As city officials throughout Washington State debate installing controversial red-light and surveillance cameras to catch lawbreakers, residents in Seattle0x2019s International District (ID) are taking a surprisingly different route: buying and installing their own.
“There’s not even one person I have met who doesn’t support this project,” says Nora Chan, president of the Seniors in Action Foundation, an advocacy group that represents the ID’s aging, primarily foreign-born population. In two years, the group has managed to raise half of the $80,000 needed to purchase and install 12 cameras that would record 24 hours a day.
And at an August 28 dinner fundraiser, Chan raised another $33,000 in less time than it takes to catch a double feature. Over 900 people attended the dinner and a rally held earlier in the evening at Hing Hay Park, where Chan says older residents donated what they could—as little as $5—while business owners donated thousands.
“And I’m determined to raise the last $10,000 by the end of this week,” she says.
Chan has already placed an order for the 12 cameras but doesn’t have a firm timeline for installing them. She intends to place them throughout the 35-square-block neighborhood in areas designated as high crime spots by the Seattle Police Department (which means if you walk through Chinatown or Little Saigon in the near future, chances are you’ll be recorded). However, civilians, not SPD officers, will privately monitor the dozen cameras.
Advocates say the cameras will go a long way in making elderly residents—who make up roughly 70 percent of the ID’s population—feel safe in their neighborhood, where 20 percent of storefronts are vacant. The red-bricked plaza of Hing Hay Park has been a magnet for drug dealing, panhandling, and graffiti; the area ranks fourth highest for violent crimes in the city (even as residents acknowledge that crime is underreported to police, due to perceived language barriers).
The SPD supports the plan, calling it a “grassroots effort to fight crime,” according to SPD spokesman Sergeant Sean Whitcomb. “The cameras, and the neighborhood, are sending a clear message: Don’t commit a crime here. You’re being watched. If you commit a crime here, you will be arrested for it.”
But still, it’s unclear how effective cameras would be at catching criminals. The ACLU of Washington argues that cameras don’t deter crime. Instead: “What cameras are likely to do in practice is to move crime to other neighborhoods,” says ACLU spokesman Doug Honig.
A two-year project piloting the cameras in Cal Anderson Park was hotly contested by both residents and the ACLU of Washington, which obtained surveillance footage of a camera zooming in on a girl in a miniskirt, and confirmed with then mayor Greg Nickels’s office that other “instances of improper live monitoring” had taken place. The two-year pilot program was declared a failure and decommissioned after a city auditor’s study concluded the cameras had no measurable impact on crime.
But ID residents say that they have evidence that it might work. Last November, the neighborhood installed one pilot camera of its own, discreetly pointed at Hing Hay Park. The camera has captured the license plates of chronic graffiti taggers and helped prosecute at least one suspected drug dealer. “It proves that there’s a potential to really help police officers do their jobs,” says Don Blakeney, director of the Chinatown International District Business Improvement Area. “Our strategy right now is, let’s throw everything together and see what sticks.”
To that end, surveillance cameras are just one piece of a larger revitalization effort. Vacant storefronts are being taken over by elaborate art projects, and bands of senior citizens patrol the streets at night to enforce public safety. Businesses are compiling lists of available art studios to attract artists from the evacuated 619 Western Building. Chairs and umbrellas now liven up Hing Hay Park, and the city is working on green-lighting sidewalk cafe permits that would allow nearby restaurants to serve there.
And others argue that lowering crime isn’t necessary to make the cameras useful. Nic Li, who leads the twice-weekly senior block watch patrols in Chinatown, says, “We’re not just combating crime, we’re addressing people’s perception of crime.”
Of course, that’s what city officials argued in the case of Cal Anderson Park—before that program was scrapped. 
Awesome for them. All of downtown needs something like this, it’s people taking responsibility for deterring crime where they live, and it’s a wonderful idea. I have always wished we would get more cameras in the public streets, it not only helps catch criminals, it helps prevent wrongful persecution.
OF COURSE cameras move the bad guys to another neighborhood thus in the same way Seattle’s “gentrification” trashed Renton, Tukwila, Sea-Tac . . . .
@2 Evidence? I hear this word “gentrification” thrown around a lot by people who want something to hate so much they will attack privileged people just to fill that hatred. Tukwila was always bad, lived there a few years of my childhood, I know it was bad because I was part of the “hooligans” that trashed people’s houses for thrills. Sea-Tac, anywhere there’s an airport will be bad because no one wants to live near all that noise, and seriously, can you blame them? Renton has always been a horrible gang location, since I was a child in western Washington it was considered “off limits” to those of us who wanted to avoid being shot. Downtown Seattle is still just as bad as when I was young to. Kent … Kent got “gentrified”, and it’s actually gotten worse, when I was a teen my family was living there, and we did stupid pranks like make peace signs in the middle of the road or put garden gnomes on people’s roofs …. now it’s actually a little worse, and the people there are far richer, specifically in Covington, oh yeah, Covington is now officially a city, that sucks. Anyhow, where is your proof, crime rates in those three locations have actually gone down in the last decade or more.
Hey they could try leaving a cop bike here and there they do at the mcdonalds on 3rd and pine
@4 Yet sadly, 3+Pine is still one of the scariest places to walk through.
One thing we’ve learned about these systems is people generally use them for reasons other than they were intended for. I predict this will last right up until “interesting” pictures start popping up on the Internet.
@7 meh, that will happen with or without public cams, and if you are willing to do something “embarrassing” in public anyway, then you should stop being embarrassed by it.
@8: Doesn’t even have to be in public. Windows are transparent to security cameras as well as to people’s eyes.
Yes, peeping toms and neighborhood gossips will always exist, but we don’t have to install infrastructure to help them. These sorts of things are more often used to persecute people who aren’t well liked in the neighborhood than to prosecute actual crimes.
@9 …. you can’t close drapes? Is there some new disability that keeps people from doing that? Seriously?
@10: So if I installed cameras that pointed at your driveway, yard, and windows at all times, and monitored your comings and goings 24×7, you’d be okay with that? Or are you one of those people who supports these things because they only affect OTHER people.
@11 Actually, no, I wouldn’t mind. Nice assuming though.
FYI, I live in a building with cameras in the hallways, on the elevator, and in the lobby already, and it’s worked great. Someone vandalized our elevator once, guess who had to pay for it? Not us residents who try to keep our building from falling apart, they looked at the video tape, found the person, and prosecuted them. No massive investigation, and the person who actually did it was the only one hurt, the rest of us don’t even know who it was because it was taken care of so fast. That’s not even technically a public camera, but it’s a community ones. The only people really afraid of cameras in public areas are criminals, period. It was cameras that sorted out the mess where a guy got beaten for trying to return a purse he thought someone lost in downtown a few years ago. Cameras help, denying it is like denying the sky is blue.
Gah! I hate having the final word, someone say something please, anything, agree, disagree, just don’t let me have the final post in here, please.