Seattle City Council: Expanding Surveillance Makes You Useful Idiots For Trump’s Regime

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council will vote to massively expand the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) surveillance capabilities. Advocates aren’t just worried about our local boys in blue spying on Seattle residents — the footage may wind up in the hands of the Trump administration to help in their quest to criminalize poverty, suppress political dissent, and disappear immigrants. If the council doesn’t heed this warning, history may remember them as nothing more than useful idiots for the Trump regime.  

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Despite the city's own Community Surveillance Working Group recommending against it, Seattle launched the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) pilot program at the end of May, creating a centralized hub for cops to collect, store, analyze, and distribute data in real-time to aid in their investigations. The City started with 65 cameras in “crime hotspots,” including North Aurora, Third Ave, and near 12th and Jackson, the usual test subjects for the City’s countless experiments in criminalizing poverty and substance abuse disorder.  

Just weeks later, the City started rushing through an expansion. The proposal before the council Tuesday would install $1 million worth of new cameras by the stadiums, near Cal Anderson in Capitol Hill, and around Garfield High School. The proposal would also allow SPD to tap into the Seattle Department of Transportation's network of 365 traffic cameras, a scale of expansion best understood visually.

And if that’s not enough, SPD will likely come back to the council to ask for access to cameras from Seattle Parks and Recreation, Seattle Public Library, just biblical levels of greed for footage. 

Proponents tout the surveillance tech as a “force multiplier,” helping SPD tackle specifically “gun violence, human trafficking, and other persistent felony crime.” In a July press release, the Mayor’s office and the Chief of Police claimed the technology had “played a role” in 600 reported incidents and 90 active criminal investigations in less than 60 days. Vague! And unfortunately not immediately fruitful to dunk on. The pilot program is so new it is unlikely any journalists or concerned residents have received public records requests to evaluate the true efficacy of the program for its stated intent. 

Proponents have not demonstrated compelling evidence that this shit makes Seattle safer, but opponents have been loud in arguing how it does not. In a joint statement against the proposal, The ACLU of Washington, OneAmerica, and Asian Counseling and Referral Service argued that the technology would “violate people’s privacy and civil liberties, harm communities where they are deployed, and waste police resources.” 

The joint statement went on to explain, “[o]nce surveillance data is collected, it is notoriously challenging to protect against federal misuse” such as targeting immigrants, people seeking gender affirming care or abortion, protesters, and others in Trump’s cross-hairs. 

No matter how much the City Council insists the data will be protected, they just cannot guarantee that. Trump has already seized control of the RTCC in Washington, D.C. and he’s threatened to take over more police departments. 

Plus, data-sharing breaches have already happened closer to home. For example, a recent KING5 investigation found the Department of Licensing (DOL) allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access private driver's license and vehicle information despite laws prohibiting Washington state and localities from cooperating with ICE. Texas cops made a nationwide search through local surveillance data to hunt for a woman who sought an abortion, tapping into Washington systems including the Yakima Police Department, Prosser Police Department, and the King County Housing Authority in apparent violation of laws to protect those seeking abortion and gender affirming care from out-of-state. 

Despite the real, demonstrable threat that data collected is data vulnerable to Trump’s agenda, it seems this expansion will pass without issue. The legislation passed unanimously through the council’s Public Safety committee: Council Members Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Debra Juarez, Bob Kettle and Sara Nelson. And they’ll likely find their fifth vote on full council. Last fall, Council Members Dan Strauss and Maritza Rivera voted in favor of the RTCC. But still opponents of the technology plan to show up to testify against the potentially dangerous tech at 2pm Tuesday.