The decision follows nearly a year of internal debate over whether to expand, freeze, or dismantle the city's camera system, which currently includes roughly 600 cameras feeding into what the city calls its Real Time Crime Center. According to Wilson, the Stadium District cameras were installed ahead of the World Cup and will be turned on this week. Additional cameras are planned for areas around Garfield High School and Capitol Hill, though the mayor said the timeline for those purchases and installations is uncertain.

"The Stadium District cameras were installed prior to the World Cup and will be turned on immediately," Wilson told reporters. "The others still need to be purchased and installed, and we don't know exactly how long that's going to take because we're at the whims of the, you know, postal service or whatever."

The expansion comes alongside a report from New York University's Policing Project, which Wilson commissioned. The audit outlines a dozen recommendations, including stricter Seattle Police Department accountability, rules governing the surveillance of protests, limits on data retention, and a requirement that police obtain a warrant before tracking individuals across multiple cameras except in narrow, urgent circumstances. Wilson committed to implementing most of the recommendations but set a far murkier timeline of "over the next four to six months." At least one recommendation—a public dashboard tracking usage of the surveillance network—was supposed to be completed within three months of the report's release.

Civil liberties advocates warn that the expanded footage will be vulnerable to hacking, misuse by police employees, secret federal subpoenas served to contractors, overt subpoenas served to the city, and public records requests from any member of the public, including immigration agents. Clare Garvie, one of the report's authors, noted that the city has little control over preventing information from leaving its custody through those channels.

"There is not a lot in SPD's control over preventing that information, including information that might be used for civil immigration enforcement or for protected healthcare, from leaving its custody through those two channels," Garvie said.

The report did not quantify those risks, leaving it to elected leaders to decide whether to accept them. Wilson downplayed the danger, saying her assessment based on the audit is that "the risk is very low."

"I think in general, ICE has its own ways of getting information and does not need our camera footage," she said.

But the decision has angered some of Wilson's former supporters, who see it as a departure from her campaign promise to "Trump-proof Seattle." Xochitl Maykovich, an anti-camera activist and former field co-director for Wilson's campaign, pointed to the timing of the announcement, which came the same week that Stephen Miller became White House chief of staff.

"She did this the same week that Stephen Miller became Chief of Staff to Trump," Maykovich said. "The master of the deportation machine."

Maykovich said she had forwarded Wilson an ACLU post about Seattle surveillance privacy issues during the 2025 campaign, and the concern later appeared in Wilson's platform. "This is a betrayal of her base," she said.

Wilson declined to comment on how her decision squared with those campaign promises. Her office released a video Tuesday emphasizing that the expanded network does not include Flock cameras, which read license plates and have been used by federal immigration authorities.

"These are not Flock cameras," Wilson said. "This is a different system, managed by a different company."

That company is Axon, which stores much of SPD's video in remote data centers and holds more than $100 million in federal contracts, including $37 million with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to federal spending records.

Support for the expansion came from some quarters of the City Council. District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said in a statement that the city must "effectively leverage this technology like other major cities across the country" to ensure safe communities across all Seattle neighborhoods.

The expansion is the clearest break yet from Wilson's campaign pledge to protect Seattle's sanctuary city status. While the mayor framed her decision as a balanced approach, the immediate deployment of cameras without corresponding privacy safeguards has left critics questioning whether the city's most vulnerable residents will bear the consequences.