Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes and East Precinct officials will hold a “Our City, Our Safety 2026” community meeting on Capitol Hill next month as Mayor Katie Wilson has put an planned expansion of the city’s Real Time Crime Center cameras to Capitol Hill and the Central District on hold.
The April 14th meeting at Capitol Hill’s Miller Community Center will be an opportunity “discuss public safety strategies” and “meet directly with Chief Shon Barnes and SPD Command Staff members.”
Last week, Wilson said she is pausing the planned expansion of the new cameras to the Pike/Pine and 23rd Ave areas of the city while her office leads a “privacy and data governance audit” of the city’s surveillance technology.
In an unusual step for the city’s executive office, Wilson is holding a public forum on the surveillance system and privacy issues to gather more feedback and allow more voices to be heard, announcing a planned session to be held at First Hill’s Town Hall Seattle this week, Friday, March 27.
The sessions come amid a flurry of meetings and roundtables over public safety around Capitol Hill. Last week, the GSBA chamber of commerce’s Capitol Hill Neighborhood Safety Coordinator held a roundtable at Seattle Central that around 40 people attended.
The crowd was split into six small groups to discuss issues like traffic safety, police capacity and property crime. This event was one of the association’s many efforts to create space for open conversation about Capitol Hill’s most persistent safety concerns. Each group was assigned a different public safety topic to focus their conversation as they asked questions, told personal stories and shared opinions on potential solutions to these problems.
Officers from SPD’s East Precinct – including Capt. Jim Britt and SPD’s LGBTQ+ liaison, Officer Haden Barton – were dispersed through the room, answering questions and swapping contact information with attendees.
“People are wanting these conversations, people are wanting to be part of the solution,” Carl told CHS after the session.
Conversations at last week’s meeting included a public safety concern that has consistently topped the list of community feedback in the East Precinct but has been given short shrift by SPD in the past — traffic safety.
Doing more from an enforcement standpoint to address making streets and sidewalks safer took on new importance after a woman was hit and killed crossing E Pine in February.
At last week’s meeting, Joe Elenbaas, the East Precinct Crime Prevention Coordinator, and his group recorded the traffic safety problems they encountered on a daily basis and by the end of the session, the list had taken up the entire page. The most recent survey conducted for SPD identified traffic safety as the top concern among residents, listing bicycle and pedestrian safety as prominent themes in responses. Elenbaas’s group suggested changing intersection stops to be more consistent with each other in certain areas and establishing designated rideshare and food delivery pickup zones, particularly around Pike/Pine, as possible changes they would like to see in the near future.
Sitting at a table devoted to discussing “police capacity,” Cameron Yonan, the district director for District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth’s office, talked with attendees about the frustrations in the new contract between the union representing SPD’s officers which was approved last year with Hollingsworth’s support. CHS reported here on how the contract is limiting the city’s newly formed and growing CARE Department and crisis responders.
The flurry of public safety meetings comes as the East Precinct has seen some of its key reported crime statistics hold stubbornly stable while falling across other parts of the city. Despite the East Precinct issues, Chief Barnes said crime is falling under his command with overall crime down 18% and murders dropping from 79 in 2024 to 58 last year.
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