Harger: Austin suffered 12 shootings before reconsidering its camera ban. Seattle shouldn’t wait that long

Three teenagers in a stolen Kia spent this past weekend driving through Austin, Texas, firing at homes, apartments, businesses, and two fire stations with firefighters inside. Twelve separate shootings. Four people were shot. One critically. A man walking his dog. Kids in apartments where bullets came through the wall.

The suspects are 15, 16, and 17.

For nearly 24 hours, Austin was in chaos. Nearly 200 officers deployed. SWAT. K9 units. Helicopters. Drones. A shelter-in-place order across parts of South Austin. The suspects kept moving, kept shooting, kept switching stolen vehicles. Shooting No. 3. Shooting No. 7. Shooting No. 12. And the police couldn’t pin them down.

Austin used to have the technology to track a stolen plate in real time. The city canceled its contract with Flock Safety last June over privacy concerns. The cameras came down. The officers on that manhunt had radios, descriptions, and hope. They were handcuffed by a policy decision made a year earlier in a conference room.

Then the suspects made a mistake. They crossed the city line into Manor, Texas.

Manor still had its Flock cameras running. Almost immediately, the system flagged the stolen Kia. Officers were on the vehicle within the hour. The suspects bailed into a field. Two were arrested by 3:50 p.m. The third was picked up at a gas station that evening.

Twelve shooting scenes across Austin over nearly 24 hours. One plate reader hit once they left Austin city limits into Manor. Done.

Austin’s police chief told reporters afterward that the cameras “could have helped.” The mayor said they “probably would have been helpful.” Flock called it a tale of two cities.

Seattle ALPR and RTCC: Mayor Katie Wilson turned off the license plate readers and paused the cameras

Seattle has never used Flock. What the Seattle Police Department (SPD) runs is different, and worth understanding.

SPD has Axon license plate readers mounted on patrol cars. They scan plates as officers drive around. Data gets deleted in 24 hours unless tied to an active case. No fixed cameras on poles. No nationwide lookup. No Flock network. It’s a tighter, more locally controlled system than what most cities are arguing about.

The city also built a Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), which integrates plate readers, CCTV camera feeds, traffic cameras, and 911 data into a centralized dashboard. Detectives using the RTCC are three times more likely to make an arrest than those working without it. The cameras helped solve 10 homicides in 2025.

In March, Mayor Katie Wilson paused it. All of it. The plate readers are off while the city audits compliance with the new state Driver Privacy Act. There is no firm restart date.

Wilson also ordered that the new CCTV cameras installed in the Stadium District for the FIFA World Cup remain dark. Roughly two dozen cameras around Lumen Field. Paid for. Mounted. Switched off. They feed into the RTCC only if there’s a “credible threat.”

SPD Chief Shon Barnes was asked about the directive on “The Gee and Ursula Show.” His response: “This decision is out of my hands at this particular time.” That’s a police chief being as diplomatic as he can about being overruled.

Seattle surveillance privacy concerns, Flock Safety, and ICE: the fix already exists in the software

The critics raise real points. Flock’s interface has confused administrators in other cities into sharing data with ICE and Border Patrol when they thought they hadn’t. A University of Washington (UW) review found federal agencies pulling data from Washington police departments that never explicitly authorized it.

Now, some people are fine with sharing information with immigration enforcement, and that’s a legitimate debate worth having. But in the Seattle metro, ICE is not winning any popularity contests, and the concern about data reaching federal immigration authorities is driving much of the opposition to these tools.

We can’t let opposition to ICE make us compromise safety. And there’s an actual solution.

The fix is the settings. Flock has added a single switch that disables all federal sharing. Seattle’s Axon system is even tighter by design: no national network, no out-of-state queries, data purged daily. The city had a menu of options ranging from full deployment to total shutdown. Configure the system. Set the toggles. Geo-fence the sensitive locations that the new state law identifies. Finish the audit. Keep the tool.

Seattle picked lights off entirely.

FIFA World Cup Seattle security: cameras dark, phones tracking, and a purity test that doesn’t keep anyone safe

The World Cup is three weeks away. Six matches at Lumen Field. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from 180 countries (allegedly). The largest sporting event Seattle has ever hosted. And the cameras are dark.

Councilmember Bob Kettle has publicly argued that waiting for a credible threat doesn’t work in the real world, pointing to 9/11 and the 1996 Olympic bombing as events that arrived without advance notice.

But zoom out past the World Cup for a second. This is about more than one event. We have tools that help fight crime. Tools that solve cases faster. Tools that recover stolen vehicles and find missing people. We have safeguards in the law and in the software. We can balance civil liberty concerns with public safety. Other cities do it every day.

And I can’t help noticing something. Every person concerned about surveillance cameras on street poles is carrying a device in their pocket that already knows where they are, where they’ve been, what they’ve searched for, who they’ve called, and what they had for lunch. Your phone tracks more about you in a single afternoon than a license plate reader will collect in a year. We’ve all made that trade-off willingly, every day, for the convenience of maps, delivery apps, and streaming.

But a camera that reads license plates on public roads to help catch the people who just shot up a fire station? That’s where we draw the line?

It feels less like a principled stand on civil liberties and more like a purity test. And purity tests don’t keep people safe.

The World Cup starts June 15. Three weeks is enough time to finish a configuration review. Three weeks is enough time to set the toggles, geo-fence sensitive locations, and turn the system back on with stronger guardrails than before.

Austin’s mayor now says his city has the framework to reconsider. It took two fire stations getting shot up before he got there. Seattle still has time to avoid learning this the hard way.

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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