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Royce Smith didn’t know the Seattle Parks Department had installed three surveillance cameras above the restrooms in Cal Anderson Park. Now he wonders if they’re the reason a cop told him to move along one morning last week.
Smith, 43, is an unemployed cook with a bad hip and no current home who asked his real last name not be used. He was lying on the cement seating that divides the Capitol Hill park’s ballfield and reservoir when a police officer drove her car into the park, got out, and told him to leave.
Smith says he hadn’t slept in the park. He got there about 7:30 that morning to wait for a free meal served by the church across the street on 11th Avenue. Now he knows he was lying right under one of three new 360-degree rotating surveillance cameras installed in January.
“I never even knew that a camera was there,” Smith says. “I wouldn’t have suspected something like that.”
The Parks Department says the cameras are “record only,” however — that is, the images they capture are kept for 30 days and only reviewed by a police officer at the West Precinct if a crime is reported that might have been recorded, such as a recent vandalism incident in which the park’s granite fountain was splashed with paint.
But Parks spokeswoman Dewey Potter says there are no written protocols for how police operate the cameras — something the City Council is requiring the mayor’s office to provide before releasing funds to install nine more surveillance cameras for a one-year pilot at three other parks: Chinatown’s Hing Hay, Pioneer Square’s Occidental Park, and Victor Steinbrueck Park at the Pike Place Market.
During last fall’s city budgeting, the council approved $550,000 for the closed-circuit camera system, but held the funds under a budget proviso that required the mayor to submit protocols for how the cameras would be operated and by whom. The mayor has now submitted a request to them to release a total of $850,000 in park security funding.
On April 22, the council Parks Committee chaired by Tom Rasmussen is scheduled to discuss the surveillance camera protocols. Though Seattle Public Utilities operates an unspecified number of cameras at reservoirs and other infrastructure sites, Cal Anderson’s and the other cameras are a first for Parks Department surveillance.
A list of the protocols provided by Rasmussen’s office shows they differ from Cal Anderson’s and an earlier draft obtained through public disclosure (“City Plans Park Cams,” Jan. 20-26). While all the cameras are or will be record only, images taken at Hing Hay, Occidental and Steinbrueck parks will be overwritten in a shorter period — two weeks. The Seattle Police Department 911 Center will also be able to monitor the cameras live in response to emergencies, public disturbances, and 911 reports of crime, with recordings of potential crimes kept 90 days.
It’s unclear what the practice is for live monitoring at Cal Anderson. The park was originally named with the others as part of the camera pilot, which was put forward last fall by Mayor Greg Nickels. But his office says it used separate funds to go ahead and install the cameras prior to council review in order to address what Nickels spokesman Marty McOmber described in January as emergent drug and prostitution problem at Cal Anderson.
“We weren’t going to wait [on the council] to move forward on addressing a public safety issue happening at the park right now,” says McOmber, who stresses that councilmembers were informed cameras would be installed at Cal Anderson. Once the council lifts the budget proviso, he says, the cameras will be “rolled into” the rest of the surveillance program.
McOmber now points to the recent fountain vandalism as a reason for the cameras. But, because the reservoir’s old shelterhouse stands between the park’s playfield and fountain, Parks spokeswoman Potter confirms the cameras cannot view the fountain and did not record the recent vandalism.
Janiko Martin, a 16-year-old high schooler who often plays basketball at the court next to the park’s ballfield, says the cameras are a great idea because he sees people go into the bathrooms to sell drugs. But the activity, says Kay Rood, president of the neighborhood’s Cal Anderson Park Alliance, is nowhere near the level it was before the $3.8 million Pro Parks Levy renovation completed at the park in 2005.
And, “Prostitution?” Rood asks. “We are not aware of prostitution in Cal Anderson Park.”
Rood is a longtime park neighbor who pushed for the park’s renovation, which included lidding its reservoir. She’s flummoxed the cameras went up without the public input promised by Nickels’ office.
At a Capitol Hill Chamber meeting last October, she says Julien Loh, Nickels public safety liaison, made a presentation on park security measures, including the cameras and new rangers that will start patroling in May. Loh insisted that an interdepartmental team working on the camera pilot would solicit community input prior to installation — something he states in a document provided by Rood.
Rood says that never happened, nor did she get answers to specific questions she emailed to the city. They include the total annual cost for the camera program, why it’s really needed, and how its success or failure will be evaluated.
“On the topic of community engagement, I just continue to be baffled,” she says. “I think it is really too bad that the city can’t see community engagement as a partnership instead of as an adversarial situation.” |
