The Grassroots Movement That Got Mayor Katie Wilson Elected Is Demanding She Turn The Surveillance Cameras Off

Mayor Katie Wilson is in trouble with supporters from the very grassroots movement that pulled off her seemingly impossible win last November. Volunteers and staffers from Wilson’s campaign are gathering signatures for a letter to the Mayor’s office demanding she hold true to the anti-surviellence stance she took in the election and dismantle Seattle’s surveillance state: “This includes stopping the rollout of additional surveillance initiatives, canceling expansion contracts, removing license plate readers from SPD patrol cars, closing the Real Time Crime Center, and directing SDOT to remove its traffic cameras.” You have until March 17 to sign on.

In September, in the heat of her hard-fought campaign, Wilson made a statement against a massive expansion of the Seattle Police Department’s surveillance capabilities proposed by her opponent, then-Mayor Bruce Harrell. Harrell proposed adding $1 million worth of new cameras to bolster a barely-tested 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 respectively. 

“Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer,” Wilson’s campaign said in an Instagram post. “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.”

The City Council approved the expansion, but SPD has not turned on any new cameras, according to a map of the City’s CCTV infrastructure. 

Supporters called Wilson’s stance a “direct and necessary contrast to the former mayor’s administration” in their open letter, one that inspired voters to pick her vision for Seattle over the incumbent’s. 

But shortly after Wilson won her election, she started to signal a retreat from the public, anti-surveillence position. In December, The Burner asked Wilson if she would reverse course on her old foe’s surveillance expansion. She did not commit one way or another, but rather said she would meet with stakeholders to discuss, even though stakeholders spent hours at City Hall to laying out the arguments at public comment just weeks prior. 

More recently, Wilson punted the decision on surveillance once again at her State of the City address last month. 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. Anti-surveillance advocates tore her to shreds for that one! 

“…It is not enough to call yourself a socialist if you simply uphold the same systems of control and policing you critiqued while running,” the open letter said of her backpedal. “Radical branding loses its meaning if the administration ends up being just another face for the surveillance state.”

But that doesn’t mean advocates are going to let Wilson go from scrappy progressive to Big Brother without a fight. Earlier this month, Wilson supporters, including her campaign’s field director, wrote an open letter demanding she start governing like she campaigned. 

“[M]any of the people who organized to elect you are losing the mayor we campaigned for,” the letter read. “The platform we defended at tens of thousands of doors is not the direction we are seeing from City Hall.”

Dan Howe, a volunteer for Wilson’s campaign, expressed his disappointment in Wilson in a recent op-ed with the Seattle Times and a phone interview with The Burner. 

Howe acknowledged that Wilson never explicitly promised to reverse the expansion she opposed, but he felt she had created an “expectation” that she would. And her new defense of surveillance as a legitimate tool of public safety certainly calls to question the sincerity of her original stance in which she claimed cameras do not make Seattle safer, only more vulnerable.  

But even if surveillance isn’t your number one concern, Howe said Wilson’s supporters should still note this moderation.

“It’s much bigger than just the cameras,” Howe said. “This is probably the first big test of what kind of leader [Wilson’s] going to be and how she's going to behave under pressure. This is about her political courage.”

If she’s willing to cave to pressure on surveillance, she may be willing to abandon a progressive issue that matters to you. She’s already caught flack from her base by continuing the City’s cruel, wasteful, and relentless practice of sweeping unhoused people. And recently she seemed to sympathize with big business when it came to progressive revenue. 

Advocates emphasize that it’s not too late for Wilson: “You still have time to ensure we placed our trust in the right person to dismantle the status-quo we organized against,” the letter reads. The letter signatories are demanding Wilson schedule a Zoom meeting with them within the next two weeks so they can hear directly from the person they fought to elect about how her administration will realize the campaign’s original vision — and how those early supporters can continue to help. 

The business interests and tough-on-crime voices pushing for more surveillance were never going to carry Wilson’s progressive agenda through City Hall. The people who will are the same volunteers now writing open letters and asking for a meeting.

If the mayor hopes to deliver the sweeping changes she campaigned on, the coalition she can’t afford to lose isn’t the one asking for more cameras. It’s the one that knocked the doors.