Harger: “No camera has ever prevented a crime,” says Seattle’s public safety director. 40 years of research disagrees

“We just want to be safe.”

That might be the simplest sentence anybody said at the Alki Community Council meeting last week.

Residents had spent the evening on robberies, gunfire, slow police response, cameras, lighting, and a Fourth of July that one person described as feeling like a war zone. Then somebody asked a basic question. Fireworks are illegal. Why aren’t the rules enforced?

Alison Holcomb, Mayor Katie Wilson’s public-safety director, answered this way, according to the West Seattle Blog:

“I get it, you just want to send everybody to jail. I want to stop the crime from happening in the first place.”

Somebody in the front row answered her.

“We just want to be safe.”

Neighbors came with a list. Better lighting. Cameras. A police outpost on space a local property owner reportedly offered near Don Armeni. A plan for next Fourth of July before emergency access and fireworks spin out together again. They got an argument they never started.

Holcomb’s background belongs in this conversation. She’s a longtime criminal-defense attorney and a former policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington.

That same night, Holcomb went further. “No camera has ever prevented a crime from happening,” she told the room.

Forty years of research says that’s not true. More on that in a minute.

Listen to the people most affected by crime. They usually know exactly what would help. Start with what they’re asking for, and leave the ideology at the door.

And if City Hall won’t listen, I will. If you live in Alki, along Aurora Avenue, or around Little Saigon and North Beacon Hill, email me your video, your photos, your dates. I want the whole region to see what’s happening in the Seattle neighborhoods that keep getting talked past because what they’re asking for doesn’t fit somebody’s ideology.

Alki crime data shows more robberies and a busy summer

Southwest Precinct Commander Capt. Krista Bair told the meeting crime has definitely upticked in Alki, and the department’s own data backs part of that. Robberies are at seven so far this year, against three in all of 2025. August brought 27 reported offenses, the busiest August in Alki in three years. Shots-fired calls are running slightly lower, eight so far against 10 over the same stretch last year. And property crime is down.

So Alki’s getting robbed more, in the summer, in a neighborhood where people also keep hearing gunfire.

Eight is better than 10.

Eight is also eight times somebody in a neighborhood heard gunfire and wondered where the bullets were going.

Bair gave residents straight answers. Response times are too long and need to improve. Staffing’s still tight. Officers are running directed patrols in Alki. She walked through how police collect shell casings and send them for forensic testing, so investigators can connect shootings and trace guns as they move from crime to crime.

That’s useful. It treats adults like adults.

Alison Holcomb keeps turning up where Seattle’s crime fights are

This isn’t the first time neighbors have gotten a lecture from Holcomb when they wanted help.

In May, after 95 shootings in two years around Aurora Avenue North, residents dragged steel planters into their own side streets to break up the loop pimps and johns were driving all night. Holcomb came out that morning, and to her credit, she stood there and took the heat. But when neighbors asked what the mayor could do right now, she told them the city’s ability to move officers to different shifts is dictated to a large degree by the police union contract.

Then there’s the night of the Bite of Seattle shooting. While thousands of people at Seattle Center waited to hear whether it was safe to come out of hiding, Holcomb was the one texting police commanders, “Mayor’s on her way. Please wait for her.” The Seattle Police Department’s after-action review found elected and senior officials distracted police from getting information to the public, as I wrote this week.

Aurora. The Bite of Seattle. Alki. Three places, one pattern. People asking for help get an explanation, a delay, or a lecture.

I asked the mayor’s office whether Holcomb wanted to expand on the jail comment, and whether she stands by what she said about cameras. The office hasn’t responded.

The American Civil Liberties Union is one voice on Seattle’s public safety spectrum

The ACLU plays an important part in how this system works. It asks who’s watching the cameras and how long the footage is kept. It stands up for people accused of crimes, who have rights too. A healthy city needs that voice at the table.

It’s one voice, though. Public safety runs on a whole spectrum.

Down the table sits the convenience store clerk who’s been robbed at gunpoint. The Aurora dad whose baby’s bassinet was inches from where the bullets came through the wall. The prosecutor. The patrol officer. The treatment provider. The neighbor wondering whether an ambulance can get down Alki Avenue on the Fourth.

Every one of them brings their own ideas about what safety means. A public safety director’s job is to hear the whole table.

From Aurora to Alki, it keeps sounding like only one end of it is talking.

Prevention and enforcement can share a building. Arresting somebody who’s an immediate danger doesn’t mean you gave up on prevention. Better lighting doesn’t mean police quit investigating. Treatment and intervention don’t require pretending the laws went away.

Seattle crime cameras: What 40 years of research says

“No camera has ever prevented a crime from happening.”

That goes further than the research does.

A 40-year review published in Criminology & Public Policy in 2019, by criminologists at John Jay College, Northeastern, and Cambridge, found cameras were associated with a modest but real drop in crime. The effect ran around 37% in parking areas and around 12% in residential ones. Systems somebody was actually watching worked better than systems nobody watched. Cameras paired with other measures worked better than cameras by themselves.

So cameras aren’t magic.

They’re also not nothing.

Aurora neighbors built their own camera network

Just ask Aurora, where neighbors and business owners have strung together their own camera network out of doorbells, garage eaves, and storefronts to cover the blocks where the gunfire goes.

That video has become the record of what’s happening there. When more than 40 shots flew near Aurora and 100th in May, the footage the region saw came from business owners who shared it with KIRO 7. FOX 13, KING 5, and other outlets have leaned on neighbors’ cameras again and again, because police can’t say much about open cases. Their cameras even catch gunfire on nights when officers arrive and can’t find casings, shootings that never make the official count.

They’ve sent their video to me, too.

And it’s helping solve crimes. After three women were shot along Aurora in July, then-Deputy Chief Andre Sayles, now Seattle’s interim police chief, told KING 5 that city cameras and neighbor surveillance were helping detectives piece the shooting together and identify the suspect car.

In one of the most tech-savvy cities in America, families are running a crime-camera network from their front porches, and the police are grateful.

Aurora got City Hall’s attention this spring because neighbors got loud and kept sending video to reporters. It’s still a rough stretch of road. Those three women were shot in July, two months after the planters went up. The minute the attention drifts, Aurora slides right back to the bad old days. That’s why the neighbors can’t stop now.

Seattle’s crime cameras are already bolted to the poles. The mayor turned them off

Mayor Wilson paused any expansion of Seattle’s police cameras while the city finishes a privacy and data-governance audit due this fall.

Fine. But look at what that pause actually looks like.

The Seattle City Council approved expanding the camera program last year to Capitol Hill’s nightlife district, the streets near Garfield High School, and the Stadium District and Pioneer Square. The Stadium District cameras went up for the World Cup. Wilson let them run during the games, then had them switched off the day after it ended.

A month later, a fight outside a Pioneer Square bar turned into a shootout. More than 30 shell casings. A 21-year-old man shot in the back. Council Public Safety Chair Bob Kettle pointed out that it happened near one of the cameras the mayor had turned off.

The council approved the cameras. The poles are up. The foot-dragging started this year, with the new mayor and her public safety director.

Now look at who’s asking for cameras. Alki. Aurora. Pioneer Square businesses. Seattle’s biggest venues and event organizers. A poll this summer from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Challenge Seattle, both business groups, found 75% of Seattle voters back the city’s camera program.

These are neighborhoods in one of the most Democratic cities in America. Nobody’s going to mistake West Seattle or North Seattle for a Trump rally.

When even these voters say, “Hold on a second, we want cameras,” that’s the reality on the ground talking. It deserves more weight than a position that sounds good in a policy seminar and falls apart on a porch on Aurora at 3 a.m.

We have to pull the ideology apart from what’s actually happening on these streets and what the people living there are asking for.

So test it. Make Alki part of the evidence. Post conspicuous signs. Spell out who sees the footage and how long it’s kept. Measure whether video helps close cases. Measure whether calls move. Publish what you find.

Aurora’s neighbors already ran the experiment.

Alki, Aurora, and Little Saigon: organize, get loud, keep receipts

Charlotte Starck, president of the Alki Community Council, already has video and documentation from the Fourth of July, and she’s agreed to hold a separate meeting on keeping next year from being a repeat.

Good. Now crank it up.

Make that meeting painfully practical. How do emergency vehicles get through on the Fourth? Which laws get enforced, specifically, and by whom? How many officers can actually be assigned? Which streetlights need fixing? What would it take to get Alki cameras? And what happened to that outpost space near Don Armeni, and whose desk is the red tape sitting on?

Put names next to assignments. Put dates next to promises.

Then show up. Every meeting. Same faces, same questions, until somebody answers.

Write everything down. The date. The time. Who said what. When a meeting gets a non-answer, that non-answer goes in the file with a date on it.

Save the original video, not a copy of a copy.

Loop in the businesses. They’re paying for the security guards. They want this fixed as badly as you do.

Call your City Council member’s office. Then call again. Then bring a neighbor.

Aurora dragged steel planters into the street, and within hours the mayor’s public safety director was standing on the sidewalk. A few weeks later, hundreds of neighbors were marching up Aurora. Nobody downtown can say they didn’t hear that.

There are a whole lot more people trying to live a normal, peaceful life in Alki, on Aurora, and in Little Saigon than there are people causing trouble there. That’s power, if they use it together.

So send me the video. Seriously. Send it.

I’m not on many City Hall Christmas card lists anyway.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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