Anti-criminalization activists are mobilizing opposition to a proposed package of new Seattle Police Department (SPD) surveillance tools, warning they could infringe on civil liberties and exacerbate biased policing.
The three technologies are closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, an acoustic gunshot location system (AGLS) and a real-time crime center.
These systems make up a $1.5 million crime prevention pilot that was passed last November in the city’s 2023 budget, repurposing funds from unspent salaries. According to SPD, the tools will speed up response times and investigations by freeing limited personnel time.
At a Feb. 27 public hearing about the new tech, SPD staff said the pilot will be deployed in hot spots with high levels of reported crime, such as 3rd Avenue in downtown Seattle, the Pike-Pine Corridor in Capitol Hill, the Chinatown-International District (CID) and Aurora Avenue in North Seattle. These areas also have larger populations of unsheltered people and, in the case of Aurora, a significant presence of street-based sex work.
The hearing was part of Seattle’s surveillance review process, which was passed in 2013 and strengthened in 2017. The law requires city departments to go through a rigorous review — including collecting public comments and evaluating potential effects on privacy and civil liberties — before acquiring new surveillance technologies. These impact reports also require final approval by the Seattle City Council.
The Seattle Solidarity Budget coalition has come out in strong opposition to the technologies, claiming that they could harm already overpoliced communities such as Black, Brown and unhoused people while doing little to prevent or deter crime. Instead, the coalition wants the money to be repurposed for social services. The group delivered a petition with more than 1,200 signatures to SPD staff at the hearing.
Allison Mills, a graduate student studying law and justice at Central Washington University and a member of Seattle Solidarity Budget, said the crime prevention pilot had the potential to exacerbate existing geographical biases.
“[It’s] collecting all this information from the police themselves, which is already biased, and then putting that information into something else,” Mills said. “So it just gives police specifically a reason to target these areas, which are historically impoverished or have higher crime rates.”
Mills also said studies of ShotSpotter, a prominent AGLS tool, have shown it to be ineffective and prone to producing false positives. The tool is composed of hundreds of small microphones installed in a specific area. When the program perceives certain loud sounds, it flags them as potential gunshots. An off-site employee sifts through the audio and, if they agree it’s a gunshot, sends the report to the police department.
“I think the most common misunderstanding of a gunshot would be a truck backfire or a car backfiring. There’s been lots of other false indicators,” Mills said. “The most ridiculous one I remember is a bird falling onto the hood of a car that caused these alerts.”
SoundThinking, the company that owns ShotSpotter, claims the technology has a 97% accuracy rate. However, a 2022 report by researchers at the University of Michigan found that when deployed in Chicago, ShotSpotter had a false positivity rate of 89%. The research also found that ShotSpotter reports in St. Louis were almost eight times more likely to be inaccurate than normal 911 calls by community members. A paper written by University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D. student researchers, published in November 2023, found that implementation of ShotSpotter in Chicago led to an average 23% delay in police dispatch and 13% delay in officer arrival.
These concerns over efficacy have led police departments across the country to ditch the AGLS model, including in San Antonio; New Orleans; Dayton, Ohio; and Charlotte, North Carolina. On Feb. 13, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson canceled the city’s ShotSpotter contract, which was valued in the tens of millions of dollars annually. Champaign, Illinois, which had an AGLS installed by Flock Safety, discontinued its program the previous day.
Mills warned that AGLS costs could rise dramatically once one-time discounts by companies like SoundThinking expire.
In spite of the critical studies, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and SPD seem motivated to see the crime prevention pilot through. As a city council member in 2014 and 2016 and later as mayor in 2022, Harrell unsuccessfully tried to pass funding for ShotSpotter.
More than 50 community members showed up to the Feb. 27 public hearing to learn about and voice their opinions on the proposed technologies. The overwhelming majority of commenters expressed opposition to the crime prevention pilot, with some holding signs reading “stop surveillance city.”
“I want to let you know that cameras don’t prevent crime,” said one commenter named Rata, who works in the CID. “I was there in Canton Alley when the windows on the Wing [Luke Museum] were smashed. I was horrified by the attack, but I was [also] horrified by the [calls] for retribution. My parents taught me better. Retribution is punitive; these cameras are punitive.”
Three commenters expressed support for the pilot, including longtime community advocate Rev. Harriet Walden. She said Black mothers who had lost children to gun violence wanted CCTV cameras installed to prevent violent crime.
The surveillance tools will be a major political test for the new, more conservative Seattle City Council. The body has already faced increased scrutiny from asylum-seekers and their allies, who held a sit-in the same day as the public hearing. The sit-in resulted in six people being arrested; five are U.S. citizens, while one is undocumented. According to The Stranger, the protesters reportedly called on the city council to divert funding from the crime prevention pilot to emergency housing for asylum-seekers.
The public comment period for the crime prevention pilot surveillance tools was extended to March 22.
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the March 6–12, 2024 issue.