPD and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said the cameras have already demonstrated their usefulness.

However, a video SPD produced to show that the new cameras are already achieving their goals didn’t include any examples of gun violence, human trafficking, or major felony crimes.

In the first video, a man in a car chased down a driver who had stolen his truck, allegedly shooting out the window of the car he was driving without hitting or injuring anyone. According to Britt, SPD used the footage to track down the vehicle and return the car to the driver, making one arrest.

The second video shows a man with a visible knife that a 911 caller said he was using to “threaten” people in the area; the man wasn’t arrested because the 911 caller declined to cooperate, according to Britt. The third video showed a driver hitting a pedestrian; however, Britt said, the video was too blurry to register the license plate, so “the investigation is ongoing.”

Council members who support the cameras assured their constituents that they’re already common in other cities, and won’t be used to violate anyone’s privacy. “This is not the People’s Republic of China,” Councilmember Rob Saka said,  “where we have social scores that have facial recognition technology built in, on top of the CCTVs on every block, and they’ll track if you don’t do something for the party or the state, and they’ll monitor you and assign you a score. This is not that.”

SPD has said it will not provide camera footage to federal authorities seeking, for example, to track down women seeking abortions, trans people seeking gender-affirming care, or immigrants.

Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was sitting in on the committee, asked what would happen if a court ordered Axon, SPD’s out-of-state camera contractor, to hand over footage to the federal government. SPD Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey said the city, not Axon, owns its camera footage, and that “under federal law, any request falls to us,” not the company. Citing a case in which Axon defended another city’s right to control its own footage, Maxey said it was unlikely (though not impossible) that the company would violate its commitment.

Beyond cracking down on so-called crime hot spots, the surveillance impact report includes another, more generalized justification for the cameras: As of January 2024, according to the report, the city only had 913 deployable officers, hindering the department’s “effectiveness in solving cases and holding violent criminals accountable,” according to the report. But January 2024 was more than a year and a half ago, making it an odd date to include in a July 2025 report; since then, city officials, including Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Harrell, have repeatedly taken credit for what Harrell called “record-breaking” police hiring numbers.

If hiring remains on pace and SPD brings on 250 new officers this year, it will be well on its way to addressing the “staffing crisis” used to justify the cameras in the first place. Undoubtedly, if that happens, the city will come up with another reason to add more cameras to more neighborhoods. But it’s certainly worth asking why the city is celebrating its success at hiring more police, while simultaneously claiming that anemic police hiring means Seattle residents must  submit to indefinite police surveillance.

Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy, Uncategorized

As Police Roll Out Live Cameras in Purported Crime “Hot Spots,” Not Everyone Is Thrilled to Be Under Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the uses of new closed-circuit cameras that currently allow police to surveil 57 locations around the city, from Aurora Ave. N to the Chinatown International District, at a press event at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center on Tuesday. The department plans to add cameras in additional locations soon, including the area around Garfield High School, in Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor, and around the two downtown stadiums.

The city council funded the cameras, along with the expansion of SPD’s existing Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), last year, adding 21 full-time police positions and expanding the program beyond its originally proposed boundaries at an ongoing cost of several million dollars a year. SPD plans to integrate feeds from private cameras, such as surveillance cameras outside local businesses, into the system.

At Tuesday’s event, SPD Captain James Britt showed reporters how RTCC staff could use a live, map-based feed to monitor the cameras in real time, zooming and panning to see an area up close and from different angles. A six-minute video showed how footage from one camera at Aurora Ave. N and N 100th St. was used to apprehend a shooting suspect, along with footage from King County drones, private businesses, and the top of an apartment building.

Barnes said the cameras had been used in “600 incidents” and more than 90 investigations, but SPD did not provide a further breakdown of those incidents or say whether the city’s cameras duplicated the private surveillance footage that the police have always used in investigations.

City officials took pains to reassure residents that SPD won’t hand its surveillance footage over to ICE for use in immigration raids. “I can’t say enough, we’ll make sure everyone’s rights are protected and the right constitutional safeguards are in place,” Harrell said.

As a city council member, Harrell added, he was “the first person who proposed body cameras” for police and the “author of the privacy surveillance ordinance”—an apparent reference not to the far-reaching 2017 surveillance ordinance, authored and sponsored by then-councilmember Lorena González, but a 2013 law Harrell co-sponsored with then-councilmember Nick Licata that required council approval for new surveillance technologies.

The city has promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not every business owner in the areas under surveillance considers them a benign crime-fighting tool.

PubliCola spoke with Cory Potts, who owns the Center for Bicycle Repair near 12th and Jackson— a longtime “hot spot” for drug use and sales of both drugs and stolen goods. One of the new cameras faces his shop, which is located in a nearly 100-year-old building that was occupied by Japanese businesses before Seattle’s Japanese population was removed from the area and interred in concentration camps during World War II.

After a mass stabbing in front of his building, Potts said, a representative from the mayor’s office showed up at a community meeting to tell them the city was installing the cameras, which Potts later learned was not actually a response to the violence, but a plan that had long been underway.

The city had already made what Potts considered some troubling decisions in the neighborhood, which was historically known as Japantown. First, they placed signs around the areas banning “buying or selling merchandise” in public spaces. “I was struck  by the historical similarities,” Potts said. “There was no outreach about the signs whatsoever—all of a sudden, they went up.”

Shortly after that, city trucks began cleaning the streets with a foaming disinfectant that seeped into Potts’ building. A worker with the Seattle Department of Transportation told Potts the foam was meant to clean up urine, but “based on observation” and talking to the people who hang out near his business, “I don’t believe that was the actual purpose for the foaming,” he said.

“The city doesn’t give those people enough credit for how sensitive they are to the neighborhood and the stuff that happens here. I think they know what it means when a city truck drives by them and shoots foam at the place where they spent most of their time.”

As a business owner in the area since the pandemic, Potts says he doesn’t see how cameras will benefit him, given that he’s seen police hanging around all day without interacting with people on the street. The police department, and Harrell, promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking, but the building that used to house Viet Wah burned down after the building was improperly secured against intruders for months, Potts said, and no one did anything to address the situation.

He’s asking the city to blur out his business on footage from the cameras as a way to “stand up for what the building represents and what the history of the neighborhood represents.” On Tuesday, Captain Britt told PubliCola SPD generally only blurs footage of residential property, because commercial buildings are open to the public. “We would want to be cautious about [blurring out] businesses that front onto a sidewalk, because the sidewalk is an area that we would want to make sure that we had good footage of,” Britt said.

The RTCC expansion was one of many mayoral priorities that added $100 million in costs, most of them ongoing obligations, to the 2025-2026 budget despite a known revenue gap of around $250 million. In April, the City Budget Office issued a new revenue forecast showing that the city will need to close an additional, previously unanticipated budget shortfall of $241 million during 2025 and 2026. (The budget already assumed deficits starting in 2027).

On Tuesday, Harrell said his 2026-2027 budget proposal could include more funding to add more cameras and expand surveillance into additional neighborhoods. “We think this is good technology, and there could be a push to expand its citywide,” Harrell said. “Everyone in this room understands we have some constraints on our budget, and so it becomes a question of priorities.”

The city’s surveillance ordinance requires agencies like SPD to complete a Surveillance Impact Report, or SIR, before deploying any new surveillance technology. In its SIR for the new surveillance cameras, SPD said it was in the process of creating a new “omnibus surveillance policy” that would include a specific policy for CCTV. To date, an SPD spokesperson confirmed, the department has not completed either the omnibus policy or specific camera and real-time crime center surveillance guidelines, and has “no firm timeline” to finish the work.

According to the spokesperson, SPD’s two-person policy shop has been busy drafting new crowd-control policies but has already begun the work of researching and drafting the new policies around the RTCC.”

The city’s Office of the Inspector General has hired researchers from the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a two-year assessment of the RTCC and the new camera surveillance program.