By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Stock photo
For its third straight meeting, Seattle’s Public Safety Committee listened to dissent against proposed pieces of legislation from a majority of public commenters—one of whom brought a detailed opposition letter from Seattle Solidarity Budget, signed by 60 organizations and 431 individuals—and voted unanimously to pass them, anyway, at its Sept. 24 meeting.
The legislation regards a pilot of Seattle Police Department (SPD)-run and -utilized surveillance technology that would be placed around the city, including in the Chinatown-International District (CID). The technology and software employed will consist of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC) software. The chosen pilot locations are the CID, including Little Saigon, Aurora Avenue North, and the 3rd Avenue corridor in downtown Seattle.
After one year, the City will assess the impact of these technologies. However, that did not alleviate public commenters’ concerns.
A recent report in Real Change News by Glen Stellmacher revealed that SPD did not disclose detailed surveillance of people during the 2020 protests. Instead, it actively omitted this fact in a retroactive Surveillance Impact Report (SIR) that it was (and still is) required by law to submit to the City’s IT department.
“Internal SPD emails sent on Oct. 23, 2020, between SPD Intelligence Sergeant Eric Chartrand and Boatright, show what SPD and Seattle IT were telling the public in their SIR was ‘not accurate,’ according to Chartrand,” Stellmacher wrote in the Real Change News article. “Despite being informed about this, SPD allowed a SIR to be submitted and eventually approved by the Seattle City Council on May 24, 2021.”
Seattle Solidarity Budget (SSB) is an organization that advocates that the City of Seattle put more resources into housing and basic needs instead of into criminalization and policing. In the letter it brought before the committee, SSB cited this recent report, and wrote that “SPD has done this with CCTV and RTCC at least once already. On Feb. 12, 2024, SPD Captain James Britt told the public that SPD would absolutely not actively monitor CCTV feeds in the RTCC. Nick Zajchowski from SPD contradicted this in the June 26, 2024 meeting of the Community Surveillance Working Group saying that SPD would be actively monitoring the camera feeds at least part of the time.”
Several public commenters also spoke to years’ worth of studies and reports that show such surveillance technologies are not only ineffective, they are used against vulnerable communities, including immigrants, communities of color, and queer people.
A cursory search appears to show that these public commenters have reason for concern. For instance, these technologies are actively being used against people seeking gender-affirming care, including keeping tabs on their whereabouts. They are also being used against people seeking abortions, to track down and arrest immigrants, and can increase the risk of a wrongful conviction. Black communities, in particular, suffer from this latter issue, and monitoring immigrants has, according to Time Magazine, “remade American policing.”
Vanessa Reyes, policy director for the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, said that “these technologies can allow the circumvention of Keep Washington Working and the Washington Shield Law by providing avenues for our data to be sold to private corporations or shared with DHS for federal immigration enforcement actions, or other states who are seeking to prosecute people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care.”
This appears to be accurate. While the City of Seattle is a sanctuary city, one public commenter pointed out that the technology and surveillance software vendors it would be working with are not, nor is it legally enforceable to write into a contract that they cannot be compelled with a warrant to turn over data.
Tee Sanon with the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said that storing RTCC data in the cloud “will make it possible for [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and red states to prosecute immigrants and people coming to Seattle for reproductive and gender affirming healthcare while bypassing state protections like the shield law.
“For example, even if a contract requires the RTCC vendor to inform SPD when they receive a request for data, they can still be legally obligated to not tell SPD,” Sanon said. “And even in cases where the vendor is able to tell SPD about a data request that they receive, this would still involve a legal challenge that SPD could.”
Presenters speaking after public comment appeared to seek to quell commenters’ fears. The mayor’s Dir. of Public Safety, Natalie Walton-Anderson, said that “the goal of this is to be objective and transparent,” and, in addition to the Office of Inspector General (OIG) working with “a subject matter expert to develop and manage an implementation and outcomes,” SPD will also “enable a public-facing dashboard that reports the use of this technology, what is being recorded, the police actions it’s being used from, and the experts’ evaluation.”
Committee Chair Robert Kettle (District 7) and SPD Cpt. James Britt both said the CCTV footage would only be kept for 30 days, and that the videos would only be stored locally, on the camera itself. After that, the footage is overwritten. However, once it is deemed as evidence, it is moved to SPD’s evidence storage locker, where it is subject to state laws regarding evidence retention.
However, short of requiring vendors to notify SPD of any legal actions by federal agencies or state governments, it is not clear that there is any way to protect vulnerable people who stand at increased risk of being targeted with these technologies in place.
Councilmember Cathy Moore (District 5) said that she shared the data-sharing concerns highlighted by public commenters. She said that she had proposed an amendment that would require “SPD to include in their contract with the vendor that they will be notified if those actions are taken by outside jurisdictions and require the vendor to seek legal counsel and let us know about the outcome so we can be tracking whether or not this legitimate fear is, in fact, coming to pass. And, if so, how we deal with it, going forward.”
As cited above, several reports and studies have shown that this has already come to pass in several other states.
In addition to Moore’s amendment, the committee passed a suite of amendments to both bills, one of which notably removed the City Auditor’s Office from playing a role in evaluating the RTCC software, instead replacing the office with “outside subject matter experts.” The auditor’s office exists to “conduct independent, in-depth analyses and develop recommendations to improve City programs and services.”
Council Central staffer Tamaso Johnson said during the Sept. 24 meeting that “this change is consistent with the original intent of the pilot to be run via cooperation by the [Office of Inspector General] and SPD with the subject matter expertise.”
Thanks to the amendments and additions to the original proposed pilot program, in a little less than two hours’ worth of a committee meeting, the price tag has jumped from $1.5 million to just shy of $4 million to carry out the program in 2025.
It is immediately unclear if the cost of those “outside subject matter experts” is wrapped into the $4 million cost for the whole pilot program, or whether Seattle taxpayers can expect additional fees on top of the projected program cost. Johnson noted during his comments to the committee that “there may be additional associated personnel and other costs that are not knowable at this time, but will be once implementation is going.”
Recently, Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr announced that SPD officers would stop responding to calls without “supporting evidence,” due to the high volume of accidentally triggered alarms.
This evidence includes audio and video recordings.
Carolyn Bick can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.
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