As Police Roll Out Live Cameras in Purported Crime “Hot Spots,” Not Everyone Is Thrilled to Be Under Surveillance

SPD plans to expand the cameras to additional areas, including Capitol Hill and Garfield High School.

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the uses of new closed-circuit cameras that currently allow police to surveil 57 locations around the city, from Aurora Ave. N to the Chinatown International District, at a press event at SPD's Real Time Crime Center on Tuesday. The department plans to add cameras in additional locations soon, including the area around Garfield High School, in Capitol Hill's Pike-Pine corridor, and around the two downtown stadiums.

The city council funded the cameras, along with the expansion of SPD's existing Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), last year, adding 21 full-time police positions and expanding the program beyond its originally proposed boundaries at an ongoing cost of several million dollars a year. SPD plans to integrate feeds from private cameras, such as surveillance cameras outside local businesses, into the system.

At Tuesday's event, SPD Captain James Britt showed reporters how RTCC staff could use a live, map-based feed to monitor the cameras in real time, zooming and panning to see an area up close and from different angles. A six-minute video showed how footage from one camera at Aurora Ave. N and N 100th St. was used to apprehend a shooting suspect, along with footage from King County drones, private businesses, and the top of an apartment building.

Barnes said the cameras had been used in "600 incidents" and more than 90 investigations, but SPD did not provide a further breakdown of those incidents or say whether the city's cameras duplicated the private surveillance footage that the police have always used in investigations.

City officials took pains to reassure residents that SPD won't hand its surveillance footage over to ICE for use in immigration raids. "I can't say enough, we'll make sure everyone's rights are protected and the right constitutional safeguards are in place," Harrell said.

As a city council member, Harrell added, he was "the first person who proposed body cameras" for police and the "author of the privacy surveillance ordinance"—an apparent reference not to the far-reaching 2017 surveillance ordinance, authored and sponsored by then-councilmember Lorena González, but a 2013 law Harrell co-sponsored with then-councilmember Nick Licata that required council approval for new surveillance technologies.

The city has promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not every business owner in the areas under surveillance considers them a benign crime-fighting tool.

PubliCola spoke with Cory Potts, who owns the Center for Bicycle Repair near 12th and Jackson— a longtime "hot spot" for drug use and sales of both drugs and stolen goods. One of the new cameras faces his shop, which is located in a nearly 100-year-old building that was occupied by Japanese businesses before Seattle's Japanese population was removed from the area and interred in concentration camps during World War II.

After a mass stabbing in front of his building, Potts said, a representative from the mayor's office showed up at a community meeting to tell them the city was installing the cameras, which Potts later learned was not actually a response to the violence, but a plan that had long been underway.

The city had already made what Potts considered some troubling decisions in the neighborhood, which was historically known as Japantown. First, they placed signs around the areas banning "buying or selling merchandise" in public spaces. "I was struck by the historical similarities," Potts said. "There was no outreach about the signs whatsoever—all of a sudden, they went up."

Shortly after that, city trucks began cleaning the streets with a foaming disinfectant that seeped into Potts' building. A worker with the Seattle Department of Transportation told Potts the foam was meant to clean up urine, but "based on observation" and talking to the people who hang out near his business, "I don't believe that was the actual purpose for the foaming," he said.

"The city doesn't give those people enough credit for how sensitive they are to the neighborhood and the stuff that happens here. I think they know what it means when a city truck drives by them and shoots foam at the place where they spent most of their time."

As a business owner in the area since the pandemic, Potts says he doesn't see how cameras will benefit him, given that he's seen police hanging around all day without interacting with people on the street. The police department, and Harrell, promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking, but the building that used to house Viet Wah burned down after the building was improperly secured against intruders for months, Potts said, and no one did anything to address the situation.

He's asking the city to blur out his business on footage from the cameras as a way to "stand up for what the building represents and what the history of the neighborhood represents." On Tuesday, Captain Britt told PubliCola SPD generally only blurs footage of residential property, because commercial buildings are open to the public. "We would want to be cautious about [blurring out] businesses that front onto a sidewalk, because the sidewalk is an area that we would want to make sure that we had good footage of," Britt said.

The RTCC expansion was one of many mayoral priorities that added $100 million in costs, most of them ongoing obligations, to the 2025-2026 budget despite a known revenue gap of around $250 million. In April, the City Budget Office issued a new revenue forecast showing that the city will need to close an additional, previously unanticipated budget shortfall of $241 million during 2025 and 2026. (The budget already assumed deficits starting in 2027).

On Tuesday, Harrell said his 2026-2027 budget proposal could include more funding to add more cameras and expand surveillance into additional neighborhoods. "We think this is good technology, and there could be a push to expand its citywide," Harrell said. "Everyone in this room understands we have some constraints on our budget, and so it becomes a question of priorities."

The city's surveillance ordinance requires agencies like SPD to complete a Surveillance Impact Report, or SIR, before deploying any new surveillance technology. In its SIR for the new surveillance cameras, SPD said it was in the process of creating a new "omnibus surveillance policy" that would include a specific policy for CCTV. To date, an SPD spokesperson confirmed, the department has not completed either the omnibus policy or specific camera and real-time crime center surveillance guidelines, and has "no firm timeline" to finish the work.

According to the spokesperson, SPD's two-person policy shop has been busy drafting new crowd-control policies but has already begun the work of researching and drafting the new policies around the RTCC."

The city's Office of the Inspector General has hired researchers from the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a two-year assessment of the RTCC and the new camera surveillance program.