Council Approves 24/7 Police Surveillance of Neighborhoods Across the City

Police say people can just choose not to go out in places where the cameras are located if they don't like being watched.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council's public safety committee approved legislation that gives police access to two new surveillance technologies—live CCTV cameras that will monitor at least five Seattle neighborhoods—and a new "Real Time Crime Center," provided by the company Axon, that will allow police to simultaneously monitor many different sources of live information, potentially including private cameras such as Ring cameras.

The legislation gives police, for the first time, the ability to conduct live, remote surveillance of several areas the city has identified as "hot spots," including Belltown, downtown, the Chinatown-International District, and Aurora Avenue North. An amendment from Councilmember Rob Saka called for a future expansion of the areas under surveillance to include Harbor Avenue and the Alki neighborhood, where he said there has been "lawlessness," "tomfoolery," and "nonsense," along with other parts of the city.

SPD estimates that the initial surveillance plan will cost $1.8 million, but the true cost of the entire project remains unclear. Council president Sara Nelson noted Tuesday that she expects the city will expand the surveillance areas in the future.

The new surveillance areas overlap with several of the new exclusion zones for drug users and sex work, effectively enabling SPD to monitor "drug areas" and "areas of prostitution" for violators in real time. In fact, Councilmember Cathy Moore, whose legislation reinstated a repealed law against "prostitution loitering" and created a "Stay Out of Prostitution Area" on Aurora, amended the Aurora surveillance zone so that it's identical to the SOAP zone, which stretches from N. 85th to N. 145th, the city's northern border.

Moore said her intent in expanding the boundaries of the Aurora surveillance zone was to address shootings, sex trafficking, arson, and other crimes. However, Saka's amendment also asks SPD to study expanding their use of the cameras to other, lower-level crimes, such as street racing (which is illegal under state law, but which the council also recently made a misdemeanor, allowing local enforcement.) "From our constituents’ standpoint, they want us to focus on what is infringing upon their safety and wellbeing," Nelson said.

People traveling through, or living in, these areas will be subject to live police surveillance as soon as they come within range of the cameras, which will be capable of capturing images hundreds of feet away—a scenario that raises obvious privacy concerns with groups like the ACLU of Washington, which has come out strongly against the proposal, as well as the city's Office for Civil Rights (SOCR) and the Community Surveillance Working Group, established to advise the city on the privacy and civil rights impacts of new surveillance technologies.

In an official assessment—required under the city's surveillance ordinance—the surveillance working group recommended strongly against approving the cameras. However, Mayor Bruce Harrell did not mention the working group's recommendation to "pause" the legislation in his group summarizing community feedback, and the council did not invite the group to present their findings publicly.

At the same meeting where Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess and police department representatives made a glowing case for the new surveillance tools, the chair of the panel, René Peters, was reduced to raising the work group's objections during a two-minute public comment slot. On Tuesday, committee chair Bob Kettle said the council had done "an incredible amount of public outreach" and that their support for camera surveillance was based on "countless interactions" with the public.

"The city clearly has not conducted sufficient public engagement," said Tee Shannon, Technology Policy Program Director for the ACLU-WA. Instead of months of meetings to get public feedback on the cameras, particularly from people of color living in the targeted areas, the city held a handful of poorly publicized meetings over the summer, including one held during the work day. Even so, Sannon says, "the overwhelming majority of folks who showed up were in huge opposition to this technology."

Nelson said the council was skillfully "threading this needle" between civil liberties and concerns for public safety. She added that other "extremely progressive" cities, like Washington D.C., already have real-time camera surveillance systems, adding that Seattle needs to "get with the program and recognize that this can help."

In a memo submitted as part of the mandatory Racial Equity Toolkit analysis of the proposal, SOCR director Derrick Wheeler-Smith raised eight high-level concerns about the cameras.

The cameras and signs alerting people about surveillance, "may create a feeling of being constantly watched that prevents residents from enjoying public spaces," Wheeler-Smith wrote. "For example, while residents of wealthier, whiter neighborhoods enjoy their parks undisturbed (such as by using them for political expression, or having a beer at a barbecue), residents of the pilot neighborhoods may be deterred from such activities that are their constitutional right, or that are customary, if not legal."

Having large "area under surveillance" signs all over an area, along with audible warnings for people with limited or no sight, would also create a "dystopian atmosphere" in surveilled neighborhoods, the memo says.

The neighborhoods that will be under camera surveillance are largely communities of color; the downtown area includes Westlake Park, frequently the site of public protests and a place where many unsheltered people hang out.

In response to questions from a public meeting about the potential for cameras to have a disproportionate impact on people of color, SPD responded that the department has a policy in place that "forbids bias-based policing and outlines processes for reporting and documenting any suspected bias-based behavior and other accountability measures." In his memo, SOCR's Wheeler-Smith noted that "while such a prohibition is a necessary policy, it did not prevent the disparities that have kept SPD under a federal consent decree for more than a decade."

The working group, and the city's civil rights office, also raised objections to SPD's claim, in response to public comment, that the cameras couldn't violate people's right to privacy because they will only "people who choose to be in a public place where the technologies are being used,” as if people could choose not to be in public in their neighborhoods.

"People living in these communities, especially those who are unhoused, do not have a choice as to whether they are in a public place while going about their daily lives," the working group wrote, adding that it "creates a disparate impact to make people in these neighborhoods choose between enjoying public spaces and avoiding constant surveillance while residents elsewhere do not face such a choice."

The ACLU's Sannon notes that it isn't clear what capabilities SPD's expanded Real Time Crime Center will have, nor does the proposal say how SPD will avoid sharing data collected in Seattle with organizations, including law enforcement agencies, outside the state—such as anti-choice groups attempting to enforce laws against traveling outside a state to obtain an abortion.

"It raises concerns... for people who come to Seattle looking fro reproductive health care, gender-affirming health care undocumented immigrants—it would be compiling this data in a central database and storing it in the cloud with a vendor that isn't in Washington state," Sannon said.

Although SPD has said repeatedly that they won't "cooperate in criminal or civil enforcement of laws related to immigration or reproductive or gender-affirming health care services," there's no guarantee the city or an out-of-state vendor will prevail in a legal case outside Washington, or how much they will be willing to spend to do so.

Representatives from SPD said Tuesday that footage will only be stored inside the cameras themselves, and only for a maximum of 30 days, which Kettle said he found reassuring; however, a broad, preemptive public records request (for all footage of the Planned Parenthood clinic inside the north surveillance zone, for instance) would require SPD to pull video from the cameras, subverting the purported intent of short-term storage.

Opponents of the bill also point out that after decades of studies, there's no evidence that camera surveillance prevents, or helps solve, the "gun violence, human trafficking, and other persistent felony crimes" SPD and the mayor's office are claiming the cameras will help them address. Councilmember Rob Saka said yesterday that the cameras would reduce gun violence and help address the"deplorable low" number of police officers in Seattle.

Citing a systematic review of 40 years of research on CCTV surveillance, Wheeler-Smith—Harrell's appointee to lead the the Office for Civil Rights—noted that the study found "no significant effects" on violent crime. In Newark, one city where CCTV implementation preceded a reduction in violent crime, the city also invested in staffing up a live monitoring center and sent extra patrols into surveilled areas, and ultimately didn't find these costly approaches sustainable.