Is Mayor Wilson turning off police cameras? Sort of

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson made a slightly confusing announcement on Thursday: She’s pausing the expansion of scores of police surveillance cameras around the city, except in the Stadium District, where 26 will go in ahead of the World Cup.

Those new cameras won’t be turned on… except when there’s a “credible threat.”

It’s Wilson’s effort to find a middle ground between businesses and community members who want the cameras to help catch criminals, and some of her most active and dedicated supporters, who are worried the federal government can access the cameras’ data.

“Sometimes as the mayor you make decisions that no one's going to like — this might be one of those,” Wilson said. “Some people will be upset that I'm not turning off all the cameras immediately, and others will be upset that I'm not charging ahead with turning on more.”

Wilson also ordered that hundreds of license plate readers on Seattle cop cars be turned off. They'll remain off — just like the new surveillance cameras — until an audit can figure out how many eyes outside the local government can peek through all those lenses.

Wilson isn't the only lawmaker in Washington trying to figure out how to respond to fears that ICE and other federal agencies could peer through local police surveillance cameras. Seattle and the state Legislature are trying to limit federal access to license plate readers and other surveillance, while cities like Everett or Redmond have turned them off after reports last year found federal agencies had accessed their data.

Some of Wilson’s most dedicated supporters believe shutting the cameras off indefinitely is the only way to keep the federal government out.

“The problem is that the records exist,” said Xochitl Maykovich, who was Wilson’s field director during her general election campaign last year. “The only way you can not get something is if it doesn't exist, which is why a lot of our government agencies do not collect immigration status."

Maykovich and more than 1,200 other people who say they knocked doors for Wilson have signed a letter asking the new mayor to immediately halt the cameras’ expansion.

Some activists are going further. A few hours before Wilson’s announcement, a handful interrupted Gov. Bob Ferguson as he signed a bill making it a gross misdemeanor to impersonate an ICE agent.

“All cameras are hackable. All surveillance is subpoenable,” a protester holding a sign shouted, running in front of the governor’s podium.

After the activists were forced out by police, they chanted outside, shouted into megaphones, and pounded on the windows.

Gov. Ferguson told reporters later that he understands the protesters’ frustrations, but it's not easy to figure out how to filter through the massive amounts of data the state shares with the federal government as part of investigations into crimes like human trafficking.

“If we give information to a certain legitimate agency, even though they will sign documents saying, ‘We're not going to share with anybody else,’ they still do it anyway,” Ferguson said. “I've still got to be thoughtful about that information and sometimes it's pretty clear [that] we can cut this off and there's no harm in Washington state to it. Other times...it's more nuanced.”