WHY WE WON: NOTES OF THE CHAZ/CHOP PART 1

The CHAZ/CHOP got a lot of attention during its brief, 22 day existence. However, the events leading up to the abandonment of the East Precinct, also deserve scrutiny. Currently, this whole tumultuous summer of 2020 here in Seattle can be divided into 3 sections. First, from Friday May 29th until Monday, June 8th. This period covers the very beginning of the George Floyd-related protests in the city, up until the moment the Seattle Police Department leaves a large section of Capitol Hill. The second era runs from this desertion until early July 1st, when SPD retakes the East Precinct. This section is the lifespan of the CHAZ/CHOP. As I write this, we’re in the 3rd era (though, I was at a protest on the evening of July 1st where people chanted, “chapter 2” so perhaps my chronology is controversial) and we’ll see where we go.

 Presently, I’d like to focus on the first era, the days before Seattle caught on nationally for our Autonomous Zone, when Seattle was just one of dozens of American cities experiencing unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s police lynching. In fact, the people of Minneapolis burned down a police precinct on the 28th of May, a day before the protests in Seattle got going. This action in Minneapolis would go on to inform the SPD’s choices. 

On Friday the 29th groups of people smashed windows down the block from the East Precinct, at a Ferrari dealership. That Saturday a much larger group protested downtown. Early in the day, the SPD maced a child and threw flashbangs in a peaceful crowd while speakers were still speaking. A group of protesters blocked the highway. Others, including myself, were maced and teargas and flashbanged downtown. Eventually, some cop cars got burned and some stores were looted. Sunday, large groups of us marched around the city under the intense gaze of SPD bike cops. By that Monday, protesters fixated on the barricades the SPD had put around their East Precinct, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood by Cal Anderson park. The cops used concrete barricades and fencing to block the streets in four places, twice on 12th, twice on Pine. The Western Barricade, on Pine between 11th and 12th (the cops moved it slightly up and down the street, day to day) was the site of the largest and most well-documented site of protest. Over the next week the protesters and cops and, eventually, the national guard, stayed out there, day (and especially) at night, locked in conflict. Eventually, during the day on Monday the 8th, the cops simply boarded up the station, drove away and the protesters were left to figure out what to do. It was very strange and probably not repeatable, even in Seattle. Nevertheless, I think there are some lessons, 5 to be precise, about what sorts of things work and what factors played into this bizarre victory:

1. Space: Like I said, actions began across Seattle before settling on the East Precinct Station. I’ve been on marches with all sorts of groups (Urban-Native Education Alliance, SIEU, the Seattle Teachers’ Union, the Womxn’s march, Refuse Fascism, various environmental groups, etc.) for as long as I’ve lived in Seattle and they all go the same way. There exists a “elite” unit of bike cops that follow and control marches. Even when the march is tiny, say 30 people, there’s still a phalanx of bike-dweeb cops circling, blocking traffic and springing into action when they feel things get “out of hand.” They mostly arrest people, mostly, for property “violence,” graffiti and knocking over trash cans. Their main concern seemed to be making sure the marches keep moving, so as not to block streets too long. If you wait at an intersection, they get antsy and threaten to arrest. Their tone and demeanor changes based on who is marching (ie, lots of deference  and bonhomie for the Womxn’s March yuppies with their clever signs, disdain and violent tension for the “radicals'')  This action is the first Seattle event I’ve been involved with that’s found a way around this. And the solution was so elegant and simple: identify a place and protest there constantly. Frankly, the cops made this choice for us by barricading and reenforcing the EP to such an insane extent it practically begged for sustained protest. Instead of having to be at a specific place at a specific time to go on a march or picket it was possible to show up to the EP at any moment of the day for a week and make your voice heard. Additionally, the neighborhood that the EP is in offers us some insight w/r/t why this worked. Capitol Hill is one of Seattle’s most famous neighborhoods. It’s slightly over a mile from downtown, has a reputation as an LGBTQ+ hub as well as a nightlife center. The area immediately around the station includes the Pike/Pine corridor, as it’s known, which is a series of bars and clubs and restaurants as well as a Cal Anderson Park. The neighborhood is predominantly YT and affluent . Expensive apartments and condos near Cal Anderson, shading into large homes and mansions as you get deeper into the neighborhood. I think this is significant for a number of reasons. Capitol Hill, being a large popular neighborhood, is on the light-rail (the subway) line as well as dozens  of bus lines. It’s quite easy to get to and most Seattleites are familiar with the neighborhood. Secondly, and more importantly, because the neighborhood is rich and YT, holding a week-long siege there was both morally acceptable to the protesters and inhibiting the police. If this was a police precinct in, say, the CD (Seattle’s historical black district that is literally blocks away from Cap Hill) the idea of shutting down a neighborhood and spray-painting everywhere and being loud at all hours would have been more fraught. Likewise, the Police were prevented from going all out based on their surroundings. I have no doubt that if we were in a poorer neighborhood, with less rich people filming from their balconies, we would have been gassed more, beaten more and generally treated rougher. Every time they gassed us, they had to gas folks living in $2.5k/month apartments. There were reports of babies in these apartments being gassed and convulsing. There was ample video of all of this since balconies overlook the entire engagement area. Now I think anyone would complain about their child foaming at the mouth and convulsing due to a chemical attack by police. The difference here was that the people making these complaints were not folks the city ignores. Plus Seattle as a whole considers itself liberal and part of the #resistance and “one of the good ones” so I think the spectacle of nightly police violence roused more local sympathy than it would many other places.

2. Time: When this happened is just as essential as where. It’s important to remember that before NYC stole our crown, Seattle was “America’s Wuhan,” the center of the COVID19 outbreak in North America. The first 6 American deaths were right outside of town. We were the first place to shut down; our mayor declared an emergency on March 3rd. Schools have been closed since March 12th. No one has been to a bar since March 15th. Many people are no longer even seeing coworkers. The psychological impact of this was profound. The isolation that everyone has been feeling has extracted a profound toll. Coupled with this is the intense and scary uncertainty of the situation. It has become more and more clear over time that the government is not interested in helping out. I think this hopelessness raised the stakes. I think the isolation made the atmosphere incredibly electric. People went from being at home all the time to pushing into thousand person crowds, yelling and screaming. People were out-of-work or working from home, making it much easier to spend time at a protest. It seemed to prove that suspicion that the increase in work hours over the years and the seepage of work into every part of life was, partly, to drain us of exactly this energy. The energy was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

3. Consistency: I think we wore them down. By placing them in the position to be guarding four barricades constantly for days at a time was too much for them. The plan was surely to wait out the protesters, to hope the numbers dwindled every day until the general public forgot about them. However, the protests never really dipped in attendance (there were certainly much busier days, for instance, the weekends, but there were a couple hundred each day) and the cops really couldn’t handle the long nights and the endless standing and the constant tension. They couldn’t handle that there was no end in sight, they couldn't’ handle the protesters constant chants of “EVERYDAY” and “YOU LOOK TIRED/WE’RE NOT TIRED” Because, like every fight with the cops, they’re better equipped but there’s more of us. A community around the protest popped up quick and made this consistency possible. Tons of free food and water and PPE and hand-sanitizer and medical care and, towards the end, music and entertainment, popped-up to make it possible and indeed desirable to come to the protest, yell at the police for a few hours, then leave knowing others were coming to take your place. As the nights went on you could feel the patience of the cops slipping. It was obvious they’d manufacture a reason to clear out the area as it was getting late each night, simply because they wanted to fight it out, arrest some people, be done with it, so they could go home. And the protesters wouldn’t allow anything to change. It’s my belief that they didn’t think they could keep this all-day, every-day struggle up, especially given how insane the overtime money was, right at a moment when the police budget is under scrutiny. Additionally, the tactics themselves remain totally consistent. Every day, people showed up at the barricades, especially the Western Barricade, and chanted and yelled and protested. The cops changed where they were standing and how many of them were out there and in what formation, but the crowd’s response was the same. They tried installing speakers and lights to “reason” with us and give directions but every-time they tried it, their voice was drowned in a sea of “fuck you”. Even after they cleared intersections by force, deploying poisons and bombs, the crowd would simply reform moments later. Cops feel their job is to take control of situations; putting them in a situation so anathema to their being placed them in a tortuous bind. The fact that nothing they tried changed the response led to the cops bowing out of the exchange altogether. 

4. The Limits: The bottle-throwers, laser-pointers and umbrella-wavers are responsible for the success that created for CHOP. There’s a long-standing, mostly tedious, debate on the “left” (especially if you define the left as broad as, “everyone physically involved with the barricade protests”) about the necessity of non-violent protest and what exactly counts and non-violent and where property destruction or similar “grey-area” activities might or might not be acceptable. In my years of going to protests around Seattle I’ve always seen and heard from the so-called “peace police” who stress the importance of, say, not spray painting all over stuff or, definitely, not throwing bottles. These people were certainly at the Precinct Protest, I saw a kid scolded for throwing a bottle, for instance, but I saw way less of them. Partly, I would guess, this had to do with the protests being so spontaneous, and therefore it was harder for people to feel “in-charge” (not that it didn’t stop some from trying) and thus self-deputized to proclaim what sort of protest this was to be. Additionally, and no less likely, many, if not most by the end, of the crowd had been victims of unambiguous violence by the very SPD we were normally asked to treat civilly. Well over half of the protest days ended or contained an instance of the police tossing bombs or firing sponge rounds or wantonly macing. After experiencing that, it’s a much harder sell to say it’s wrong to throw a water bottle at them. And the reason I think these boarder-line “violent” (Hopefully, it’s clear how silly I think it is to consider throwing a half-full water-bottle or pointing a laser-pointer at a man in 50k+ worth of protective gear, including a baton, guns, chemical weapons, helmet and visors is, in any non-symbolic way, violent) tactics worked is directly tied up with one of the main criticism abolitionists have w/r/t the police. Namely, their inability to de-escalate. The New York Times did a great internet interactive about one of these interactions, the famous one from June 26th which gave the movement one of its symbols: the pink umbrella. On this occasion and protester held up a pink umbrella as part of a would-be wall to block an anticipated mace attack (they turned out to be right about an attack being imminent). A cop brushes the umbrella, and decides he must have it, that the protester is being insolent and uncooperative by not allowing him to simply snatch it. There’s a brief tug-of-war before other cops, not even the ones directly next to the action, see all this and start spraying mace right at people’s faces (the “proper use” of this chemical weapon involves spraying it above crowds, not directly at faces). Then it’s the flashbangs and the tear gas and the batons. This incident was particularly well-documented. It happened in broad daylight and involved a bright pink object in a sea of black. But it wasn’t isolated and this dynamic pushed the police into violence over and over. A bottle is thrown, a laser pointed, a cop gets scared and they all have to attack. Because the Police will always value the safety and authority of each other, rather than the general safety and health of anyone else, actions like the ones I’ve described put the Police in a place where they have to “have each others’ back” and lash-out and take control of the situation. The only way they know how to do this involves a level of violence in unacceptable in liberal Seattle. I would, finally, add another tactic to this list of specific tactics that seemed really effective. At the other, non-western, barricades, the crowds were much smaller, sometimes around 50, sometimes less than a dozen. Of course, there were still full lines of war-LARPing cops and national guard folks who had to just stand there. Because there weren’t enough protesters to create a deafening wall of chanting, like at the Western Barricade, protesters switched up the tactics and started yelling really mean, personal aggressive stuff at the individual cops. I can only really speak anecdotally but this seemed to really bother the cops. People yelling, “what will your children think of you?” “If you took off that badge I’d fuck you up” “This is a terrible way to process your trauma, who hurt you?” and “40% of your co-workers abuse their wives” as well as singling out individual cops for ridicule, especially when they’re ordered to just stand there passively, fucked with them. I saw several incidents of “commander” telling cops on the line not to respond. On the last day, that Sunday, I saw a few cops lose it and get into actual flustered arguments with the protesters. Again, I don’t have anything beyond anecdotes to prove that this particular strategy played a role in the victory, but I have been on other marches and protests where the organizers specifically eschew this edge-of-peaceful tactic. And, at least in this case, it was the folks pressing the limits of a “peaceful” protest who were and are responsible for putting the police in an unwinnable position. But why was their position so unwinnable? For that we have to look at the third, and I think, most important factor:

5. POLICE MINDSET: It does seem insane when you think about it. After 10 days of constant siege, dozens of violent skirmishes, including some that got national media attention (the SPD famously shot an MSNBC reporter, on live TV, with a tear-gas canister)  and truly no end in sight, the SPD packed up their shit in the early morning, boarded up the windows and left the scene. They even left the precinct doors unlocked. They weren’t gone, of course. They were, in fact, less than half mile away, parked in the Safeway parking lot. The National Guard was waiting in Volunteer Park about a mile away. They were waiting because they were expecting the protesters to try to trash or burn down the precinct so they could sweep back in, this time being seen as rescuers and heroes, bulwark against violent anarchy, not the assholes who’d turned the neighborhood into a warzone. This obviously didn’t happen and because the Police made a dumb miscalculation. They really thought that the crowd in front of them, night after night, made up of regular people from across Seattle, would pillage and burn down the precinct the second they got the opportunity. They really believed they were all that was stopping these people from turning a dense urban neighborhood into an inferno. I say, “The Police” made this decision but that’s actually speculation on my part. As I write this, in early July, it is actually unclear who gave the order to abandon the station. Both the Mayor and the Chief of Police have both gone on the record saying that it wasn’t their idea or their order. You know it was a stupid decision when the mayor and the head cop can’t even agree who’s decision it was. Either way, whoever made this choice, made it because of the oversized position the “Anarchist terrorist” occupies in the police imagination. It’s hard to overstate how worried about Antifa violence and rioters the police in Seattle are. Last December, back when we were still allowed to be in groups, I went to the Vera Project, an all-ages venue steps from the Space Needle, to an anarchist book-fair. When I got there it was surrounded by cops. Cops in riot gear, cops with tear gas guns, cops with battens and, of course, the bike-dweebs. It turns out that a lone insane (he was later yelling at us for supporting Hillary Clinton’s infant-cannibalism) Alex-Jones t-shirt dude called them saying that he was worried there were violent terrorists at the book fair. The cops heard Anarchist (presumably, they can’t even hear the word “book”), and, like always, came out guns blazing. On the night Trump was elected I marched from downtown to UW as part of a protest. Right after we got to Red Square a shot rang out and a man fled the scene as a guy, clearly part of the Black Bloc, fell to the ground, shot. The cops swarmed, formed a circle around the shot man and pushed back the medics. They told me and others that an anarchist had shot the man, even though it was clear to everyone that the man was himself an “anarchist” and we had all just watched the shooter slither away unmolested by the police. At the EP siege there was a day when the police attacked to push back the line because a riot cop saw what he thought was a pipe-bomb by his foot. After themselves throwing flashbangs to push back the crowd, it turned out to be a candle. There’s clearly a pattern here where the cops won’t even believe their own lying eyes and consistently and luridly overestimate the strength, cunning and brutality of their opponents. I wonder often about why this is. On the one hand it seems to go back to the ‘99 WTO protest. Those 3 days are still famous around the world and certainly must have been seen as a stinging blow to the SPD. Do you think other cops, in other cities, teased them at cop conventions? Mocked because they couldn’t handle a few silly hippies and anarchists? Maybe they vowed to never let it happen again. Perhaps it’s prudent to look further back. SPD has fought, violently, against the Black Panthers, the United Indians of All Tribes and the General Strikers. So maybe it’s deep in their bones to treat any dissent with total force. I also think it has a lot to do with the psychology of getting all of these military weapons and military training. If you’re driving around Hummers, wearing Call-of-Duty style tactical gear, holding several lethal and chemical weapons, yelling at people to comply or face violence and have a mindset to control the streets at all cost, it’s probably psychologically necessary to imagine an opponent as obsessed with violence as you are. It’s projection and environmental influence. If you see weapons and barbed wire, concrete barricades and the National Guard around, it must be because your opponents will stop at nothing, not because your budgets are overstuffed and you bought a bunch of toys. Additionally, the training and demographics of the police force seem to be a factor. Only about 11% of Seattle cops live in Seattle. That’s a huge problem. It’s exacerbating the Us vs. Them dynamic. It allows them to passively absorb (cops, as a whole, are not curious and thoughtful people) all sorts of stereotypes about dumb libtards and violent antifa which in turn colors their response since they aren’t responding to real people, they’re responding to their cartoonish projects of what Seattleites are like. Additionally, they receive warrior cop training, including training from Israeli cops who quite literally see themselves as holy occupiers, that encourages them to see themselves as brave, manly cowboys, fighting off unwashed hordes and dishing out righteous justice. Just look at how many of them have The Punisher shit on their trucks and tattoos, etc. 

Those five factors are the main reason Seattle was able to successfully drive the police out of a few-city-blocks wide area, occupy a police precinct and create a space, the CHAZ/CHOP, that really resonated around the country. I’ll get more into what happened during the 22 day CHAZ/CHOP era in a later essay, here I’d like to end with some things that the cops seemed to be successful with during the protest that we should think about going forward. First, they cops were most successful when they picked out people in the crowd to communicate with and through. While there are the obvious fears about “police plants” and “double agents” I’m not talking about authentic protesters who get manipulated by the police. To give a specific example, on that Tuesday, I was in the crowd on 11th when we got pushed back by flashbangs and gas. The crowd reformed but a small group of young men (the police almost always seemed to choose men for this, for obvious reasons) said the cops had told them to hold off and that we could move back to the square in “10 minutes” the men told the crowd that when we got back to the square, they would be in front to “keep everyone calm.” People dissented but the men yelled at them to “do this the right way.” They repeated the police rationale, that we had been pushed back because they saw a pipe bomb. It turned out to be a candle. While this was going on, another part of the original Western Barricade protest, who had been pushed down Pine instead of 11th, were pushing the police line in front of them by chanting “hands up don’t shoot” and walking towards them. Eventually, our group of cops backed up as well and the day went on. The desire to be the leader or the one “in-charge,” especially in young men, is pretty easy for the police to manipulate and should really be guarded against. We’re at our strongest when we aren’t negotiating or “doing it the right way.” Likewise, there were many attempts throughout the week to move or alter the protest. People would loudly try to rally people to take the highway, or march to city hall, or change parks. Each time they couldn’t get enough support to really alter the situation which I think was the correct analysis on the part of the protesters. When something is working and we’re clearly putting our opponents in a situation they don’t feel comfortable in, we should keep pushing. At least until they figure out an effective response. Then, and only then, we should move on. 

Like I said before, I’m not sure that you could really recreate this action anywhere else, or even Seattle again. It was one of the most exciting and truly dynamic events I’ve ever been part of. If anything, it shows that radical strangeness is possible if you push hard enough. It shows you that you don’t always get what you are asking for, sometimes you get something much weirder. It shows you have to be ready when your opponent fucks up. The extent to which we were able to capitalize on the SPD’s fuckup is the next question.