Well, the 22 police cameras in the Stadium District are off, which is what Mayor Katie Wilson promised to do once the World Cup and its “credible threats” were gone. The Seattle Police Department won’t be able to turn them on itself. But the camera boxes, the modems, the routers, the cooling fans, and the Linux computers are still powered, according to the mayor’s office.
Wouldn’t it be cool if… they were gone?
That’s what the 40-ish advocates, activists, and erstwhile Wilson allies rallied outside City Hall demanded Tuesday afternoon. They believe all the SPD cameras—part of a department crime prevention surveillance pilot that’s scattered dozens of CCTV cameras in the Chinatown-International District, along Aurora Avenue North, and throughout downtown—should go. They don’t trust the city to keep the cameras off.
“You can’t have a progressive city when you are over-invested in militarized policing,” said 43rd District Rep. Shaun Scott at the rally. “You can’t have a progressive city when you’re surveilling the residents of that city, and so the mayor has to understand that we’re on the correct side of history—and she has a choice to make.”
Rally organizer Bryce Cannatelli of Seattle Solidarity Budget, a group that wants to give marginalized residents a voice in city budgeting, also read a statement from Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who wrote that the city didn’t yet have local data on the effectiveness of the cameras, and warned that several other blue cities across the country had seen their footage accessed by the federal government. Rinck and Councilmember Dan Strauss voted against the surveillance pilot expansion last year.
Advocates worry those cameras, installed by the US Department of Homeland Security contractor Axon, could be accessed by the federal deportation police in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection. The $4.9 million of the $489 million SPD budget City Council set aside for the cameras last fall could be better spent on behavioral health care and gun violence prevention, said speakers like drag artist (and Stranger contributor) Miss Texas 1988 and Moni Tep, the decriminalization policy director at the nonprofit Lavender Rights Project.
“Seattle cannot claim to be a sanctuary city while building out surveillance infrastructure that erodes trust, undermines safety, and targets vulnerable communities,” Tep said.
On the campaign trail, Wilson said she did not support the City Council decision to expand the SPD surveillance pilot to Capitol Hill and the Central District. In March, Wilson paused the expansion, pending an audit from New York University’s Policing Project expected this fall. But she made an exception when the World Cup came to town, citing the “current geopolitical situation.” The half-measure pissed off both the hardliners, like Seattle City Council Public Safety Chair Bob Kettle, and the progressives who campaigned for Wilson.
After Wilson turned the cameras back off, Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) president and CEO Jon Scholes (predictably) said Wilson’s decision to switch off the stadium district cameras made “zero sense.” But she was never going to win over the pro-capitalist groups like (the bad) DSA. The real danger for Wilson, politically speaking, is that her triangulation on surveillance may have already caused lasting damage.
Noah Williams, the communications lead for the Transit Riders Union (TRU), the advocacy group Wilson co-founded and led for many years, says the cameras represent broken trust with her base.
“I think that some members have at points felt like promises weren’t kept, and that is why it is so important that this administration keep moving in this direction, and keep these cameras turned off,” Williams said. “We would like to see them uninstalled and removed citywide.”
If even her staunchest supporters are furious, it could spell trouble for the Mayor when she needs the political capital to push through other priorities like progressive taxation and increased housing density.
In an email to The Stranger, mayoral spokesperson Sage Wilson did not answer if the mayor’s surveillance policy was in line with her campaign pledges. He reiterated that the stadium cameras will remain off until “the audit is complete and its recommendations are reviewed.”