FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 19, 2025

Media Contact: press@policingproject.org

New York, New York – The Policing Project at the NYU School of Law is pleased to explore the opportunity of working with the City of Seattle and the Seattle Police Department to conduct a civil rights and civil liberties audit of the city’s real-time crime center.

Although real-time crime centers (RTCC) may offer public safety benefits, the technologies they rely on also carry real risks to civil rights and civil liberties. RTCCs bring together surveillance tools and data in a centralized environment, heightening concerns around privacy, fairness, discrimination, and potential misuse. Notably, the City has raised serious concerns about the potential use of RTCC data in Seattle for federal immigration enforcement, the identification of individuals seeking reproductive healthcare, and other sensitive uses.

Our effort would assess independently the issues around Seattle’s RTCC and offer policy recommendations designed to protect civil rights and civil liberties. In previous projects across the country, our evaluations have surfaced crucial information about how technologies are used in practice and have led to concrete policy changes that protect individual rights. We would hope to accomplish the same here.

Our work necessarily would require engaging with a wide range of stakeholders. We believe that the best outcomes come from taking differing perspectives seriously — from community members to advocates to city officials to law enforcement itself — as part of developing responsible use approaches.

Our goal in all the work we do around policing technologies is straightforward: to help ensure that, if those technologies are used, they are used and governed responsibly, in a manner that improves public safety, respects civil rights and liberties, and is worthy of the public’s trust.