🏙️ Mayor Wilson responds to critics

Mayor Wilson on Surveillance, AI, and Her Critics

Today, we welcomed Mayor Katie Wilson to the podcast. We have been a podcast just slightly longer than Katie Wilson has been the mayor, so it feels like we’ve grown up together. Here’s a little preview of what Jane and Katie talked about. [City Cast Seattle 🎧]

• 🏙️ How has it been going from organizer to mayor?  ”From business to labor to community organizations… there's more of a need to have some kind of relationship where you're able to work together even if you don't always agree on things, and that is kind of the baseline that I've been trying to establish with everyone.”
• 🚌 On transit being a core issue:  ”The sense that I have is that the response from Seattle residents is really overwhelmingly positive. I think there's a wide recognition in Seattle that we need to make our transit system work, right? Seattle voters have consistently, overwhelmingly supported funding transit, and I think we all know that when we're putting our public funding into something, we wanna make sure that it works well.”
• ⏸️ Hitting pause on surveillance expansion: “Moving forward, I want to get a much clearer sense of the legitimate place of surveillance technology in our larger public safety system. What are the limits of that? How can we make sure that we have as good as possible protections in place?... Surveillance should be a very small, modest part of public safety.”
• That’s just a little bit of what they cover. But there’s also AI-policy, Ballard encampments, car-free park weekends, and a lot more.

⛔ Mother’s Day weekend traffic: We’d keep brunch local this year, as I-5, 405, SR 99, and 520 are all going to be backed up for projects related to the World Cup. Definitely check out SDOT’s Travel Map to see what the latest is. However, getting to and around the waterfront could get easier this summer with expanded service. [KING5]

🎸 Collectors, get to West Seattle: Tomorrow is the West Seattle Community Garage Sale, and it’s looking, frankly, amazing. As a guy who loves old books and DVDs, I am practically salivating. Check out this interactive map to see what is gonna make you drool! [West Seattle Blog]

🧊 ICE’s standards sink: A new report from UW’s Center for Human Rights is reporting that ICE has lowered the standards of detention at its Northwest Processing Center. The report focuses on internal investigations conducted by ICE and how they are ignoring evidence, not reporting crimes to law enforcement, and not creating measures to prevent sexual assault and abuse. [UWCHR]