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.”
