The debate over police surveillance cameras in Seattle is heating up.
The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce released a poll Monday suggesting that nearly 75% of registered Seattle voters support expanding the city’s police surveillance camera network. The poll of 500 people was conducted shortly after the shooting at the Bite of Seattle food festival last month.
Chamber President and CEO Joe Nguyễn argued that the results show that the protracted debate over surveillance cameras in Seattle is not as polarized as it often seems.
“What we found is that the folks who are oftentimes most vocal online don’t actually represent the majority of what people in Seattle want and care about,” Nguyễn said in an interview. “I hope we can use this information to provide some cover, to provide data, to provide a partnership to thoughtfully implement a [public safety] plan.”
Anti-surveillance activists disagree. At a press conference at City Hall on Monday, organizers with Indivisible and the Communities Not Cameras coalition argued that the poll’s questions were biased and that money spent on cameras would be better invested in preventative measures like violence intervention programs, which the poll did not mention.
“If you tell people that the only answer is cameras to public safety — like questions in this poll disingenuously did — then they’re going to say, ‘We want public safety,’” attorney and organizer Leah Salerno said.
The anti-surveillance activists had just finished a tour of the Seattle Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center, where officers gather and monitor footage from closed-circuit television cameras posted across the city. The tour “confirmed and strengthened” activists’ concerns about mass surveillance, Salerno said.
“We’re not just in danger of misuse and exploitation of the data,” Salerno said. “The surveillance state itself is a threat.”
The issue of police surveillance cameras has been a hot-button issue throughout Mayor Katie Wilson’s term. She was critical of the cameras during her campaign, citing concern about civil liberties and the possibility of federal immigration officials accessing footage. After taking office, she paused the planned expansions and turned off cameras in the stadium district. She turned those cameras on again for the World Cup, and then turned them back off after it ended.
Wilson has deferred any final decisions about the city’s camera system until an audit by New York University’s Policing Project is completed later this year.
The mayor’s waffling on the issue has drawn criticism from both sides. Nguyễn said he believes the cameras’ effectiveness and privacy guardrails have already been proven, and that there is no reason why Wilson should wait for the results of the “self-imposed audit” to make a decision.
“This is not China, this is not other jurisdictions where you have mass surveillance using AI or facial recognition,” Nguyễn said. “These cameras are less sophisticated than the ring cameras that you would have on your door.”
The city’s camera feeds are powered by Axon, a police technology company. During Monday’s news conference, Noah Williams, a cybersecurity engineer with the anti-surveillance coalition, said Axon’s software gives the city “the illusion of control” and is “structurally dangerous.”
“They can stream our footage to their cloud platform without telling us,” Williams said. “And if they can do it, so can anyone who hacks them, and so can the federal government.”
The news conference came one day after gunfire in Pioneer Square — where Wilson turned off cameras — left one person injured and damaged multiple buildings and vehicles.
“It would be nice to have the cameras on just to see who did it and what happened and if we can protect people going forward,”
Nguyễn said.
Activists acknowledged that, in some cases, cameras may assist with identifying a suspect. But they argued that trade-offs aren’t worth it.
“The fact that these things happen sometimes, and sometimes cameras help figure out what happened when nobody was there, is not justification to put cameras everywhere,” said coalition member and software engineer Phil Mocek. “There are a variety of privacy-invasive measures we could take to solve that, and we don’t because we live in a free society.”
The chamber’s poll also found that only 34% of voters are confident that Wilson and her administration have an effective plan in place to improve public safety in Seattle. It found that 52% of voters believe Seattle is on the wrong track — an increase of 10% from earlier this year.
The poll was conducted via text and email by Fulcrum Strategy Group between Aug. 10 - 13. It has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points and was weighted to be demographically representative of the Seattle electorate. Of the respondents, 64% identified as Democrats; 17% as independents; 10% as Republicans and 9% as socialists.
