Mayor Wilson Turned Off One Camera, The People Who Got Her Elected Still Want More

After pressure from her progressive base to shut down the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) surveillance infrastructure, Mayor Katie Wilson agreed to turn off exactly one camera in the entire system — one positioned near a health facility, to protect patient privacy.

In a press conference Thursday, Wilson announced she will not yet meet demands from her own campaign staff and volunteers to dismantle Seattle’s surveillance state, but she will “pause” part of a recently approved expansion of SPD’s surveillance program to allow time for an audit. While the cameras slated for Capitol Hill and the Central District will not go up for at least several months, Wilson said the City will still install 26 cameras in the stadium area in anticipation of the FIFA World Cup. SPD will only turn those on in case of a “credible threat,” which Wilson could not define. 

Wilson also announced she will temporarily pause SPD’s Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) tech while SPD figures out how to comply with new state regulations prohibiting the tech from sensitive areas. 

As Wilson anticipated, her supporters are not happy. 

“I’m still waiting for real, decisive action instead of buzzwords and contradictions,” Wilson campaign volunteer J Weaver told The Burner. “This felt like a slow tiptoe around the exact concerns voters had about her ability to lead on policing and surveillance.”

Weaver said this decision is “not leadership. [It’s] political hedge dressed up as due diligence."

“Due diligence," Weaver said, would mean turning off all the cameras for a review within days of taking office. Existing cameras will stay up and on along Aurora from 85th to 145th, about 20 square blocks in the Chinatown International District, and a broad swath of downtown. 

“You cannot claim to be reviewing a surveillance program while it is still actively running,” Weaver said. 

Weaver is a part of a group of Wilson campaign staff and volunteers who are collecting signatures for a letter laying out their anti-surveillance demands. The advocates want Wilson to stop the rollout of additional surveillance initiatives, remove license plate readers from SPD patrol cars, remove the Seattle Department of Transportation’s traffic cameras, and shut down the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), the centralized hub that the cops’ cameras feed into. The letter has garnered more than 1,300 signatures with more to come before the group’s upcoming Sunday deadline. 

Wilson failed at the most basic of their demands: stop the expansion of surveillance. To many, this feels like a broken promise or at least a backpedal.

Last fall, then-Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed an early expansion to the RTCC pilot program before it could be properly evaluated. It would add $1 million worth of new cameras to Capitol Hill, the Central District, and around the stadium. The City Council passed the expansion 7-2 despite listening to hours of unanimous opposition during public comment for fear the footage may help the feds track down immigrants, hunt out-of-state-abortion seekers, or go after trans people. But even if all these federal threats subsided, surveillance still can endanger communities. 

At the time, Wilson sided firmly with the advocates, distinguishing herself from her opponent. 

“Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer,” Wilson’s campaign said in an Instagram post last fall. “But it will certainly make our neighbors more vulnerable. As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on immigrants, trans people, and big cities in general, we need to prioritize safety, not surveillance.”

But anti-surveillance advocates started to wonder if her opposition was purely to score political points when she wouldn’t actually commit to reversing the expansion after she won the job just weeks later. 

In a statement to The Burner in December, Wilson called the expansion “the wrong decision at the wrong time” and said she was aware of other cities moving to rollback their surveillance tech. 

Wilson said, “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. I'm certainly not going to allow any further expansion of surveillance without an actual independent review of their effectiveness and their impact.”

Wilson gave an even more middling take on surveillance at her State of the City address. She maintained that she agreed with advocates' concerns about how footage could endanger immigrants, transgender people, and those seeking abortion from out-of-state, but said she also believes the cameras are a “useful tool” in solving crimes, reducing profiling, and protecting witnesses.

In Wilson’s remarks on Thursday, she took a similar tack.

“There’s no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve crimes, including serious ones like homicides. But also: Cameras are not the one key to making our neighborhoods safe,” Wilson told reporters. “On the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about privacy, over-surveillance, and potential misuse of surveillance technologies. But also: these cameras are not the primary threat to immigrants, trans people, or people seeking reproductive health care in our country right now.”

The audit, which the Mayor hopes to partner with NYU’s Policing Project for, will take a few months. The audit buys Wilson time. It postpones a final reckoning with her base while leaving open two very different outcomes: a quiet retreat from the expansion, or a delayed rollout once the backlash subsides.

Notably, Wilson didn’t draw a clear line in the sand for what the audit would have to find to get her to shut down the surveillance system. But Wilson said she would “likely” move forward with expansion if the audit finds “everything’s totally secure, we’re not at all worried about this data getting into the hands of the federal government.” 

That framing narrows the risk to Trump-era federal abuses, even though local critics and even a City-sponsored working group have long argued the technology also poses more routine dangers: misidentification, mission creep, privacy violations, and disproportionate impacts on heavily policed communities.

But this means the debate about surveillance in Seattle is far from over. Her supporters are still collecting signatures for their community letter, anti-surveillance advocates are plotting their next moves, and Wilson will host a town hall next Friday to continue the conversation.