Mayor Katie Wilson gave an emphatic “yes” to the immediate expansion of police surveillance in Seattle on Tuesday, with no immediate policies to reduce the risk of abuse by local and federal law enforcement power in 4 to 6 months.
The decision follows nearly a year of foot-dragging over expanding, freezing, or gutting the city’s police camera network and the release of a related report she commissioned from New York University. It’s the clearest departure from Wilson’s campaign promise to “Trump-proof Seattle.”
The city’s police surveillance network includes around 600 cameras integrated into an erroneously named “Real Time Crime Center.” The cameras from the Seattle Police Department could help in a crisis, in real time, but the civil liberties concerns raised mostly stem from their other main use: recording video footage for police analysts to comb through later.
And starting this week, the footage will grow and grow.
“The Stadium District cameras were installed prior to the World Cup and will be turned on immediately,” Wilson told reporters Tuesday, adding that “The others still need to be purchased and installed, and we don’t know exactly how long that’s going to take because we’re at the whims of the, you know, postal service or whatever.”
Future expansions of the digital dragnet will include areas around Garfield High School and Capitol Hill.
That footage is vulnerable to hacking, misuse by police workers for stalking, secret federal subpoenas to contractors, overt federal subpoenas to the city, and public records requests from anyone, from pro-life activists to ICE agents.
If Wilson was trying to strike a balance between police investigative power and individual liberty, she fell on her face.
Wilson enumerated her commitment to a dozen of the report’s recommendations (more SPD accountability, rules for surveilling protests, limits to online data retention), but not on the same timeline. Big Sister’s expansion will happen immediately, while transparency is TBD.
“At the same time, and crucially, my office and SPD will be working urgently to implement most of the recommendations in this audit,” she said, adding a much murkier timeline of “over the next four to six months.”
At least one of the recommendations she committed to, a public dashboard on the surveillance web’s usage, was recommended to complete no later than three months after the report’s release. Other recommendations she dodged, like requiring a warrant for tracking individuals across cameras except under narrow and urgent circumstances.
Under the mayor’s plan, the city’s surveillance will expand, while possible access by hostile actors like Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will remain the same: mainly through public records requests (including under pseudonyms) and subpoenas, which can be done without the city’s knowledge.
“There is not a lot in SPD’s control over preventing that information, including information that might be used for civil immigration enforcement or for protected healthcare, from leaving its custody through those two channels,” says Clare Garvie one of the authors of the report NYU School of Law’s Policing Project.
The report did not quantify the risks, and left it to public leaders to decide on whether to take them.
To date, there are no reported instances of federal agents using Seattle’s video records. But the report recommended that city policies get ahead of changing technology and legal landscape.
“My assessment, based on the audit, is that the risk is very low. I mean, I think in general, ICE has its own ways of getting information and does not need our camera footage,” Wilson told reporters.
It’s great news for folks who supported Wilson’s centrist, millionaire opponent, Bruce Harrell.
“To ensure safe communities across all Seattle neighborhoods, businesses, and diverse stakeholders, we must effectively leverage this technology like other major cities across the country,” District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said in a statement Tuesday.
But Wilson’s assessment, and the resulting decision, did not land with former supporters.
“She did this the same week that Stephen Miller became Chief of Staff to Trump,” says Xochitl Maykovich anti-cameras activist and former Wilson campaign field co-director. “The master of the deportation machine.”
Wilson put out a video Tuesday timed with her announcement that underscored that the surveillance web she’s expanding doesn’t include Flock cameras, which read licence plates (for ICE).
“These are not Flock cameras,” Wilson said. “This is a different system, managed by a different company.”
The different company is Axon, the company that sends much of SPD’s video to remote data centers has over $100 million in federal contracts on Miller’s puppet strings, including $37 million with ICE, according to USAspending.gov
Miller is the master because he’s helped Trump pull the levers of power to do illegal stuff, over and over again, far beyond something as simple as asking Axon to hand over some municipal data. This is not a man who respects the Constitution, let alone Axon’s terms of services with our city.
Maykovich says she forwarded an ACLU post about Seattle surveillance privacy issues to Wilson during her 2025 campaign, and it wound up as part of her platform: “I vow to protect our neighbors and defend Seattle’s status as a sanctuary city” and “Seattle can’t be a true sanctuary city if ICE can access data about you through City policies and programs that could have been better designed.
Wilson declined to comment on how her decision related to those promises.
For others, it’s clear.
“This is a betrayal of her base,” Maykovich says.
Hunter Pauli contributed to reporting.
More in NEWS
Local (and not-so-local) news from your favorite writers.
