Seattle Mayor Waffles, Allows Security Cameras for World Cup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuOR-1GntY8

Who Is Afraid of ICE?

Wilson had cited privacy concerns in her March decision to pause the rollout of cameras to address the city’s crime problems. The mayor said she wanted to wait for the results of an evaluation that the city is participating in by researchers at New York University’s Policing Project.

“There’s no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve some crimes, including serious ones like homicides”, she admitted at the time, but she wanted to go slow because of “legitimate concerns about privacy, oversurveillance and potential misuse of surveillance technologies”.

Worries about the cameras were not “just about keeping data safe from ICE and other federal authorities”, wrote Erica C. Barnett for the urbanism website PubliCola, though that was the better part of it.

In January, Wilson’s office announced a city initiative to limit the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – the deportation arm of the federal government – in her city.

For instance, it was her intention to “bar federal agents from using city property for federal civil immigration enforcement activity”, she said in a statement.

All city departments were directed to conduct privacy reviews to make sure that neither they nor their vendors were sharing immigration information with the federal government.

Seattle police were not only barred from cooperating with ICE. They were also tasked with “verify[ing], and document[ing] any reports of immigration enforcement activity”, recording that activity, demanding official ID from the feds, and “secur[ing] scenes of potentially unlawful acts to gather evidence for transmittal to prosecutors”.

Wilson sought to bar ICE from “[c]ity parks, parking lots, plazas, vacant lots, storage facilities, garages, and the Seattle Center”. She urged schools to enact similar policies and for private businesses to put up signage telling ICE agents to go away.

No World Cup “Mass Arrests”

The Seattle mayor’s strong aversion to ICE makes her temporary about-face on surveillance potentially worrying for locals.

Wilson would not share the details of the threats she was briefed on. Whatever she was told was enough for her to swallow hard and do something that she clearly finds distasteful.

The federal government has already announced ICE will be at World Cup games. Thus, those cameras could potentially be used by ICE agents as well as other federal law enforcement for purposes that Wilson does not approve.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who ultimately oversees ICE, sought to allay those fears in a recent CBS interview. “We’re not there to go round up mass individuals”, he said. But there is some distance between “mass arrests” and targeted arrests for the purpose of deportation.

Wilson has made it clear she does not like either of those options. But with the safety of her city on the line and the whole world watching, she has decided that cooperation with federal law enforcement is her surest bet.