The Seattle City Council’s public safety committee could vote Tuesday morning on legislation expanding the Seattle Police Department’s surveillance camera pilot program to include Capitol Hill and the Central District. The expansion could also bring changes that will allow SPD to use select Seattle Department of Transportation traffic cameras in the program.
CHS reported here on the proposed legislation to expand the SPD “Real Time Crime Center” surveillance camera system to include the Capitol Hill nightlife core around E Pike and Cal Anderson Park and a major swath of the Central District from E Cherry to Jackson it says it necessary to prevent gun violence near Garfield High School.
The proposed SPD camera expansion would also include adding the installations to the city’s Stadium District around Lumen Field and T-Mobile park.
The city already operates more than 350 traffic cameras across its streets. SPD’s current three-location system includes 57 cameras, the city says.
The proposed Capitol Hill boundaries would cover the core of the Pike/Pine neighborhood along E Pike and E Pine between Broadway and 12th Ave with a mapped extension along Nagle Place and Broadway north of the core all the way to Denny/E Barbara Bailey Way and the southern edge of Capitol Hill Station and its Sound Transit security camera installations. The camera zone would stretch to the backside of Pike/Pine along E Union.
The Nagle extension would cover an area troubled by nighttime violence, camping, and street disorder and represents a de facto inclusion of Cal Anderson Park’s western edge including Bobby Morris Playfield and the skate area, dodgeball and tennis courts, and basketball court.
In the Central District, the Harrell administration is pushing for the camera system to be centered around safety at Garfield High School but with boundaries running from a block north of the school along E Cherry all the way to S Jackson. The western edge would include 20th Ave and the eastern edge would extend along 26th Ave. The zone would include Garfield’s 23rd Ave campus, the Garfield Super Block area including the Garfield Community Center and sports fields, and the troubled parking lot at 23rd and Jackson.
How the program handles private property like the 23rd and Jackson parking lot around businesses like AutoZone and Walgreens and public areas like the Garfield campus isn’t clear.
The extension to Jackson would allow the SPD system to monitor the area around the Vulcan Real Estate-owned parking lot and surrounding area where multiple incidents of gun violence have erupted including this 2023 drive-by shooting that damaged a nearby daycare and sent one man to the hospital.
The Capitol Hill system will cost around $400,000 to install and $35,000 a year to operate.
The Central District installation has a budget of $425,000 and also an estimated $35,000 in “ongoing annual costs.”
The council committee will grapple with proposed amendments including a proposal from District 3 leader Joy Hollingsworth that would restrict camera installation to only “arterial streets” within the Garfield High School area.
Additional amendments proposed by Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and sponsored by committee chair Bob Kettle would add reporting and efficacy requirements. “If the evaluation does not show that CCTV deters violent crime, then the Executive would need to consider, in compliance with the Surveillance Impact Report (SIR) policies, discontinuing the pilot project,” an amendment reads.
Another would require the program to report “whether a warrant, subpoena, or court order” has been used to obtain “Closed-Circuit Television Camera Systems (CCTV), Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR), or other protected data from a contracted vendor.”
That amendment would also call on SPD to “remedy the situation” “including steps that might be taken to discontinue collecting certain data” — or end the program.
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I’m concerned about any government installing cameras in a neighborhood where LGBTQ+ people live, work and play. It is particularly troubling as our federal government demonizes members of our community — especially transgender people. The City clearly understands where crime is an issue, so instead of installing cameras they should increase foot patrols and address crime in real time instead of recording and monitoring the majority of us who are innocent and simply living our lives.
OH please! I’ve signed up for plenty of companies where my data was described as supposedly “protected” and I just got yet another letter in the mail the other day informing me of yet another data breach.
They can’t possibly think we’re that gullible. More and more people are realizing that US consumer data privacy and security is in an absolute shambles, even just compared to the EU regulatory structure, and we’re pretending the lamebrained Seattle police are somehow ever going to be held accountable when a data breach inevitably occurs??? Spare me. They are data breachers themselves and will obviously be complicit when ICE comes knocking looking for their next victims. There is no proof of efficacy for these cameras in other cities, especially since crime has been decreasing year over year all over the country, but on top of that, this data will clearly be sold to third parties no matter what they say. We live in a data economy baby. The police wanted to make it PUBLIC to view our residential neighborhood streets on a whim like the fucking Truman Show. Absolute Psychopathy. Hope you like insurance companies buying the data to increase rates on an even more targeted basis. Combine that with your biometric data scraped from your phone and your life is completely quantifiable and able to be priced out. Don’t let them get away with this invasive bullshit.
Police need to be from our communities and need to be in the streets being part of said communities. Not in contrived and obviously planned family events, but naturally, while doing beat patrols by foot. Get out of your damn tanks cowards. I have no time for this racist suburban warrior bullshit, and now we’re supposed to give them their own private CCTV to boot? HELL NO!
We are 100’s of millions in debt. Stole Jumpstart for housing and buying a militarized Seattle.
It’s sick. NOBODY wants this. PUT IT ON THE BALLOT!
Cram it down our throats quick before you lose the election! The wealthy are counting on you. They DID doughnate and expect a return!
I am happy to see that Seattle is finally taking a common sense approach to the increase in gun violence, general crime and lawlessness in the city, but I am thrilled to see that my place falls into one of the zones covered by the cameras!
I am proud to have Hollingsworth as our rep, but will be bummed if she is successfull in limiting the proposed coverage areas, none of the shootings in the blocks around my place are major arterials, I hope she does not cave to the vocal minority as so many Seattle politicians do.
I happen to be one of those liberal weirdos that dont like to see kids get shot while going to school.