‘Public safety ecosystem must be ready to go by the time the world comes to Seattle’

Councilmember Bob Kettle (District 7), who serves as chair of the Public Safety Committee, issued the following statement today regarding the ongoing community discussion of Mayor Wilson’s announced audit and the use of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) and other crime prevention tools.

“This past Tuesday, during my chair comment of the Public Safety Committee, I spoke to the Mayor’s changes to the City Council-passed Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) and Closed-Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV).

“First, it is important to know that I support an audit of how ALPR and CCTV work through Seattle’s Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC). Through the six ordinances the City Council passed that underpin these systems, we set in specific protocols and accountability measures. It is crucial to stop and review to ensure that our protocols and accountability measures, plus the protections we have built into the system, are working.

“However, declining to turn on the Stadium District CCTV cameras without evidence of a ‘credible threat’ is a decision I do not support. Too many instances of terrorism in the past thirty years have not had adequate intelligence of a credible threat prior to those attacks. If we wait for the Fusion Center (Seattle / King County’s counterterrorism center) to alert us to a credible threat, it may be too late. The FIFA World Cup puts Seattle on the world stage, and with the number of people we are expecting, that makes FIFA football matches or the surrounding Fan Fest events a target for bad faith actors. We cannot risk safety at this critical time.

“Additionally, our RTCC already will be audited by the University of Pennsylvania. That audit’s conclusions are expected by the end of this year; any other audit that Mayor Wilson is calling for must be completed by early June so that we have one more tool in our public safety ecosystem ready to go by the time the world comes to Seattle.

“To be clear, I do support the Mayor performing her due diligence on our ALPR and CCTV surveillance systems. These systems were crafted with Seattle values in mind, but there is always room for more accountability and privacy protections. We cannot let our desire to improve unnecessarily limit our ability to protect our communities and the projected 750,000 visitors we’ll see for these events.”

For a more detailed perspective, refer to Chair Kettle’s opening remarks from the Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday, March 24.

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