Mayor-Elect Wilson Won't Commit To Shutting Down The Surveillance Cameras She Campaigned Against

Mayor-elect Katie Wilson distinguished herself from the incumbent she toppled by standing with the overwhelming public opposition toward massively expanding the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) surveillance cameras capabilities, which advocates worried, rather fairly, would aid in the Trump administration’s unprecedented wave of ICE kidnappings and crackdown on other civil liberties. But now that she’s won her race and even as cities across the state have opted to backpedal on their own surveillance systems, Wilson’s not making any strong promises to shut off the cameras she initially opposed. 

“I'm aware of the decisions by Olympia, Redmond, and other cities to turn off their surveillance cameras, and I'm going to work with immigrant rights groups and civil rights advocates to evaluate whether Seattle should also scale back or disable the surveillance expansion that was authorized by the outgoing mayor and council,” Wilson said in a statement to The Burner. “I'm certainly not going to allow any further expansion of surveillance without an actual independent review of their effectiveness and their impact.”

Wilson affirmed in an email statement that she thought the City made the “wrong decision at the wrong time” when in September the council voted 7-2 to add $1 million worth of new cameras to a brand new surveillance pilot program known as the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) in Capitol Hill,  the Central District, and near Chinatown International District (CID), capturing the historically queer, Black, and immigrant neighborhoods.

The vote came just weeks before the University of Washington’s stunning report that showed federal immigration enforcement has been mining license plate data from Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPR) cameras around Washington state. Flock Safety has also made headlines when a Texas cop combed through Flock data from Washington jurisdictions to help them hunt for abortion seekers, undermining the state’s law protecting out–of–state abortion seekers from repercussions at home. If that’s not already concerning enough, Range Media recently reported that the Spokane County Sheriff's Department used the cameras to spy on protesters, seemingly violating the department’s own policy. 

But even before these abuses fully came to light, basically every immigrant rights organization and civil liberties group in town came to City Hall to testify against the surveillance expansion. 

Wilson told The Burner these abuses “really underscores” the concern she expressed during the campaign about “how any technology like this can be used to target immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, women seeking reproductive healthcare, and anyone else under attack by the federal administration.”

She added: “Expanding surveillance doesn't magically make our neighborhoods safer, but as we're seeing now, it can certainly make our neighbors more vulnerable.”

In response to UW’s reports and the media’s findings, Redmond, Olympia, and Mountlake Terrace have opted to end their contracts with Flock Safety. Renton, Auburn, Mukilteo and Lakewood, Pierce County also changed their Flock settings, according to the Seattle Times. 

Seattle doesn’t use Flock Safety and the City Council has insisted that despite countless data breaches across different systems around the country, they have somehow stood up the exact, magic guardrails to keep the data out of the wrong hands. Most significantly, the council added an amendment that would automatically shutdown the system for 60 days if the federal government tried to obtain data to help them with their anti-immigrant agenda.  

But as progressive Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck expressed over and over again it is not a matter of “if” the Trump administration or ICE taps into the surveillance footage, it is a matter of “when.” Wilson has the opportunity to be proactive, to act on the campaign messaging that colored her as an activist against the establishment. While it's true Wilson never explicitly ran on turning the cameras off, if she was ever principledly against them beyond just scoring political points, Wilson really shouldn’t need much time to mull the issue over now that she holds the power to actually do something.