‘Evidence.com data is forever’ — As Wilson weighs next steps, audit finds Seattle Police unready for camera expansion including Capitol Hill and Central District

Findings from a civil rights audit of Seattle’s Real Time Crime Center challenges the Seattle Police Department’s planned camera expansion into Capitol Hill and the Central District, warning that deploying surveillance in these neighborhoods and across the city raises core constitutional risks.

Mayor Katie Wilson has said the “privacy and data governance audit” would be the basis for her next steps after her actions early this year pausing the approved expansion of the city’s Real Time Crime Center camera system over privacy concerns and worries of Seattle Police Department and federal authority overreach.

“RTCCs and modern surveillance technologies collect information about everyone, not just criminal suspects,” the Policing Project at New York University School of Law cautions in its findings, noting that “under the new model, everyone becomes a potential subject of surveillance, regardless of whether they have done anything to attract police attention.”

Wilson is scheduled to announce her “next steps on CCTV cameras” in an appearance with Interim SPD Chief Andre Sayles Tuesday morning at City Hall.

CHS reported in March as Wilson followed up on campaign promises and stopped an expansion of the city’s police camera system to the stadium district, Capitol Hill’s nightlife areas, and 23rd Ave in the Central District citing concerns about how law enforcement and federal authorities might access the technology and data.

The cameras for Capitol Hill — budgeted but never installed — would cover Broadway from Capitol Hill Station to Pike/Pine and the core of the Pike/Pine nightlife zone.

In the Central District, the then-Mayor Bruce Harrell and District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth pushed for the camera system to be centered around safety at Garfield High School with boundaries running from a block north of the school along E Cherry all the way to S Jackson. The western edge has been planned to include 20th Ave and the eastern edge would extend along 26th Ave.

The additions were planned to expand the SPD Real Time Crime Center surveillance camera system to include the Capitol Hill nightlife core around E Pike and Cal Anderson Park and a major swath of the Central District from E Cherry to Jackson police officials say is necessary to prevent gun violence.

The Capitol Hill system is estimated to cost around $400,000 to install and $35,000 a year to operate. The Central District installation has a budget of $425,000 and also an estimated $35,000 in “ongoing annual costs.”

In March, Wilson said SPD had yet to receive the ordered cameras from technology provider Axon.

The proposed rollout in the Central District collides with the report’s equity findings, which caution against concentrating automated police monitoring in historically marginalized and heavily policed communities.

While the initial pilot deployed 303 cameras across 61 sites in areas with higher proportions of people of color than the city average — including the Chinatown-International District, downtown, Belltown, and Aurora Ave — the audit found that SPD failed to publish the underlying data or comparative crime analyses used to justify placement decisions.

Each site is configured as a cluster of up to five cameras — typically four fixed cameras and one pan-tilt-zoom camera.

For the Central District around Garfield High School and Capitol Hill, the Policing Project urges the city to publicly disclose the crime data underlying deployment and mandate annual reassessments to verify whether conditions that justified camera installation continue to exist, ensuring cameras do not simply remain in place indefinitely.

For Capitol Hill, a frequent center for the city’s protests, the audit warns that continuous CCTV feeds threaten First Amendment rights.

According to the report, existing departmental policy requires lieutenant-level authorization before officers may record lawful demonstrations, but the findings show that RTCC cameras capture protests incidentally and continuously without triggering those required safeguards.

The audit also includes findings that private camera integrations through Axon’s “Connect Seattle” program currently operate without caps, deployment criteria, or technical masking to prevent private areas such as residential windows from being filmed. Recent reviews under the Office of Inspector General made similar findings.

Although SPD applies permanent digital masking on its own cameras, private feeds and Seattle Department of Transportation traffic cameras lack these protections.

The audit also found that technical oversight within Axon’s Fusus platform is deficient. The system does not require officers to input a case number or operational justification before viewing camera feeds.

The department also fails to log queries when analysts deploy artificial intelligence object-detection tools, a feature personnel described using only as an unreliable “last resort” after a search for a suspect in gray clothing returned an image of a pigeon.

Across both Capitol Hill and the Central District, the audit cautions against warrantless location tracking and indefinite data storage, warning that searches of camera networks allow police to retrace movements without the legal standards required under the Fourth Amendment.

The report also argues that state and municipal shield laws cannot prevent federal authorities from obtaining stored surveillance footage through administrative subpoenas or court orders served on cloud vendor Axon under the federal Stored Communications Act.

This risk is heightened by SPD’s handling of data. While raw CCTV video is deleted after five days under an internal guideline that is “not written policy, and thus could be changed at any time,” video clips and stills uploaded to Axon’s Evidence.com platform are retained indefinitely.

“Evidence.com data is forever,” SPD personnel said in one interview, according to the report.

To safeguard neighborhoods including Capitol Hill and the Central District, the report advises that Seattle require judicial warrants for retrospective tracking, end the practice of storing video evidence indefinitely, and resolve operational gaps before allowing police to access more cameras in the city.



UPDATE: The Community Not Cameras Coalition has provided a statement on the audit including this roster of key findings:

•  SPD keeps the video clips it saves to Evidence.com indefinitely, a practice the audit recommends ending.

• The agreement that keeps Axon’s new surveillance features turned off is informal and appears nowhere in the City’s contract.

• Analysts can open a camera feed without entering a case number or a reason, so no one can audit whether an analyst viewed footage for a prohibited purpose.

• SPD created a case number for the World Cup and streamed live camera feeds throughout the tournament, despite its policy against watching cameras without a call for service or an active case.

• The City proposed the system for gun violence, human trafficking, and persistent felony crime, and analysts may now assist with any call, including misdemeanors.

• SPD did not prepare a specific analysis of where to place the cameras, and the pilot neighborhoods have a larger share of people of color than the city overall.

• Real Time Crime Center staff can view 538 cameras directly, while the City describes the system as 62.

• SPD has purchased 100 devices to give to businesses at its discretion, each able to connect several private cameras to the Real Time Crime Center.

• SPD applies no privacy masking to those private cameras and sets no limit on how long businesses keep the footage.

“The report revealed what we’ve known since visiting the RTCC. The recommendations to reform the RTCC in the report are half-measures,” the coalition statement reads. “More oversight, audit policies and targeted use won’t eliminate the fact that this system can and will be abused.”