Seattle Must Repeal Mass Surveillance Expansion To Protect People from Trump

Uplash

Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Seattle City Council claim they want to protect people in Seattle from the Trump administration. If that's the case, they must repeal the massive expansions of police surveillance they approved last year or risk the Trump administration accessing and abusing all of that surveillance data to carry out his purges.

In 2024, Mayor Harrell and City Council disregarded objections from community and experts and pushed through three ordinances which greatly expand the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) surveillance of Seattleites:  

• Ord 127044 put an Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) in every cop car. ALPRs use cameras to record every license plate they see along with the time and location. The ordinance allows SPD to keep a record of ALL license plates it scans for 90 days (Scans flagged as related to an investigation can be saved forever). 

• Ord 127110 allowed SPD to purchase and install neighborhood Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV) and store ALL video for 30 days (Video flagged as related to an investigation can be saved forever).

• Ord 127111 allowed SPD to license a cloud-based Real Time Crime Center (RTCC). RTCCs collect video feeds from SPD’s cameras, privately owned cameras, and other data sources. They include software for automatic identification and tracking of objects and humans, and roll out new algorithms on a regular basis which SPD does not have to get council approval for or let the public know about.

  
  

With these ordinances, Mayor Harrell and the City Council handed federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), access to mass surveillance of everyone in Seattle. The Real Time Crime Center stores its data, including all CCTV video and ALPR license plate locations, on cloud-based servers owned by a for-profit, private company located outside of Washington State. And recent statewide legislation designed to protect Washingtonians from surveillience, including Washington State’s Shield Law and the Keep Washington Working Act, won’t protect us. These laws restrict federal and out-of-state agencies access to data physically stored in Washington state or by Washington based companies, but SPD bypasses these protections by storing the data in cloud-based servers owned by a company located outside of Washington state. 

Mayor Harrell and the City Council knew these ordinances slashed through Seattle’s symbolic status as a “sanctuary” city. Last year community groups, the Seattle Office of Civil Rights, and the Mayor’s own Community Surveillance Working Group repeatedly raised this issue. 

Mayor Harrell and the City Council chose to pretend that writing data sharing restrictions into the contract with the for-profit, private-company that stores the surveillence data would somehow protect us. That’s nonsense. Contract language does not protect us. If there is a conflict between a law and a contract, the law always wins. If the Trump administration changes federal law or issues an executive order granting federal agencies such as ICE access to all data collected by local law enforcement agencies, no city contract will stop it. If another state, like Idaho or Texas, passes a law allowing themselves access to Washington data stored out of state, no contract language will stop it. 

As we have seen abundantly these past weeks, the Trump administration does not care about laws or court decisions. Laws and court decisions have not stopped the Trump administration from already accessing personal information on millions of people. Laws and court decisions have not stopped them from illegally arresting, jailing, and disappearring people to prisons in other countries. Laws and court decisions have not stopped them from doing anything they want to do. Mayor Harrell and the City Council know this. Anyone claiming contract language will magically stop the Trump administration is either lying or willfully ignorant. 

The only way to prevent the Trump administration from accessing surveillance data on everyone in Seattle is to not collect it in the first place. Once surveillance happens, and data is collected, it is just a matter of when the Trump administration gets its hands on it. The consequences of the Trump administration getting this information are life- and community-destroying. It is ICE kidnapping people off of Seattle streets and imprisoning them in Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador. People arrested for seeking abortion healthcare. Kids taken from their parents and doctors being prosecuted for providing gender-affirming healthcare.  

SPD does not surveil everyone in Seattle equally. People in areas with higher police presences are scanned by SPD’s ALPRs more often than people in other areas. For example, people in the Chinatown-International District (CID) get scanned by SPD’s ALPRs 79x more often than people in Wedgewood. And SPD plans to install its CCTV cameras in the CID, along the Aurora Avenue North Corridor, Downtown, and Belltown. These areas include “some of the highest-percentage minority population centers in King County,” as well as Planned Parenthood’s Northgate Health Center. The people SPD is gathering surveillance on are the very people the Trump administration wants to target: immigrants, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and people seeking reproductive care.

This is not a choice between protecting immigrants, trans folx and other groups from the Trump administration and safety for everyone else – because surveillance is not safety. Surveillance makes us all less safe. It does not reduce violence. It makes our brains act as if we have “psychosis and social anxiety disorder,” and has already been shown to have a negative psychological impact on people in Seattle. It takes money from community investments, which do decrease violence (Seattle will be spending over $7.8 million on this mass surveillance in 2025 and 2026). And police officers, including SPD officers, misuse surveillance data all the time.

Mayor Harrell and City Council’s response to the Trump administration so far is all talk, no action. They have issued a tepidly worded letter addressed to no one, a useless bill saying Seattle will follow the existing State Shield law, a resolution proclaiming councilmembers love SPD, and held panel discussions. If Mayor Harrell and the City Council actually want to protect us from the Trump administration, they must start taking action, including a repeal of the mass surveillance they approved last year. Not taking action is a choice; it is a decision to side with the Trump administration.

BJ Last is an analyst, baker, and community volunteer. He organizes with Stop Surveillance City and the Seattle Solidarity Budget. 

Julia Buck is an artist and community volunteer in Seattle. Dan Strauss hides whenever he sees her.