Hing Hay Park, in December 2025. • Photo by Theo Bickel
On the corner of 10th Avenue South and South Jackson Street, a surveillance camera watches over the street near Cory Potts’ Center for Bicycle Repair shop. His shop, he said, once belonged to a Japanese florist who disappeared during World War II with Executive Order 9066 — taken, like over 100,000 others, by a government that had been surveilling Japanese Americans for decades, collecting names and building lists, until families started being forced from their homes. And when Potts learned that the camera in front of his shop and dozens like it were installed throughout the city, he couldn’t shake the feeling that history was repeating itself.
“There’s a lot of stories about Japanese business owners who lost their businesses due to the monitoring of civilians in this area [during World War II],” Potts said. “The installation of the cameras without at least acknowledging what types of harm the government has caused in this area by monitoring citizens, to me, was a huge historical oversight.”
He’s not the only one in the Chinatown International District (CID) who feels that way.
It’s been a year since the cameras were installed, funded by a $1.5 million dollar allocation in former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2025 budget, as part of a larger $4 million Seattle Police Department (SPD) pilot project. More cameras are planned for additional neighborhoods. Anti-CCTV protesters have occupied several city council meetings in recent months, arguing that surveillance data could be weaponized by the federal government to track immigrants, refugees, people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, or activists — concerns that aren’t hypothetical, given that federal agencies have already accessed local surveillance data in other jurisdictions nationwide. In Washington state, U.S. Border Patrol accessed automated license plate reader data from multiple law enforcement agencies, including at least 10 that had not explicitly authorized those searches, and immigration lawyers across the country have reported that clients have been subjected to facial recognition technology by federal agents.
Others say cameras are necessary in the CID, a neighborhood that has averaged nearly 300 violent crime incidents per year since 2020, according to the SPD’s crime dashboard. But studies — like a 40-year systematic review by the City University of New York in 2019 — show that CCTV does not reduce violent crime.
Mayor Katie Wilson, who criticized the city’s surveillance expansion during her campaign, announced last month she is pausing expansion of the program to Capitol Hill and near Garfield High, but will keep existing cameras running elsewhere in the city, including in the CID. She will allow new cameras in the Stadium District, but they won’t be activated unless there’s a “credible threat.”
Under city law, if the federal government compels the release of surveillance data, the data collection pauses for 60 days while council decides whether to continue the program or shut it down completely.
For some, those safeguards aren’t enough. “I was really hoping for more from [Mayor Wilson],” said Meilani Mandery, a member of the CID Coalition, a network of activists mobilized around concerns in the CID. “To run on an anti-surveillance platform and then continue the same surveillance that was in place is really disappointing.”
Mandery said there’s a pervasive idea among folks outside the CID that the neighborhood wants the cameras. But she disagrees. The neighborhood isn’t a monolith, she said, but the voices that get amplified are usually the business owners and elderly residents who feel unsafe — a dynamic she thinks is connected to the model minority myth.
“I think model minority myth 2.0 is a lot of Asian Americans that are the perfect victims, especially post-2020 with the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes,” Mandery said. “I think the way the outside audience from the CID understands Asian Americans is, oh, they’re getting beat up, they need more protection.”
That framing, she said, leaves out other marginalized groups, like undocumented immigrants and refugees, unhoused people and Black community members.
Mandery believes part of the problem is that many residents never get the information they would need to weigh those tradeoffs. Research suggesting that surveillance may not reliably prevent violent crime tends to exist only in English, meaning non-English-speaking elders may never encounter it, Mandery said. The information that does reach them in their language often comes from business-aligned organizations that support the cameras.
“People are really grasping for any sense of security, any sense of safety, and what is being sold to us is the surveillance state,” Mandery said.
She doesn’t dismiss the fear. People in the CID have been violently attacked, and she takes that seriously. But she wants the city to ask: how do we protect one group’s safety needs without putting another group in harm’s way?
That’s not a question Gary Lee is ready to ask. In March, Lee, former co-chair and current member of the CID Public Safety Council, submitted a petition to the city council with 1,032 signatures of people in support of surveillance. Lee said residents are concerned for their own safety, not about the risks.
“Yeah, it could be used to hunt down illegal immigrants, maybe in our neighborhood,” Lee said. “But the people who feel most affected in the neighborhood are concerned with their safety and less concerned with protecting immigrants…Are we just gonna do nothing to protect our neighborhood because some people are concerned that somebody might get swept up?”
Beth Ku, a community volunteer and CID Public Safety Council member, spoke in favor of the cameras when the signatures were presented to the city council. While she understands the concerns about surveillance being used for immigration enforcement, she doesn’t believe innocent people will be targeted.
“ICE, if they do something…if there’s any issue, you can go to court,” Ku said in a conversation with the International Examiner. “If you don’t do anything wrong legally, why do you worry about it?”
One of the cameras is posted at Eighth Avenue South and South Jackson Street, where Diamond Bay Restaurant is located. The owner, Darrel Wu, is relieved it’s there — it’s one of the locations where a series of stabbings took place in November 2024.
“For this corner, it’s really necessary to have a surveillance camera,” Wu said. “We want this place to be safe for everyone.”
CID Coalition advocate Sue Kay grew up in the CID. She’s in her 80s and said she’s uncomfortable with surveillance in the neighborhood, knowing it could be used by ICE to target immigrants and refugees.
“That weighs very heavily on me,” Kay said. Among her friends, Kay is in the minority when it comes to her opinions on surveillance.
“[My friends] just feel that they’re safer,” Kay said. “One of the discussions was, ‘If somebody hits me on the head in the CID, I want that person to be caught and pay for it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I want a CID where I won’t get hit on the head, and I don’t think that surveillance cameras are the ticket. I feel safe with all kinds of people that share our neighborhood.’”
