Seattle Lobbied Olympia For Huge Exemption For Seattle Police In Weak Surveillance Regulations

While advocates shame the Washington State Senate for being too lax in its bipartisan bill regulating fascist-enabling Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology, Seattle City Council Member Bob Kettle and the City's top legislative advocate both lobbied for a major exempt for the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) entire existing ALPR program. 

Seattle officials have heard the case against ALPRs countless times at City Hall — that the technology has been used to help ICE track down immigrants and to aid law enforcement in hunting women who crossed state lines for abortion care — and yet the City remains less sympathetic to civil-liberties concerns than half of the Republican senators in Olympia, including Sen. Phil Fortunato, arguably one of the most far-right lawmakers in the Legislature. The effort to score special treatment on surveillance regulation undercuts any lingering illusion that Seattle is somehow a blue bubble safe from authoritarianism. 

Inside Senate Bill 6002

Last Wednesday, the Washington State Senate voted 40–9 to approve light regulations on Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs), high-speed, computer-controlled cameras that scan license plate numbers and feed them into centralized databases used to track vehicles. The technology has spread rapidly among police departments nationwide, with cameras now mounted on street poles, overpasses, and patrol cars across Washington State. 

In recent months, however, several jurisdictions have suspended their ALPR programs amid reports — particularly involving systems run by Georgia-based company Flock — linking the technology to crackdowns on immigration and abortion care. While many advocates argue the Legislature should ban ALPRs outright, some backed the bill as a minimal step toward any regulation at all.

Here’s what the bill, Senate Bill 6002, entails:

• A 21-day data retention cap, requiring all ALPR data to be deleted within three weeks — a modest improvement over Flock’s standard 30-day policy, but a major retreat from the sponsor’s original proposal to delete data after just three days.

• Location-based restrictions, prohibiting ALPRs near sensitive sites such as schools, churches, and food banks.

• Defined use cases, allowing police to access ALPR data only for parking and toll enforcement, recovering stolen vehicles, locating missing or endangered persons, and tracking vehicles tied to felony warrants or felony investigations.

• A formal ban on using ALPR data for civil immigration enforcement — a protection that already exists under the Keep Washington Working Act, and one that has nonetheless failed to stop ALPR data from winding up in the hands of ICE and Border Patrol

  
  

The bill amounted to so little, some anti-surveillence advocates encouraged the public to testify against the legislation all together. And yet, it didn’t encroach on civil liberties enough for the City of Seattle.

Too Weak for Advocates — Still Too Strong for SPD

In an email in the public record, Kettle asked lawmakers to consider an amendment to SB 6002 so it "only concern[s] fixed automated camera systems , or excludes vehicle-mounted cameras, which would enable SPD to continue their work under the regulations outlined specifically for Seattle and its unique needs."

In 2024, the City Council voted to equip every one of the SPD's 360 patrol vehicles with ALPR technology. But, since SB 6002 bans ALPRs in sensitive areas such as near schools and churches, police departments would break the law whenever a patrol car with ALPR crossed into a restricted area. So, it would seem SB 6002 would practically ban SPD's entire existing ALPR program.

However, even though SPD's ALPRs are all mobile, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has ALPR capabilities in their stationary cameras which now feed into SPD’s Real Time Crime Center software.

It's not just Kettle acting on his own bootlicking agenda. While carving out exemptions in the ALPR regulations is not on the City's official State Legislative agenda for 2026, Seattle's State Legislative Affairs Director Anna Johnson made a similar request to lawmakers.

"We support adding privacy protections for facilities that provide protected health care or facilities conducting an immigration matter, schools, places of worship, courts, or food banks," Johnson wrote in an email to the bill's sponsors on behalf of the City of Seattle. "However, we recommend clarifying the location-based requirements relate to static/fixed ALPR."

Johnson did not respond to The Burner's request for comment, but Kettle seems to think Seattle deserves a break! In an email to The Burner, Kettle offered the reminder that Seattle does not use Flock, the private company implicated in a recent UW report about ALPR data breaches. Instead, Seattle contracts with Axon and Kettle said they’ve created a system with the “highest level of data protections possible.” 

Kettle seems content to react to possible federal intervention or data breaches rather than prevent them in the first place as advocates recommend. He explained to The Burner that the City’s contracts “ensure that in the event of a federal subpoena, Seattle must be 1) notified, 2) provided with clear mitigation steps, and 3) given the immediate option to suspend services to protect our residents' privacy. To date, we haven’t had to take these steps.”

SB 6002 passed through the State Senate without an amendment exempting ALPRs installed on vehicles. But the legislation still has to pass the State House. If an amendment pops up on the House side (HB 2332) to carve out much of Seattle from the already wimpy regulations, I’ll let you know.