LIVE: Anti-CCTV group rallies in Seattle, calls on City to take down police cameras

Our Take

Credit to KOMO News for covering this one live, because the timing here is almost too perfect. A business-funded poll drops Monday showing Seattle voters love camera surveillance, and within hours there's gunfire in Pioneer Square near cameras that had been switched off — handed to reporters as proof the city needs more eyes, not fewer. That's not evidence of anything except how surveillance expansion gets sold: find an incident, find a poll, skip the part where you explain who's watching the feed, for how long, and who gets flagged by an algorithm with no oversight.

Community Not Cameras showing up at City Hall is the actual story. A 75% approval number from a poll funded by the Metro Chamber of Commerce means less than it sounds like when the question is framed around 911 calls and active investigations — nobody polls on what happens when that same camera network gets quietly repurposed for immigration sweeps, protest monitoring, or parking enforcement creep. Axon's RTCC infrastructure isn't a single camera at a single intersection; it's a networked system built to scale, and once it's wired into a city it rarely gets smaller.

Seattle residents pushing back on that is worth paying attention to everywhere, not just the Pacific Northwest. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood already has this kind of plate-reader or RTCC camera infrastructure installed, check our map, and if you'd rather not wait for your city council to hold a vote nobody announced, our take-action page has steps for showing up before the cameras go in, not after.