Surprise! Seattle PD was not truthful in surveillance disclosures
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This week, Real Change publishes a feature I have been working on for a long time. It shows that Seattle’s Surveillance Ordinance is failing. Seattle PD are using surveillance systems without disclosing them to the public. For the systems they do disclose, misdirection, half truths, and flat out lying are fully in the cards.
Some say that’s a violation of the law.
We are reaching peak creep.
Nebulous “machine learned algorithms” are pitched by the city of Seattle to work in conjunction with real time video feeds at Seattle PD’s Real Time Crime Center. No one knows what that means or how that works except the cops.
Recently, Los Angeles County Sheriff Department surveilled a journalist, Cerise Castle, who exposed the reality of LASD’s violent deputy gangs. Will Seattle PD be surveilling those who hold a critical lens to violent power?
There is a lot to the story that got cut, including the fact that the City of Seattle does not track the greenhouse gas emissions of SPD’s use of helicopter surveillance. The helicopter belongs to King County, however King County Sheriff does not track any emissions data either. No one is.
For Guardian One, the 2008 Bell 407 helicopter uses Jet-A fuel. At 50 gallons an hour, and 1,200 hours of flight time a year, KCSO’s Helicopters are torching approximately 576.217 metric tons of CO2 each year. That’s the equivalent of annually driving 125 cars, with questionable results.
[Update 8/12/24]
KCSO’s air support unit includes multiple helicopters. Specific to Guardian One, KCSO provided the following breakdown of flight time for the last four years:
[End Update 8/12/24]
Washington State Patrol (WSP) aircraft, leveraged by SPD during the 2020 protests, are also outfitted with FLIR’s advanced Merlin Moving Target Indicator system, which can automatically target and track multiple moving people across the camera view, placing a moving target box over their bodies. This same technology is used by “a U.S. Ally in [the] Middle East Region” according to a $25 Million contract announcement. TELEDYNE FLIR did not respond to questions if the Merlin system is being used by Israeli occupation forces in Palestine.
A WSP spokesperson told me that WSP’s Merlin system’s “use was limited during this [2020 protest] timeframe.” In a further statement, WSP wrote that, “Back in late 2019/2020, the aviation section was looking to implement the MTI to utilize on traffic and TZAP missions, specifically for measuring vehicle speeds. The MTI system was tested and we found it degraded the camera computer system capabilities and, due to the large number of vehicles being tracked, the MTI system overlayed numerous small white boxes on the monitor, rendering the MTI technology not practical for our traffic missions. We have not utilized this technology for anything else. Records show since July 2018, and the MTI technology has not been operational.”
One final thought: when the city asks for approval to use AI connected to video feeds of you walking around the ID after karaoke, do some background research on what AI really is. Its planet killing, people killing, larceny and harassment tech. It produces visual slop and genocide. Read up on +972 magazine’s story here. We don’t need it as a probable cause initiation device to violently disappear poor people.
I’m thankful to Real Change for working with me on this project and for the patience of the amazing editing, art and social team at Real Change.
Go buy a paper this week!
Full story linked here: