Seattle's planned police camera expansion is back under scrutiny as a civil-rights audit finds the department is not ready to extend the Real Time Crime Center deeper into Capitol Hill and the Central District. The review arrives as Mayor Katie Wilson prepares to announce next steps for the city's CCTV program.

The audit, by the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, says Seattle Police has not fully published the data used to justify camera placement, has oversight gaps for private camera feeds, and lacks firm limits on how footage can be searched and stored. Those concerns carry extra weight in areas that have long seen heavy policing and in Capitol Hill, where protest activity is a regular part of public life.

In Capitol Hill, the planned coverage runs from Capitol Hill Station down Broadway to Pike/Pine and into the nightlife core. In the Central District, the proposed area centers on Garfield High School and stretches roughly from Cherry to Jackson, with edges near 20th and 26th avenues. The audit calls for the city to release the crime data behind those choices, require regular reassessments, and avoid letting temporary surveillance turn into a permanent fixture by default.

The report also highlights data retention. Raw CCTV video is deleted after five days under an internal guideline, but clips and still images uploaded to Axon's Evidence.com platform are kept indefinitely. The audit warns that long-term cloud storage, potential federal access, and tools that can retrace a person's movements may outlast the narrow public-safety case used to launch the system.