Local surveillance is ramping up in tandem with federal surveillance

Jul 17, 2025

Seattle News:

First up, I wrote about the new proposed crisis care center site in Capitol Hill.

One detail I hadn’t remembered is that the King County crisis care levy doesn’t provide any funding for involuntary treatment. Now, there is an important distinction here, because the first crisis care center, Kirkland Connections, does have involuntary beds, and when I interviewed them earlier this year, that involuntary capacity was mostly full. So it’s not impossible for crisis care centers to have involuntary treatment space, but none of that is funded by the crisis care levy dollars.

New SPD Chief Shon Barnes was sworn in last week. PubliCola reported that Barnes was out of town most weekends during his first four months as SPD Chief. A side note from that reporting is that Barnes met with Sound Thinking Technologies on March 17, when he’d been chief for less than two months. Sound Thinking is known for their Shotspotter gun shot detection technology that Harrell has proposed a couple of times, only to have community reject it.

Mayor Bruce Harrell and Chief Barnes are celebrating SPD’s real time crime center (RTCC) so I finally got to enter the room where it happens. It did not, in fact, feel like I’d entered the control center of a science fiction movie. The RTCC is staffed by two analysts 19 hours a day, seven days a week.

The cameras SPD are installing include five cameras in each deployment: a 360 camera with a pan tilt zoom camera mounted below. So each camera actually gives out five feeds, four of which are static and facing all four directions, the last of which is a pan tilt zoom that can move and focus. The cameras record for five days at a time. They don’t use facial recognition or gait analysis, but they do have an AI overlay within the camera systems that allows the police to look for things such as “blue shirts, black pants,” to use SPD Captain James Britt’s example.

57 cameras have been installed so far in the three zones: Aurora North, the downtown core, and the CID.

Britt said, “We're looking to add a couple of new locations in coming legislation, which will include the Capitol Hill nightlife area, the area around the stadiums, and the area around Garfield High School. We're working with council right now to work on that legislation. The ability for the real time crime center has also to pull in private video from businesses and other places that are willing to give their video. We're working on getting that rolled out, but we're not quite ready to go there just yet. We're also working, as part of the legislation, to be able to pull in other government-owned cameras, which would include DOT cameras and cameras from other city facilities around the area.”

By DOT cameras, Britt is referring to traffic cameras operated by SDOT.

Britt assured me that the RTCC doesn’t connect with any federal agencies with its data or equipment. SPD is also planning to have random audits of their analysts to make sure they’re following policy. Britt said it would be illegal to use RTCC data to assist ICE. However, in recent months we have been seeing many of these protective laws being bent or broken across the country, including close to home in Pierce County.

You can read articles about the RTCC center from The Seattle Times and PubliCola. The Times article in particular does a good job covering some of the civil rights concerns related to the use of these cameras and the RTCC.

At the same press conference, Harrell announced that SPD has hired almost 100 new officers as of July 1.

Seattle is also asking to leave its federal consent decree after more than 13 years. My guess is that Judge James Robart will schedule a hearing in the fall, possibly in September.

This week the city council passed new graffiti and nuisance property legislation, which I will be writing more about in the near future.

The applicants for Cathy Moore’s council seat have been made public, and rumor has it that former Councilmember Debra Juarez might be a shoo-in for the position. The final vote on the councilmember appointment will be on July 28.

Surveillance news

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and reading about surveillance since President Donald Trump signed his big budget bill on July 4. The bill gives ICE a whole lot of money, and as a result, we can expect to see large investments in building out surveillance systems. These will be nominally for the purpose of helping to deport illegal immigrants, but there is always the potential for an existing surveillance system to be used for other purposes.

Right now, here’s some of the data we know is being shared with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP):

ICE is searching a massive insurance and medical bill database called ISO Claimsearch.
Domestic flight information was sold to CBP by a data broker owned by at least 8 major American airlines.
The IRS is building a system that will enable them to share taxpayer data with ICE, which would allow ICE to obtain home addresses.
Here in Washington State, the Department of Licensing (DOL) is giving ICE and other Homeland Security departments access to drivers license and vehicle information, in spite of state law.
ICE is currently using AI to scrape social media for more data/information.
I’ve reported before on how license plate reader (ALPR) data is being shared with ICE, even by King County’s own Housing Authority.

I’d recommend caution when thinking about laws such as Washington’s Shield Law that are designed to protect immigrants or California’s law regulating the sharing of ALPR data. While it is good to have these legal protections, we are currently seeing the limit of these laws in action, including in California, Illinois, and here in Washington. Assurances that a surveillance behavior and/or data sharing would be illegal are not sufficient to ensure safety at this time.

Notes from the Emerald City

Local surveillance is ramping up in tandem with federal surveillance

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