Classic Seattle weather—cold, wet, and grey—graced Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’s first day on the job this January. But inside the hallowed chambers of Seattle’s government, City leaders were positively glowing. Finally, they said, following a closed-door police chief selection process, the city had a model of accountability and progressive policing it needed to see the City into a new, Consent Decree-free era.
He had the resume. Barnes had briefly served as the director of training and professional development with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in Chicago. He’d led the police department in Madison, Wisconsin, which had recently implemented a body-worn camera pilot program. He talked openly about leading the Salisbury Police Department into greater accountability. He was a former school teacher. In short, he was the police chief who would prioritize transparency and reform.
And Barnes leaned into that reputation. In an opinion piece in the Seattle Times after his first 100 days, he wrote: “My earliest efforts led with transparency and accountability to the public and to our officers—creating an open-door policy with SPD employees, removing access restrictions to our executive floor and encouraging people to reach out directly to ask any and all questions. I believe every voice should be heard and can be instrumental in helping us move forward. The hard truth is that SPD has weathered a difficult five years, marked by leadership changes, staffing losses and shifting public trust. But we are charting a new course.”
But a report released in Madison in October brings that reputation into question. Months after Barnes left the Dairy State, Madison’s Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) dropped a report on their old chief’s police body-worn camera pilot program, Barnes’s pet project.
The civilian oversight agency report lampooned the former MPD chief. It was a litany of Barnes’s failings. Four chapters of the report began with the word “failure.” Barnes had ignored City Council’s “multiple directives” for essential, specific guardrails, which likely violated state law, the office wrote.
The OIM specifically made sure to note that the failure was Barnes’s, not the department’s current leadership.
Then, in the weeks between the November election and Mayor Katie Wilson taking office, speculation swirled about whether or not Barnes would remain in charge of SPD. Wilson was reportedly on the fence about the decision for weeks, and, according to one Stranger source familiar with the situation, Barnes himself allegedly told fellow officers he was certain he would be out of a job come 2026.
But in December, newly-elected Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she plans to keep Barnes on as police chief.
“My administration will work with Chief Barnes to make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” she said. It was reportedly an effort to maintain stability and continuity. To set expectations for the Chief, and give him a chance to meet them.
That leaves Barnes leading a department trusted with yet another controversial camera program: the network of police CCTV cameras on Seattle’s streets, which the public protested in City Hall as recently as this week. The programs have concerning parallels: In Madison, the pilot program failed to collect necessary data and ignored instructions from their City Council; in Seattle, Barnes didn’t even wait for data from the pilot to push an expansion of the program. And like Madison’s bodycam program, Seattle city leaders are counting on the police department to observe “guardrails” and “accountability.”
Neither Barnes nor SPD returned The Stranger’s multiple requests for comment.
Bodyworn cameras
Barnes stepped into the role of Madison’s police chief in January 2021, almost a year after a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minnesota. Black Lives Matter protests against racist policing had dominated American life that June. “Defund” and “abolition” had entered the common vernacular. Police accountability was in the air, and a popular response was to strap body cameras to the chest of every officer in their department.
Barnes had every reason to think the department deserved scrutiny: at the time, almost half the time the Madison Police Department (MPD) used force, it was against Black residents. And while Barnes didn’t start the conversation about bodycams in the MPD, (the department’s SWAT team had used them for years, and the debate about outfitting the entire MPD had been underway since 2014), he was a vocal proponent of them from day one.
Not everyone in the community agreed with him. The Black- and Southeast Asian-led nonprofit Freedom, Inc. led the charge in Madison. They had been longtime vocal opponents of body cameras, arguing that they’re a double-edged sword: Technically, they were a tool to record potential police misbehavior, but those same body cameras could be used against civilians—specifically to surveil and criminalize Black and brown people. Plus, nationwide, even when videos clearly show officers attacking Black people, those videos don’t guarantee justice.
Freedom Inc. is backed up not only by several Madison City alders, but also by a chorus of alarm bells from journalists, civil rights groups, and think tanks: A 2017 study found that bodyworn cameras do not deter officers from treating Black people with disrespect at traffic stops; the Brookings Institute wrote in 2022 that, with the rise of facial recognition technology combined with the federal government’s historical surveillance of Black communities, bodyworn cameras could be used to increasingly track, profile and surveil not only Black communities, but Chinese communities, too, under Trump 1.0’s China Initiative through the Department of Justice; and the NAACP and the ACLU both share these concerns.
So it should be no surprise then that Madison’s own Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee—which was tasked with analyzing a body-worn camera program prior to implementation, and drafting a policy for the MPD to follow in a pilot program—highlighted concerning data that Barnes should have taken into account, in his creation of the MPD’s body camera pilot program.
Their final report said that the issue deserved further evaluation, particularly given the researched and documented potentials for police abuse of body cameras. Specifically, the committee noted that the available scientific literature regarding body-worn video cameras shows that they allow for heavier surveillance and intrudes on privacy, and that the available data suggests body-worn cameras “expand criminalization of marginalized populations.”
While the report concluded that the MPD could adopt a body-worn camera program, its first stipulation was that the department should do so only if the MPD “formally adopted the BWC policies recommended by the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee with, at most, minor modifications” to the proposed policy.
That policy included a rule that officers would not be allowed to review the bodycam footage before completing their reports, unless it was required, in the field, to address “an immediate threat to life or safety.”
But that didn’t happen.
The Pilot Program
According to the OIM’s October report, Barnes’s department disregarded a number of council’s demands. It failed to create a real, randomized sample to test the program, ignored council’s directive to track officer time spent on the pilot, and failed to measure key metrics in the program.
Perhaps most crucially, the pilot broke that committee’s rule about reviewing footage. Barnes allowed officers to review their tapes before writing any police report, even if they’d shot someone or broken the department’s code of conduct. But the department also had the power to limit their access on a case-by-case basis.
The report focused on this loophole.
Once exposed to video footage of an incident, the report said, officers’ memories may be altered or influenced. Officers who are allowed to review footage ahead of giving a report may also consciously choose to lie about incidents, based on what action or angles the body-worn cameras caught. This can lead to an increase in everything from inaccurate court testimony to justifications for officers shooting and killing a person. The office backed up these statements with a hefty number of in-report citations from multiple credible sources, including accountability experts and the ACLU.
“The Single Most Important Metric”
On top of the procedural flaws, the report called Barnes out for failing to collect key data that would inform the risks of continuing the program.
The office also links the use of body-worn cameras to higher rates of prosecutions, where prosecutors know body-worn video exists. Even in cases where the person was innocent, prosecutors are more likely to drag a person through trial and force them through ultimately unnecessary and potentially expensive legal hurdles.
The committee called this “the single most important metric specified in the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee report.” And, once again—as with many other gaps in Barnes’s policy—the office noted that the pilot program failed to measure and test it.
“Most BWC studies (albeit not all) that have tracked criminal charges have shown an increase in prosecutorial charging rates, particularly for lower-level offenses,” the report reads. The report found an approximate 150 percent increase in the likelihood of misdemeanor charges being filed by prosecutors in cases with BWC video.
The report states that prominent accountability investigator, OIR Group’s Los Angeles-based Michael Gennaco, “noted that prosecutors would tend to automatically bring misdemeanor charges in cases where they knew BWC video was available,” including cases where the charged individual was innocent.
“The charged individual would often then plead out to get out of jail and get on with their life,” the report reads. “In Madison, such an effect could most heavily impact communities of color, given the neighborhoods that are most heavily patrolled (and that would receive the most exposure to BWCs).”
The office noted that it was odd for the pilot program not to have included this metric in its measured outcomes, particularly because the officers themselves make initial charging decisions, recommending cases to prosecute.
Parting shots
The OIM report wouldn’t come out until months after Barnes left the MPD. But before he left, he was already showing his distaste for the department’s accountability structures.
It starts with Greg Gelembiuk, an evolutionary biologist, who would eventually go on to become the OIM’s data analyst. Gelembiuk declined to be interviewed for this story, but at a public meeting, he chimed in during the public comment section, pointing out that, contrary to what Turner and Barnes were saying, a body camera program is actually quite expensive. Amelia Royko Maurer, a police accountability activist who was at that meeting, told The Stranger what Gelembiuk said and how Barnes and Turner responded.
The numbers provided accounted neither for officer training time, nor the cost of time associated with officers fulfilling body camera-associated administrative tasks, Gelembiuk said in the meeting. Someone has to then spend time reviewing and logging the camera footage, and redacting footage for public disclosure. He estimated the program could cost $23 million over the course of five years.
“Chief Barnes turns to Dr. Broderick Turner and says, ‘Have you ever heard of body cams costing $23 million?’” Royko Maurer recalled. “And Turner says, ‘No.’ And they both chuckle.” (This was another metric that MPD failed to track, despite the Madison City council’s directive to do so.)
When Barnes announced that he was leaving the Madison Police Department to lead SPD, he gave exit interviews to a number of outlets throughout the city. And in several, he took direct aim at the OIM and Gelembiuk, in particular.
Madison’s OIM exists under the oversight of the city’s Police Civilian Oversight Board (PCOB). The OIM is empowered to investigate the MPD, and is meant to analyze and identify problems within the department and recommend policy changes.
All of this is impossible to do without data and information—Gelembuik’s job.
But Barnes seemed to disagree, and he had a bone to pick about it.
“I think the office of the independent monitor and the independent monitor were on a great path,” he said in an interview with the Madison365 podcast. “I think they were showing some promise, and then they decided to hire a data analyst, and they switched their focus from actually taking complaints and investigating or creating an investigative process to asking for data from the police department so (they) can find a problem…They are a hammer looking for a nail, and probably pose one of the greatest threats to the trust and legitimacy that we have built up between the police department and the community.”
That data analyst was Greg Gelembiuk, who challenged Barnes’s cost analysis in that public meeting years earlier.
“That is a complete misunderstanding of our role. That is 100 percent misunderstanding of our role,” Gelembiuk told Madison365. “We are not just the complaint department. That was never the idea. Our most important role is … to do analysis and to identify problems in the department, and then recommend policy changes or ways in which those problems can be rectified.”
Madisonians tell The Stranger that these were just the last jabs in an ongoing conflict between Barnes and the OIM. Royko Maurer says that before these interviews, she called Barnes in late October, because she had learned that Barnes had allegedly started an internal campaign against the data analyst position, following OIM’s decision to hire Gelembiuk.
“I called Barnes to tell him, ‘Independent oversight will help you,’” Ryoko Maurer said. “‘It is a friend to the chief. It puts pressure on your officers to do the right thing. It puts pressure on them to ask for help when needed, before something bad might happen—before they find themselves in a situation of officer-created jeopardy.’”
“And he says, ‘I’m going to call you back. I’m going to call you back tomorrow, I promise, because I want to discuss this with you,’” Royko Maurer said.
Barnes did not call her back, she says.
Instead, Royko Maurer learned that Barnes increased pressure against the data analyst following her phone call to him.
Royko Maurer said that Barnes approached people in city government, and “was telling individuals within city admin and [government] that the OIM didn’t need a data analyst, that it was redundant and that the OIM and PCOB were doing great until the data analyst showed up,” Royko told The Stranger in a later email. “It was an obvious effort to divide and conquer within the OIM and PCOB and to stir up bad feelings among those in city admin, [government], the PCOB and OIM and direct them specifically towards a data analyst he [Barnes] could not control.”
“The chief is the most powerful person in the city,” Royko Maurer says, “and people are easily swayed when someone with such rank pays them special attention.”
One Madison official Barnes had approached confirmed this to The Stranger. That official asked to remain anonymous. According to this official, Barnes insinuated that MPD could handle that accountability work themselves.
Surveilled in Seattle
Barnes’s push for cameras has since surpassed Madison’s borders. He’s been a vocal proponent for increasing surveillance cameras in Seattle, in the Seattle City Council’s recent passage of legislation expanding its use of CCTVs around the city. Notably, the city will place more cameras in the Chinatown International District and the Central District, both areas with larger communities of color.
The expansion was met with huge community pushback, not the least of which was based on the fact that the city council voted to expand the program in its infancy, less than four months after the program’s pilot began last May—before the pilot was complete, and before any data could be collected about its effectiveness.
Both the Seattle Office for Civil Rights and the Community Police Commission strongly opposed the City’s decision to expand its surveillance program. Both agencies noted that data regarding surveillance cameras do not support claims that they reduce crime. Their concerns hearken back to experts’ concerns regarding body-worn video.
But since Barnes first started dabbling in community-opposed camera programs in Madison, the stakes have gotten higher. For one, the current president and his supporters are doing everything in their power to establish an autocracy, and immigration enforcement has repeatedly accessed surveillance camera programs to track immigrants throughout the US.
While the council committed to certain measures that allegedly make the program safer, the wording of those accountability measures are lukewarm, at best. For instance, the council unanimously passed an amendment that would institute a 60-day “pause” of the program, if the City is subpoenaed by the federal government—meaning that one subpoena would have to be fulfilled before they could shut it down. It also does not address any circumstances under which the city would release data without a subpoena.
As recently as this week, protesters have flooded City Hall to protest the surveillance program. The cameras in the expansion program haven’t been installed yet, but the original CCTV cameras are still in place. Right now, the City is depending on Barnes—who disregarded many of the Madison council’s parameters for the bodycam program—to now observe the City Council’s simple guardrails to keep Seattleites safe from the federal government, let alone overpolicing.