Let’s say there’s a dog in your neighborhood who can fire a taser using his mouth.
To your knowledge, there’s never been a dog like him where you live. Dogs of history, definitely. Dogs in other places, absolutely (on the news, you’ve heard “dogism” was on “the rise.”)
This dog is not “woke.” For months, he has broken into your neighbors houses to shock people with his taser. The dog claims your neighbors are anti-dog. You’re pretty sure they’re anti-taser.
Now imagine that your landlord, who has already placed a taser on the kitchen counter, wants to put a second taser on the kitchen table and a third in the cabinet for good measure.
“Won’t that make it easier for the dog to tase us?” you ask, confused.
“No,” says your landlord. “The taser is here to protect us from cats.” Cats had been causing mischief, you see. “Plus, dogs cannot jump this high.”
In the other room, the television is on. The dog is jumping on screen. You can’t argue. They’re your landlord.
This is, more or less, the situation. Yesterday, the City Council voted 7-2 to expand its network of police CCTV surveillance cameras to Capitol Hill, SoDo, and Garfield High School. And they did this despite two and a half hours of public commenters who opposed their decision, as well as memos and statements from the city’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and Community Police Commission, ACLU of Washington, several advocacy groups and 17 state legislators from the Members of Color Caucus asking the council to make a different choice.
The Council passed the original bill approving the two-year Real Time Crime Center pilot last year, and the cameras at Aurora Avenue, 3rd Avenue, and at 12th and Jackson in the Chinatown International District were installed just this spring.
The city claims the pilot has delivered early results, with footage “currently supporting” 90 active investigations, but it’s unclear exactly how it’s supporting those investigations. A large body of research suggests the cameras will not decrease crime. But they could hand the federal government a powerful tool to surveil immigrants, abortion seekers, transgender people, and political activists in Seattle.
With these serious concerns about privacy, bad policing and federal incursion, adding new cameras seemed like placing a high risk wager without a clear payoff, commenters and legal advocates said.
But Councilmembers Bob Kettle, Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Debora Juarez, Mark Solomon, and Joy Hollingsworth are willing to gamble, and call into question the city’s commitment to its “sanctuary” status.
During the lengthy public comment, the Council heard 105 people deliver the same basic message: CCTV surveillance could pose an incredible danger to people in Seattle. Four or five people lost their tempers, but most delivered clear, sober testimony.
Still, the occasional smattering of applause was too disruptive for Council President Sara Nelson. “Jazz hands and snaps,” she said.
Alex Fayer, a board member at Seattle Indivisible, said regardless of their intentions, Seattle cannot “guarantee how third parties or the federal government used this data,” and felt expanding this program now broke the “promise of a data-driven pilot.”
While they were all at the hearing, a man in a yellow shirt said, federal agents were cracking down on immigrants in Washington DC and Chicago. President Donald Trump had threatened Seattle and Portland. He went to Garfield, he said. He asked the council not to “do this to my community.”
An older woman with white hair said CCTV cameras caught a thief stealing her husband’s bike from a Safeway parking lot. That didn’t solve the crime. Or the crime of the person who smashed car windows in her alley. Just recently, she watched CCTV footage of a person breaking into their recycling and having “a great big defecation all over everything.” The footage led nowhere, she explained.
“I would just say, think about people and community,” she said.
Carl Knox, who said he lives in Ravenna, told them the cameras would aid and abet ICE. Surveillance centers didn’t care about people’s safety, they will sell to the highest bidder.
“This is a time, more than ever, where our cities who claim to provide a sanctuary must take that value seriously,” said Tara Miller, a co-executive director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. “It is our moral obligation in an immoral time.”
Through an interpreter, a Spanish speaking community organizer with the Church Council told the city council members that expansion would create an environment where “parents are afraid to go to work, where children stop going to school, and where everyone is subject to scrutiny, profiling and detention.”
A woman named Jill said cameras on Garfield High School’s campus did not “prevent the murder of Amarr Murphy-Paine, nor has that footage helped apprehend his killer.” Cameras created the “appearance the city is doing something to so-called reduce crime,” but the data showed this “extensive” privacy violation would not do that. The city could not promise this footage would not land in the wrong hands, she said.
“The city should be protecting its citizens, not making them even more vulnerable,” she said.
A man named Michael asked what the Council thought these tools would be used for when the federal government was threatening to send armed troops to blue cities. “I simply cannot wrap my head around thinking this is a good idea,” he said.
A local United Methodist pastor said the immigrants he worked with already feared being detained by ICE. “How much more fearful will they be knowing that there’s increased surveillance throughout Seattle that could be used to target them and their families?” he asked.
Meilani, a resident worker and historian in the Chinatown International District, said people in that neighborhood cannot “enter or leave” the CID without being surveilled. The city did this to “poor immigrant communities” who have not forgotten the government’s “racist surveillance” of Japanese Americans “before sending them to concentration camps.”
Sue Ann Kay, a longtime CID advocate, said her community needed housing, not cameras.
Chris Rojas, who said he had worked 15 years in the field of computer vision—teaching artificial intelligences how to “see” or interpret digital images— said that it was especially dangerous to embrace surveillance at this point in history. These cameras could easily be taken over by the federal government, he said.
Dylan Baker, a former Google engineer in computer vision who studies AI ethics, said surveillance cameras were not “created by people who are experts in keeping people safe—they’re created by people who are experts at building cameras and selling them to police departments.”
“They market their technology however they need,” Baker said.
Ashley Ford, co-chair of the city’s LGBTQ commission and development director at the Washington Bus, said the council knows Trump is coming after queer people—earlier this year, it passed a resolution declaring Seattle a “Welcoming City” for LGBTQ people—and yet, it is now “taking steps to collect information to put us in harm’s way.”
Joan said she was a trans person who worked with trans political refugees who fled to Seattle.
“I’ve held them in my arms as they cried, as they felt scared,” Joan said. “Councilmember Kettle, I know you are trying to keep people safer, but this is not the way to do it. This will put my community at risk…I know that’s not your intention, and I know you have a chance to change your mind.”
“Bob, I’m here, you’re my neighbor” said Stephanie Miller, “I’m here for my family and the large group of your neighbors on Queen Anne who could not be here today … We are begging you to vote no.”
Kettle, who wore a stern expression for much of the meeting, looked down. About twenty minutes later, he thanked everyone who came for public comment. Then he explained why he thought they were wrong.
The legislation that created Seattle’s CCTV and Real Time Crime Center were not “standard bills,” he said, “and they’re definitely not red state, red county America bills.” The CCTV data was safe, he said. He had a letter from Chief of Police Shon Barnes that said only 28 people had access to Real Time Crime Center data, and that all of them had been backgrounded and had obtained a Criminal Justice Information Services certification.
“CCTV is used for crimes, but immigration status is not classified as a crime,” Kettle said. “Executive Order is not law, plus the Keep Washington [Working] Act of 2019, is quite clear about this in terms of immigration—so we are covered in a sense.”
The crowd hiccuped with laughter. Public commenters focused on federal overreach assumed the Trump administration will continue to disregard precedent and the law.
“Their laws are not written like ours,” Kettle said. “And I should note, this is very important, their Governor is Governor Abbott. Their Attorney General is Attorney General Paxton—very different from Governor Ferguson and Attorney General Brown.”
The notion that people did not want these cameras was false, Kettle said. The council did its own outreach. Just last week, 24 people in Interbay told him they would be “happy to have a CCTV program in Interbay.”
“They didn’t show up,” someone shouted.
Kettle introduced one amendment to the bill, co-sponsored by Councilmember Rinck, which would shut down the CCTV program for 60 days if the federal government serves the city or its private vendors a warrant, subpoena, or court order for a federal civil immigration matter. Kettle was confident this “guardrail” would be enough, though presumably, if subpoenaed, the city would have to turn over the footage it had already captured. The amendment passed; four others that were intended to limit the cameras or evaluate the surveillance program failed.
From the dais, Rinck argued that expanding the program wouldn’t be a data driven decision, it would be “reckless with people’s privacy.” While the city hired researchers at University of Pennsylvania to study the pilot’s effectiveness, that work hasn’t even begun, she said.
Monday night, Rinck said, one of San Francisco’s Supervisors alerted her to “breaking news” that the city’s police department had let out-of-state cops search its license plate data 1.6 million times, which was likely illegal. At least 19 of those searches were related to ICE, the San Francisco Standard reported, “in contradiction to all their local policies and state laws that purport to shield their citizens,” Rinck said.
Last month, DC Councilmembers did “not imagine” police data would be used to “wage war on immigrant communities.” Earlier this year, Flock Safety license plate camera data collected in Denver was accessed in immigration-related searches over 1,400 times. Last month, an audit from the Illinois Secretary of State found Flock Safety shared its data with ICE, despite the state having a shield law to prevent local governments from assisting federal immigration officers.
“Sure, no city has done it exactly the way that we have,” she said. “We’re talking about different contractor providers and different companies, and we all have different protocols. But this is happening across the board … Why do we think we’re so special?”
Councilmember Hollingsworth explained her “yes” vote was meant to strike a “delicate” balance. As a Councilmember, it’s her job to keep people safe. It was hard, but she had to listen to people who had not shown up, like minority business owners on 23rd and Jackson, and the parents of Garfield High School students, she said.
Councilmember Solomon, another “yes” vote, said he knew the cameras were not a crime prevention tool. For a case to be assigned, a crime needed to be solvable. The cameras were an investigative, evidence-gathering tool, he said.
Councilmember Saka said his “yes” vote was about governing from a “majoritarian perspective.” The pilot program was a needed public safety tool. But if he sensed “in any way that this pilot program is being used improperly, or not in accordance with the strict guardrails that we laid out as part of the amendment process, I will be among the first to call for its immediate cessation.”
Councilmember Juarez said she was not worried about a breach. Her community didn’t have the “luxury of not calling 9-1-1. Our babies are being shot. Our children are being killed. Our young men are being targeted based on the color of their skin.”
“And you can go on and on about the Trump reading, we all watch the news, we get it, we know,” Juarez said. “I’m not going to go with fear. I’m going to go with facts, with subject matter expertise, and I’m going to go with wisdom and knowledge and respect for humanity and everybody in this room … I hope you can be respectful to me the way I’ve been [respectful] to you, to listen to you for over three hours. And when I’ve been up on this dais for eight years, I’ve had to witness some interesting behavior. Comes with a lot of goddamn privilege. I’m tired, so I will be supporting this bill today.”
“Let’s say there’s a dog in your neighborhood who can fire a taser using his mouth.“
Wow Vivian. How many bong hits did you rip before coming up with this analogy?
Obviously, if this one tool cannot Solve Crime, then it is worthless. It should not receive another penny.
Meanwhile, all Seattle’s Homeless-Industrial Complex needs is another billion dollars, and everyone will be housed.
Please donate generously to preserve the Stranger’s excellent political insights.
Viv, I suggest an edit – drop the very strange dog analogy (it distracts from the article)
How long is the footage being retained? I didn’t see that in the article, but I was too busy rolling my eyes at some of the quotes so I may have missed it.
“Let’s say there’s a dog in your neighborhood who can fire a taser using his mouth.
To your knowledge, there’s never been a dog like him where you live. Dogs of history, definitely. Dogs in other places, absolutely (on the news, you’ve heard “dogism” was on “the rise.”)
This dog is not “woke.” For months, he has broken into your neighbors houses to shock people with his taser. The dog claims your neighbors are anti-dog. You’re pretty sure they’re anti-taser.
Now imagine that your landlord, who has already placed a taser on the kitchen counter, wants to put a second taser on the kitchen table and a third in the cabinet for good measure.
“Won’t that make it easier for the dog to tase us?” you ask, confused.
“No,” says your landlord. “The taser is here to protect us from cats.” Cats had been causing mischief, you see. “Plus, dogs cannot jump this high.”
In the other room, the television is on. The dog is jumping on screen. You can’t argue. They’re your landlord.”
What the fuck
“17 state legislators from the Members of Color Caucus asking the council to make a different choice”
LOL
Of course
” But they could hand the federal government a powerful tool to surveil immigrants, abortion seekers, transgender people, and political activists in Seattle.”
Good
“But Councilmembers Bob Kettle, Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Debora Juarez, Mark Solomon, and Joy Hollingsworth are willing to gamble, and call into question the city’s commitment to its “sanctuary” status.”
GOOD
“While they were all at the hearing, a man in a yellow shirt said, federal agents were cracking down on immigrants in Washington DC and Chicago. President Donald Trump had threatened Seattle and Portland.”
GOOD
“Carl Knox, who said he lives in Ravenna, told them the cameras would aid and abet ICE.”
GOOD
“Tara Miller, a co-executive director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle.”
Fuck churches
“A woman named Jill said cameras on Garfield High School’s campus did not “prevent the murder of Amarr Murphy-Paine, nor has that footage helped apprehend his killer.””
NO SNITCHIN YO!
“A local United Methodist pastor said the immigrants he worked with already feared being detained by ICE.”
GOOD. And again, FUCK CHURCHES
“Meilani, a resident worker and historian in the Chinatown International District, said people in that neighborhood cannot “enter or leave” the CID without being surveilled. The city did this to “poor immigrant communities” who have not forgotten the government’s “racist surveillance” of Japanese Americans “before sending them to concentration camps.””
Asians in Chinatown are in far greater danger of being violently attacked by African-Americans than they are of being put into a concentration camp because of “racist surveillance”.
“trans political refugees”
Does this mean trans people from other countries that are in a state of war or civil unrest?
““Their laws are not written like ours,” Kettle said. “And I should note, this is very important, their Governor is Governor Abbott. Their Attorney General is Attorney General Paxton—very different from Governor Ferguson and Attorney General Brown.” “
Texas was never mentioned at all in this article before this paragraph. In fact, the word “Texas” appears nowhere in this article. BAD WRITING!
““They didn’t show up,” someone shouted.”
Probably because they actually have jobs and aren’t unemployed losers with time to kill harassing the city council.
““in contradiction to all their local policies and state laws that purport to shield their citizens,””
The people that ICE is looking for are not “citizens”.
“Earlier this year, Flock Safety license plate camera data collected in Denver was accessed in immigration-related searches over 1,400 times.”
No duh, Denver has a serious problem with illegal immigrants and their crimes.
“Councilmember Juarez said she was not worried about a breach. Her community didn’t have the “luxury of not calling 9-1-1. Our babies are being shot. Our children are being killed.”
Yeah, by “PoC”.
“Our young men are being targeted based on the color of their skin.””
Maybe they should stop committing so much crime
Overall, a rare Shitty Clowncil win
@5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21 —
Mary, mother of God. You’re going to singlehandedly cause Slog to deploy anti-spamming capabilities (I HOPE!). Touch grass.
Until this morning I did not know that spam walked on two legs….
I’d like the Spam, eggs, bacon, sausage, and Spam, with beans and Spam.
@22 – go complain about it to kristofartian
@23 – you too – go complain about it to kristofartian
My family and neighbors welcome more cameras in Seattle. Video footage of incidents is useful for investigators, prosecutors, and defense lawyers—let’s fund them fully. The camping, property damage, assault, and tolerance of petty criminals and illegal immigrants in this city are not okay. I can’t believe that anyone who’s lived in Seattle the last few years wants to limit enforcement capability? We do not have an expectation or privacy in public. We deserve fair enforcement and video evidence supports that.
@ 26 — “ I can’t believe that anyone who’s lived in Seattle the last few years wants to limit enforcement capability?”
The Stranger’s longstanding editorial position is that the government of the City of Seattle should prioritize criminals and those engaged in anti-social behavior over the law abiding and pro-social. Their sincerely held belief is that anything that would help hold accountable those who commit crimes and engage in anti-social behavior is bad and where there are policy decisions that result in tradeoffs you should never have the law abiding and pro-social receive a benefit. That’s how you wind up with articles like this one.
@1 damn it I have to agree with Aguecheek
@27 this comment is even more nonsensical than the dog analogy
@28 — politics and governance is always about tradeoffs. The Stranger has repeatedly — over and over and over again — made clear that whenever there are tradeoffs, criminals and those engaged in anti-social behavior should be prioritized over the law-abiding and those engaged in pro-social behavior. Which is the main thrust of this article: installing and using these cameras, while legal and constitutional, comes with tradeoffs. Besides the $, the tradeoff that most concerns The Stranger is that those engaged in pro-social and law-abiding behavior will be fine, but those engaged in criminal and anti-social behavior will not. The cameras will help catch people doing bad stuff.
Because The Stranger believes that the city’s highest priority should be to accommodate those committing crimes and engaging in anti-social behavior, they wrote this article and are opposed to the cameras. The Stranger thinks that the people doing bad stuff are more important than the people doing good stuff and the city should act accordingly. It’s that simple.
@29 what you wrote makes any sense at all only if you believe people living in this country without proper legal authority are “anti-social” and “doing bad stuff.” If so that’s ok, many people in this country agree with you, and they tend to wear distinctive red hats.
@30: And if you believe that persons should not live in tents in Seattle’s parks, should not steal to feed addictions, should not get into gunfights near schools over stolen property and drugs… the Stranger has, explicitly or implicitly, defended and endorsed all of those negative, anti-social, criminal behaviors. It has bitterly castigated persons who criticized those behaviors.
Furthermore, your idea the city should not use cameras in public because of the chance ICE will use the images is just silly. ICE has been arresting persons in courtrooms.
@30 — yes, Donald Trump is bad, which is why it’s bad that you did everything in your power to get him elected.
@32 you didn’t just move the goalposts you swapped them out for a volleyball net
@33: That’s not what “moving the goalposts” means. “Moving the goalposts” is when you declare Trump better than Bid— sorry, “Genocide Joe” — because, you say, “Trump didn’t do X.” Then Trump goes and does X, and you say it’s the fault of the Democrats, because they should have stopped Trump.
That’s you, moving the goalposts.
@34 ok, what’s a straw man?
Its crazy that the progressive left won’t even support a tool as obvious as cameras in high crime areas. Outside of DNA there is no better crime solving aid than a good photo of the perp, which was made clear once again with the quick capture of the Charlie Kirk killer just hours after his photo was released. How fucking clueless must you be to claim photos and videos don’t help? The ability to craft hypothetical dystopian scenarios, which is what the activist mob does in council chambers, should not get in the way of giving cops this valuable addition to their toolbelt.
And what the fuck was that nonsensical 7 paragraph intro about a non-woke jumping dog with a taser in its mouth? Yikes…
@36 “Outside of DNA there is no better crime solving aid than a good photo of the perp, which was made clear once again with the quick capture of the Charlie Kirk killer just hours after his photo was released.”
He didn’t get ID’d from the photo, he confessed to a family member who convinced him to turn himself in. You’re 0/2 claiming surveillance cracked a case but maybe 3rd times a charm?
@37 “He didn’t get ID’d from the photo”
Still trying to pretend photos don’t help? From WaPo:
“Tyler Robinson’s father reportedly recognized him from images released by authorities and encouraged him to turn himself in.”
From CNN:
“Like thousands of Americans captivated by the manhunt for the shooter who killed conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, a Utah father had seen the photos and video footage of the suspect released by authorities.
The man in the images, dressed in a black T-shirt plastered with an eagle and American flag, could be seen jumping off the roof of a Utah university building after the shooting and running into a wooded area. His face was partially concealed by a dark pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap.
But the father recognized the man.
“Tyler, is this you? This looks like you,” he asked his son, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.”
From AP:
“Robinson’s father recognized him from the photos released by the FBI and told him to turn himself in. Robinson refused at first, but then changed his mind, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. “
How can you be so misinformed? Are your ideological blinders really that thick?
@38 — thirteen12, like The Stranger, believes that it is extremely important to prioritize criminals over the law abiding. It’s why he and The Stranger are opposed to anything that makes it easier to hold criminals accountable. It’s also why thirteen12 (and The Stranger) did as much as they possibly could to get Donald Trump elected, because it is incredibly important to Trump to avoid being held accountable for criminal activity, so it’s a philosophy they all share.
@37, @38: From the Wall Street Journal, more on the utter uselessness of surveillance video in solving crimes:
“Investigators reviewed surveillance footage that confirmed Robinson had arrived on the university campus in a gray Dodge Challenger hours before Kirk’s appearance. The video showed him wearing a maroon T-shirt, light-colored shorts, a black hat with a white logo and light-colored, Converse-style shoes… When Robinson was taken into custody, he was wearing clothes that were consistent with the surveillance images, the governor said.“
@38 an anonymous source also said bullets found with the rifle had been inscribed with transgender ideology so let’s see whether that rumor turns out to be true. But if it is I concede the point.
Seattle is a city that serves millions of people. A few dozen squeaky wheels who have the luxury of time to show up at a city council meeting don’t get to set city policy. Nor should they. These public comment meetings have outlived the usefulness they had when cities were a thousand people. There are too many people for that forum to be meaningful anymore – it’s just a recipe for the people with the most time to deride and feel victimized by council members who are voting their constituents best interests.
The cameras are desired by the public at large because crime is at unacceptable levels, and the public is still somewhat unwilling to lock up criminals en masse for various reasons.