Hopefully you read my article from earlier this week on the Seattle Police Department’s “Port Security Mesh Network”. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consider 4th and Cherry the port. If you ask me, it’s quite squarely in the middle of downtown Seattle, you can only see a small sliver of the waterfront from there. But there is clearly a camera there. I also spotted a camera on 4th and Columbia.
Here is a map of the location of the downtown camera:
A document posted by the city claims that there are four cameras around Colombia Tower installed as part of a “Buffer Zone Protection Plan grant”. Is this one of those cameras? I only spotted two of these (and several of another type), but I may have missed some. I’ll continue to investigate the true ownership.
In the meantime, this still brings up the point I’ve been making all along. The only thing stopping the city from installing more cameras is money. Where else could we get a national security grant to install the cameras? I’d think the blocks around Sixth Ave and Virginia St are a logical next choice. There is quite a bit of critical infrastructure in The Westin Building. If something were to happen to the building, or the fiber, which is clearly marked for blocks around, the whole Pacific Northwest could be knocked offline. What’s next? The space needle, then Third Avenue? Next thing you know, the city has a police camera on every street corner.