There is a moment, after the sirens fade and before the cameras arrive, when grief is still allowed to be grief. But this fragile window is gone much too soon.
Because in this country, and in this city, grief is rarely permitted to remain untouched. It is quickly conscripted into the familiar machinery that tells us what safety is supposed to look like. Pain triggered by tragedy soon becomes justification, and communities already carrying the weight of neglect are asked, almost immediately, what they are willing to trade for the promise of feeling safe.
More cameras? More police? More surveillance?
These questions are posed as if their answer were obvious. As if the menu were complete. But what if the question is itself the problem?
In that moment, when something must be done, almost anything can be made to feel like the right thing.
This year, Seattle has witnessed instances of high-profile violence that have shaken the South End and the Chinatown–International District. Teenagers have been both subject to and instigators of gun violence. Their families have been left holding a grief that no policy can fill, and their communities are trying to make sense of something that refuses to make sense.
Something must be done, we tell each other. It is the most human of instincts, and also the most dangerous. Because in that moment, when something must be done, almost anything can be made to feel like the right thing.
We are told, often and with urgency, that communities like the CID and Rainier Beach are asking for more surveillance and more policing. That elders want cameras. That residents want more visible enforcement. And some of that is true. Earlier this month, Rainier Beach students spoke at King County Council and asked for more police patrols and metal detectors, and CID community leaders brought more than a thousand signatures to City Hall asking the city to expand the neighborhood’s CCTV program. Seniors spoke openly about fear, and not feeling safe walking through their own neighborhood.
We are told this is a debate about cameras. It is not. It is a debate about what we believe safety is, and who is responsible for creating it.
When the left dismisses these voices, we run the risk of reinforcing the false, but effective, narrative that Seattle progressives do not care about the concerns of communities of color. It’s why we should meet these perspectives with curiosity, not dismissal.
“I think people feel a lot safer than before,” CID resident Gary Lee told the Northwest Asian Weekly following a March 24th city council meeting where the Chinatown International District Public Safety Council presented a petition in support of the cameras. “Because they feel that there is some surveillance out there.”
To dismiss those fears would be arrogant. Cruel, even. But to flatten them, to treat them as a unified endorsement of surveillance, is something else entirely.
What if what we are witnessing is not consensus. It is the constraint that happens when people are asked to choose from a set of options shaped long before they arrived at the table.
What else can I do to feel safe?
That is the real question. And it is a question shaped not just by violence, but by absence.
We fund visibility because it’s legible. It can be installed, measured, and announced. It gives the appearance of action, produces metrics, and reassures us, no matter if it’s a public safety placebo.
What would it look like to expand that menu of options? What would it look like to invest, instead, in the conditions that make harm less likely in the first place: care-based first response, stable housing, youth programs, and community-led interventions that meet people before crisis, not after?
Those essentials are the slow architecture of safety. And they’re sorely missing in the areas we’re told need more surveillance. Many neighborhoods in the CID and South Seattle fall below King County’s Self-Sufficiency Standard, meaning even working families often lack the income necessary to meet their basic needs.
Civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis has spent years tracing how these moments unfold and how the stories we are told about safety begin to narrow our imagination before we even realize it. Our carceral state and the narrative machinery that sustains it, he argues, depends on our belief that punishment, and its quieter cousin, surveillance, is the primary response to social problems. So it floods the public with narratives that make that belief feel natural.
“To sustain a system like this, you have to tell stories about what people are supposedly getting in return, for all that violence and spending,” says Karakatsanis, who authored the book Copaganda. “The most effective propaganda isn’t outright falsehood, it’s selective truth.”
Proponents of cameras will point to recent surveillance footage that helped identify two men accused of brutally assaulting a 77-year-old stranger in downtown Seattle last month. But we should be careful not to confuse a tool that helps reconstruct violence after it occurs with a system capable of preventing violence in the first place.
Because the political sleight of hand around surveillance has always depended on collapsing those two ideas into one. A camera helps identify a suspect after a horrific assault, and suddenly the conclusion becomes: so cameras equate to safety. Make no mistake, those are not the same claims.
Once we accept documentation as synonymous with safety, we begin reorganizing public life around evidence collection rather than harm prevention.
The footage did not stop the man from being beaten or interrupt the attack. Most importantly it didn’t address whatever conditions produce two men willing to assault an elderly stranger in public. It documented the violence afterwards.
Once we accept documentation as synonymous with safety, we begin reorganizing public life around evidence collection rather than harm prevention.
But even if cameras occasionally improve clearance rates, we still have to ask what kind of society we are building around that logic.
If the answer to every failure of housing, healthcare, youth support, addiction treatment, and economic abandonment is ultimately “more cameras” then we aren’t solving violence. We’re simply adapting ourselves to living alongside it more efficiently.
There is a pattern here, one we have learned to accept as common sense. We underinvest in the conditions that actually produce safety, and then we overinvest in the systems that respond to its absence. We abandon, and then monitor what abandonment produces.
Dr. Amy Barden, who leads Seattle’s CARE Department, puts it plainly: “Crime is often tied to mental or behavioral health crises… These are complex social issues, not simple visibility problems.”
And yet, visibility is what we fund.
Because visibility is legible. It can be installed, measured, and announced. It gives the appearance of action, produces metrics, and reassures us, no matter if it’s a public safety placebo. We keep shoveling it down our throat in hopes it might cure our societal illness.
But reassurance is not the same as safety. Legal scholar Brie McLemore underscores how thin the evidence for any connection between the two actually is. Surveillance technologies, she notes, have not consistently been shown to deter crime. Their effectiveness in solving serious violence remains inconclusive. What is less uncertain is what we give up in exchange:” privacy, autonomy, and control over how our lives are observed and interpreted.
“Surveillance itself can create harm and vulnerability… If we recognized that from the beginning, it would open the door to entirely different approaches to public safety,” says McLemore.
It should be noted that crime in the city has declined year over year, with overall incidents dropping by roughly 18 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. But public perception continues to be shaped by highly visible acts of violence.
Support for more policing and surveillance in marginalized communities is not a contradiction of their history. It is a consequence of it.
Fear is not irrational. It is responsive and shaped by lived experience. And in communities where violence is not conceptual but concrete, where it has names, faces, funerals, and fear, it becomes its own kind of logic.
This is the part of the story we are often reluctant to tell: that support for more policing and surveillance in marginalized communities is not a contradiction of their history. It is a consequence of it.
If the only thing a system reliably delivers is surveillance, people will begin to call that safety. Not because it works, but because it is what exists.
Karakatsanis would tell you that this recurring return to surveillance and policing is not a policy failure at all. It is a narrative success. The most powerful stories in our society are the ones that teach us to look at harm and ask: who should we watch and control?
Meanwhile, the work that actually produces safety, remains under-built: housing stability, accessible mental health care, youth programs at the scale required to interrupt violence before it begins.
Once that frame is set, the range of possible answers collapses. We stop asking about the quiet, accumulative conditions that produce harm long before it becomes visible. We start asking how to catch it, and how to see it sooner next time.
Meanwhile, the work that actually produces safety, remains under-built: housing stability, accessible mental health care, youth programs at the scale required to interrupt violence before it begins. The slow, unglamorous investments that rarely make for clickbait, but instead invite scrutiny from editorial boards, skeptics, and anyone from who mistakes patience for weakness and care for naïveté.
There is a reason for that. They require us to confront inequality, and redistribute resources. To sit with the uncomfortable truth that violence is not an aberration, but a symptom.
None of this is to dismiss the voices of those who walked into City Hall. Their fear is real. Their grief is real. Their desire for safety is not up for debate. But honoring that fear requires more than affirming the solutions placed in front of them. It requires asking why those are the only solutions on offer.
We are told this is a debate about cameras. It is not. It is a debate about what we believe safety is, and who is responsible for creating it.
Because safety is not simply the absence of harm. It is the presence of something else entirely, including stability, dignity, and connection. The conditions that make violence less likely to occur in the first place.
Those are not things you can install. They are things you have to build.