TRU members voted to ask fellow members to sign on to the open letter by Wilson campaign staffers and send a letter of our own to Mayor Wilson and the Seattle City Council urging them to take immediate action on surveillance cameras in the city:
Dear Mayor Wilson,
We are calling on Mayor Wilson and City Council to take immediate action and invest in community-based violence prevention to protect the lives of Seattle residents, especially our youth most impacted by gun violence. The city has done multiple studies on gun violence over the last decade. All of which have said the same thing: the way to prevent gun violence is to invest in communities and young people. Elected officials have failed the community by repeatedly dismissing these recommendations in favor of increasing spending on police and surveillance.
We are calling on Mayor Wilson and City Council to take immediate action by taking down the surveillance infrastructure that is harming our communities and that risks the safety of immigrant communities, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, and everyone living in or visiting Seattle. Seattle taxpayers are spending at least $8.7M for the surveillance that threatens our safety and violates our rights. We demand that the city use the money saved by removing harmful surveillance to immediately ramp up the violence prevention strategies that have been proven effective at reducing community violence and creating safety.
We are aggrieved at the recent loss of life of two teenagers in Rainier Beach due to gun violence and other gun violence throughout our city. Seattle has conducted multiple assessments on its approach to violence prevention which have shown that Seattle electeds are failing to scale the community-led interventions that prevent violence and protect community members. We do not need another panel, review, or assessment! What Seattle needs urgently is for the City to fund and implement successful community-led violence prevention and scale up these interventions to meet the needs of its residents.
The moratorium on SRO’s passed by the school board in 2020 promised community-led solutions to violence prevention and was the result of 20,000+ community sign-ons to a letter campaign led by students with FEEST Seattle, WA-BLOC, and the NAACP Youth Council. But in the years since, and despite consistent advocacy from Seattle students, our electeds have failed to fund and scale up funding for holistic restorative justice programming in our public schools, leaving our students vulnerable to community violence.
Community organizations like Community Passageways, Rainier Beach Action Coalition, Creative Justice, Rainier Ave Youth Safety, and Choose 180 have been doing the work to provide violence prevention, but they lack adequate and sustained funding to build capacity so they can serve our schools citywide. In fact, funding for restorative justice programming has been cut in a number of schools, leaving our students vulnerable. Many of these cuts are the direct result of the City Council and the former Mayor raiding the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy (FEPP) levy as part of the 2026 budget. The City Council and the former Mayor took over $43 million of FEPP funds to back-fill the general fund and other funds, effectively balancing the budget on the backs of Seattle’s youth.
Violence interruption programs work. Neighborhoods that have adopted a Cure Violence Model or Group Violence Intervention Models have seen homicides and assaults decrease 30-50%. The city could scale effective community-led solutions such as the Regional Peacekeepers Collective coordinated by the Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the Rainier Beach Action Coalition and their Restorative Resolutions project, which have already reduced violence in the Rainier Beach neighborhood by 33%. The scaling up of Community Violence Interventions (CVI’s) both within and outside of our schools is urgently needed.
Violent crime can be reduced by investing in mental health treatment, substance-abuse-treatment, access to affordable housing, and direct income support. Even something as simple as expanding library hours would make an impact that surveillance never could. The CDC’s 2025 Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action recommends strategies and approaches such as: preschool enrichment with family engagement, parenting skills and family relationship programs, equitable educational attainment support for youth and young adults, job training and employment programs, mentoring and after-school programs, street outreach, treatment programs, income-support policies such as unemployment insurance, and access to expanded health care benefits. None of these evidence-based recommendations put out in this joint report (by the CDC, National Center for Injury Prevention, and Division of Violence Prevention) include policing or surveillance as a violence prevention strategy because policing and surveillance do not prevent violence.
We call on Mayor Wilson and the City Council to act urgently to scale up investments that actually decrease violence to prevent any further loss of life. Defund the harmful surveillance cameras that make communities less safe and use our resources to fund these evidence-based violence prevention programs; the well-being of our city’s youth demands it.