What Happened at the CHOP? A narrative.
Note: This is adapted from a journal I kept during this period. People’s names are obviously not in it and I’ve changed or removed some sections because I don’t want anyone to go to jail. If you read this and are interested in a specific part, we can talk about it in person.
I wrote a whole other thing about the days leading up to the formation of the CHOP so I’ll skip to Monday the 6th. At this point the police had erected fences and concrete barriers around the East Precinct, with 2 on Pine Street and 2 on 12th street. Every barricade had protesters but typically the largest group gathered at the 11th and Pine barricade. Every night drew thousands of protesters who yelled and chanted until we were gassed and beaten off. A handful of people, typically older people who didn’t want to be present for the spicier stuff, would sit or stand and protest during the day, so there was a constant presence. I live very close to this intersection, less than a 5 minute walk, so I was not only able to walk down every night, I could hear the bombs from my apartment. The night of the 7th was particularly violent. We received a brutal gassing and a protester was shot in the chest with a less-than-lethal round and needed medics to revive her. The police, of course, also attacked this medic.
I don’t work Mondays and the 8th was a Monday so I went down in the morning, around 11 and noticed construction on the fence and protesters. The police and National Guard, who were also present, often moved around the barriers and fences during the day to try out different formations. I checked in again around 5 and noticed fencing around the station itself and lots of cops leaving on a bus together. I thought this was strange but figured maybe it was a shift change and went back to my house to eat before the nightly protesting. At 8, when I walked back, it was completely different. The barricades were down. The East Precinct was boarded up but you could walk right up to it. You could touch it. There was not a police-person in sight. It felt victorious and like a trap. They clearly wanted someone to break in so they could return and swarm. It was clear the police would return in an instant if we broke in. Apparently, they told protesters as they left that they would not allow the building to be burned. We’ve learned since then that they were waiting less than a mile away in a grocery store parking lot ready to swoop back in and demolish the anarchist firebugs they were so sure were in the crowd. This turned out to be as dumb as it sounds, we weren’t interested in burning a building, we were interested in abolishing to police. It also became quite clear that the police didn’t have a plan B when it turned out no one set the building on fire. As of this writing it is still not known who gave in order to abandon the station, with the Mayor, Police Chief and Fire Marshall all blaming each other and telling the courts their text messages from this time period are gone for some reason. Personally, and this is speculative, I assume the order was given by a Federal agency of some sort, specifically the FBI or the DHS, both of whom were all over the city at this point, and since this plan didn’t work, they’ve been pressuring the Seattle folks to do them a favor and keep quiet. Either way, the Seattle Times is suing the mayor and other relevant actors to get these texts, again, supposedly deleted by mistake, so I’ll update this when/if we find anything out.
People immediately began giving speeches and talking about next steps and made plans to occupy. Within an hour there were several tents pitched in the road in front of the station. When I left that night people had set up a projector and were watching 13th.
The tents that were put up the first night to encourage around-the-clock occupation
By the next day, the zone was named and in full swing. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, CHAZ, as it was already called in numerous graffiti posts, had expanded down Pine and into Cal Anderson Park. I’ll get into the CHAZ vs CHOP in another post, but it should be pointed out how sticky that original name was, we were all over twitter and the news those first days.
The Barricade on 12th
The next day, there were huge crowds on the Bobby Morris playfield, the flat field on the southern edge of Cal Anderson, listening to speeches. The Seattle Teachers’ Union was the most vocal about getting the Police Union out of the labor movement. On the side streets, 10th and 11th, there were more mutual aid tents, including ones that give out hot food, which is a real step up from the Cliff Bar sort of fair that had been on offer in the pre-CHOP days. The barricade had been moved, now blocking 2 points on 12th and 2 on Pine but further out and more fortified, with cars and dumpsters. Cars-used-as-weapons driving into the area was (and is) a major concern. A few days before this a man had tried to run his car into the protesters, got out and non-lethally shot someone. Turned out to be the cousin of a cop, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence. The John Brown Gun Club was doing the security the first little while of the protests, which makes sense since they’re a known presence on the Seattle Left. I’m not a member but I’ve seen them at protests throughout my time in the PNW. The strangest thing I witnessed that first full day was a member of the National Guard, who had been deployed by Trump to back-up the SPD, in uniform speak to the crowd, and, bizarrely, told us they supported what we were trying to do here. This was strange given how recently they were attacking us. It hadn’t been 48hrs since they last deployed gas and batons on these same streets. The station itself was now more graffiti’d, my partner and I witnessed folks using a ladder to string up a huge, “this is now property of the Seattle People'' sign. Over the next few days the debate over the meaning of and narrative around the space really picked up. Fox featured a story about Seattle Warlords and chaos, using a badly photo shopped image. The police lied about local businesses being extorted before, quietly, admitting they didn’t actually have any examples. Trump himself tweeted about “Ugly Anarchists” which had a somewhat reverse effect here in Seattle, where squishy, NIMBY liberals, who were on the fence about the CHOP decided that if Trump was against they needed to #resist and support it.
A member of the National Guard speaking to us. I still have no idea if this solider had permission to speak with us and to voice support. I also have no idea why they would do this.
These first few days were all excitement and growth. The No-Cop Co-op, which predated CHOP, grew to include fresh produce, cooked food and clothing. The park itself got more tents daily, from families with young kids to an all-black “Goths 4 BLM” tent, from tents giving out explicitly revolutionary literature to the normal, sunning day-drunk young people who populate the park during less bizarre times. The tents and structures slowly spread north through the park over the course of a few days until there were people camping across the entire thing. A popular “Decolonization Café” opened on the corner of Pine and 11th, which consisted of lots of couches and chairs, along with free coffee, for people to sit down and talk about political justice issues. People were giving out everything from books and clothing to more esoteric services like sound baths and baptisms.
Part of the NO COP CO-OP, forgive the thumb in the photo
The backlash also continued. In addition to the Cruz and Trump tweets, as well as the Fox News nonsense and the lies from police, a Facebook group called BIKERS 4 TRUMP, made up of sad, sloppy YT boomers, started organizing an event to “liberate the CHOP” on the 4th of July. The only bikers I ever saw in the space were the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers, who were there in support of CHOP; the space didn’t last long enough to test whether or not these Trump bikers were serious.
On the 10th a group began painting a very large “BLACK LIVES MATTER” mural on Pine St, with a different artist painting each letter. This seems to have been a very popular tactic, deployed in dozens of cities during the summer of ‘20. It’s basically the least a city can do to gesture towards the goals of the movement. Since the city retook the space it’s worked hard to scrub the graffiti and other physical remains of the CHOP. Only the mural, which is now city-sanctioned, the garden and the large fence around the precinct remain as physical reminders of the CHOP. On the morning of the 12th, people told me that police had come by the previous night and went into the station to retrieve “documents.” To me, this means one of two things: a) that they have documents that there are no copies of and they really don’t want seen by the public or burned or b) they’re trying to provoke. Later in the week, a guy I came to know as a real loose cannon, ex. doing things like running around with a bat or yelling at people then laughing maniacally or setting off fireworks, does go into the station and sort of putters about before walking out and goes about his day. He was, apparently, arrested later that same day after he left the CHOP area.
At this point, we’re getting featured more and more on the national news and the reports become darker. There’s more emphasis on reports of assaults and violence which, of course, creates a positive-feedback loop where people are now more nervous and on edge within the CHOP and more and more people with bad intentions are hearing about a “lawless” zone where you can do whatever you want.
During this early timeframe I begin to hear about and try to attend a General Assembly that is supposed to happen everyday. As you can imagine, it was hard to settle on a time/place as well as to get that information out to everyone who would be interested (there were a handful of people, who I really admire, who put in a ton of work to make these happen), but I started hearing about these things and trying to attend on the 12th and was able to attend my first one on the 15th. In the meantime, there was lots of music and speeches and general festival-y vibes. I got to watch someone shoot a music video as well as hear the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in both Lushootseed and a Siouan language. At this point the garden, overseen by the newly created Black Star Farmers, between the Bobby Morris Playfield and the north end of Cal Anderson was coming along quite nicely. They built a gazebo.
Sunday, the 14th, was the first time I saw signs that the name had been changed from CHAZ, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, to CHOP, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (or Organized Protests, depending on who you were talking to). It is also the day I saw one of the more intense encounters of my whole tenure. That night at a nearby auto shop, I noticed a small crowd gathered near their gate, and I noticed that the crowd appeared to include PSJBGC folks so I stopped to watch. I was told that the folks were tense because the owner of the store had caught someone who’d broken into his shop and started a fire, and now the owner was holding the attempted arsonist at gunpoint.
This seemed extreme so I wandered over to the fence where the owner himself confirmed much of what I’d heard. Except the owner insisted the man was no longer held at gunpoint but he was still being held. The owner claimed the police were refusing to come down to pick the guy up. People in the crowd had trouble believing this story but the owner doubled down that he personally himself witnessed a fire being started. The crowd was divided on what to do and worried about the situation but some in the crowd were very aggressive and loud. They demanded the would-be thief be let go and the police not summoned. Things spiraled when a different, larger crowd, who had heard about this situation in increasingly lurid rumors, marched over from the park. They seemed to think cops were in the process of arresting someone and were ready to stop it. It got tense and people climbed the fence and shook the fence, all while the owner was now pointing the gun at us in the crowd, before some of the more level-headed PSJBGC folks were able to settle things. However, it was hard to get the crowd to leave. I waited a while to watch but decided my presence too was heightening the situation so I left. Later, we read in the paper that this went on for hours before the police did eventually come pick the guy up. Incidentally, they charged him with both that burglary and one from the previous night, which also involved a fire, at a different auto shop in a different neighborhood.
I finally got to see my first General Assembly on the 15th. It was a sizable crowd but there was tension when we broke into groups and a woman-only break-out group formed, whose existence upset a number of intoxicated men. Several people of different genders/races/ethnicities attempted to calm the men but were all unsuccessful. Eventually, I was able to have a pretty good conversation with some people about the goals of the CHOP and ways to keep the vibes good. I heard people talking about the Proud Boys, specifically the Vancouver, WA chapter that I’ve seen around here for years, had been in the CHOP earlier. I didn’t see them personally but read reports and saw photos of Andy Ngo and his buddies walking around the CHOP with their guns. Fortunately, no one took the bait inside the CHOP itself, though they did assault someone when they were off the CHOP grounds leading to the eventual arrest of “Tiny” Toese, who is a PNW-famous fascist brawler, for violating his parole.
By Tuesday the 16th the barriers, which had been left by the cops, had been moved to try to create a space for cars to drive through but still protect people walking. I was able to make it to another assembly featuring a guy who, falsely, claimed he “started occupy” and promised to teach us some of the tricks they learned in NYC. I never saw the guy again. It was also the least engaged assembly I attended, the participants were mostly teens who were focused on drinking beer and enjoying the atmosphere.
Over the next few days the GA time was changed and I was unable to locate it. I was able to go to a rally to remove the Seattle Police Officer Guild (SPOG) from the Labor council and attend a march that shut down the highway and received no news coverage at all. This would prove to be an ongoing media blackout. It’s also during this time that I noticed the NO-COP CO-OP was gone. At this point there were still dozens of tents in the park offering free everything.
The 19th, Juneteenth, was the only day I did not enter the CHOP. This was on purpose, a call went out to make the space Black-only for the day so I attended a march and rally elsewhere in the city.
The next day I woke up to the news of the first murder. Two men were shot on the corner of 10th and Pine and one lost his life. It happened at 2:30am, by the time I was in the CHOP on the 20th there were already a dozen different stories being told. The two most popular stories were 1) there was an argument between the victims and guys in a white pickup truck before the shooting, and 2) the shooting came from a black SUV. The cops apparently came, guns drawn and screaming at everyone, long after the people who were shot had been transported to the hospital, by CHOP medics, and were met with hostility. I went down to the CHOP to get lunch at around 2 and noticed the makeshift shrine, complete with candles and his friends/family mourning. The young man who was killed was named Horace Lorenzo Anderson. It is unclear as I write this if this was a right-wing killing (certainly the most popular theory, but the one with the least evidence) or if this was the case of an argument that got out of control, or if people wanted Mr. Anderson dead for reasons unrelated to the CHOP and this is just where they happened to catch him. It has certainly made things tenser.
Later that day, on the way home from work, I noticed the GA in the park and I sat in. It went over 2 hours and was mostly good. There were references to a vague leadership structure, specifically to a “council” that apparently would simply be getting advice from this assembly. The “council” was claiming to be all Black but was otherwise opaque.
While the meeting was going on there was an intense situation with a Jesus-Guy, one who is quite familiar to me from other protests over the last couple of years. He’s a real glutton for pain and is very aggressive and disruptive. He was screaming and slamming into people and completely manic. People maced him and he was undeterred. The ambulance and MCT (the Mobile Crisis Team, a group of mental health specialists who are supposed to intervene in public mental health crises) apparently have refused to come to the park to help in any way. I helped hold him, hoping he would calm down, for a while until the situation seemed to attract too many people, which gave him an audience and seemed to rev him up. A middle-age, visibly-armed, Black guy who was running a discussion cracked him in the face when he broke into their circle and dropped him but he continued his rampage.
On the way home that night I ran into armed guards by the auto shop and asked them who they were. At first I got sass about how “everyone’s read about us” but I told them I hadn’t and I live here and I’d like to know who the guys with guns are. They changed the tone and told me they were Iconic Global and were hired by business on 12th to “keep the peace.” I looked them up on Facebook and they do indeed have pictures of themselves, armed, protecting the auto shop. They also have a post about finding a “trove of guns” by said auto shop, the day after the stand-off, an allegation that hasn’t been elaborated on since.
At this point, there were also daily marches from the CHOP to the West Precinct, about a mile and half away. I started going on these marches daily which often included blocking the highway. The police were trying to avoid open conflict so they no longer blocked the on or off ramps as they had in the past. Instead, they made a habit of shutting down the highway before we even started marching. It made walking on the highway itself very strange, since it was less a road and more an abandoned stretch of asphalt. I did get to see some incredible views of the city. It becomes clear when standing on the interstate how large these spaces are, how wasteful they seem without cars, and how much of our city we give over to these barren stretches. The media blackout of these shutdowns continued as well, not even a mention in the paper, despite being nightly at this point.
Later that day I spent the night walking around the CHOP, seeing what was going on. Not only did more PSJBGC people have the long-guns out, which they typically didn’t during the day, I also witnessed right-wing chuds, in their big, dumb trucks, coming up to the barricades and flashing their lights or their YTpower hand signs or their pistols. They drove around the perimeter all night doing this, trying to freak-out or intimidate the security folks. They would also harass and occasionally assault people leaving the CHOP. It’s also during this time that the general paranoia increased dramatically. I returned from a march late the night of the 21st, around 10pm, and saw a whole area duck and cover when a series of fireworks went off. It turned out someone was shot later that night, though non-fatally. At night the park itself had a real exciting and dangerous end-of-the-world vibe, especially at night. Lots of large makeshift structures and open fires. The people camping in the park, at this point, seemed to be largely people who were homeless before the CHOP, as opposed to people who were housed but choosing to stay in a tent for protest reasons.
On Monday the 22nd, we got our first announcement for the city officials about clearing the CHOP. About 5pm I noticed the Mayor and Police Chief were speaking at a press conference on TV about CHOP. The mayor stood in front of “Black Leaders,” none of whom were involved with CHOP. Basically, the mayor said that the East Precinct will be returned and the park will be cleared between 8pm and 8am. It was not dissimilar to a plan I had heard floated at a recent GA meeting, one that involved a constant occupation of the station but clearing the park at night because of the violence. I went down to CHOP right after this for the 6pm GA which now seemed like it was going to be focused on the upcoming eviction.
Members of this mysterious “Black Leadership Council” spoke and they struck an apologetic tone. They were apparently asked to meet with the Mayor and attend this conference, but, to their credit, they said they couldn’t, in good faith, represent the CHOP. At first, some of them seemed confident that we could move this protest elsewhere, like the Central District (Seattle’s historically redlined Black district) or near the Space Needle. It became clear quickly that the crowd didn’t like this idea and we collectively agreed to keep occupying the current CHOP.
The meeting pivoted to a discussion about how we could pull this off but people again could not help themselves from speechifying instead of talking about concrete plans. I broke off with the gardeners who seemed to have their shit the most together. People hunkered down, moved tools and vowed to stay through the bitter end. Many folks were convinced the cops were coming at 8pm exactly but this seemed unlikely to me. The City mentioned that they would seek to send in “Black Leaders” (there Black leaders, not our Black leaders) to convince folks to move as well as social workers/the Navigation Team to try to connect with the unhoused in the area. And since this “outreach” hasn’t happened yet, which always, in my experience, proceeds a sweep, I doubted they’d sweep that night. It also seemed weird they’d tell us the exact time they’d come through. It seemed more of an attempt to sow chaos.
After helping clear the garden of tools the gardeners didn’t want to lose in a sweep, I walked up to the precinct to see how they were preparing. A rather unhinged security guy was being yelled at, rightfully so, for pulling down signs. For a guy who is supposed to de-escalate situations, he never does. People wanted to lock hands but that seemed unnecessary since they (the cops) weren’t on their way right then and there. I said fuck it, and went on the march to the West Precinct and to shut down the Highway. I found out the next morning there was no sweep but there was another shooting. No deaths this time.
Wednesday the 25th, the GA meeting was again overtaken by a small group. One of the main facilitators was heroically trying to run an actual GA but this group, who called themselves the “Leaders the CHOP'' came up and read a list of demands. They suggested everyone come up to the precinct to defend it and that we should abandon the park encampments. They suggested there would be a march on Saturday to an “undisclosed” location. My guess at the time was that this was to be the “sit on the highway” plan I’d heard floated for a while. This plan, as explained to me, involved taking tents and chairs and barricades onto the highway in an attempt to block it as long as possible. Like I said, the evening marches were shutting down the highway daily but were getting no coverage in the media, people were hoping to reverse that. The “highway sit” plan struck me as a bad idea since it would get all the most dedicated people arrested and beat up.
Also during this GA, an old YT man, who said he was a Yippie and a Black Panther, came up to push Ibogaine and suggested we could replace the police and the carceral state with Ibogaine. I still have his literature. A group of Black teens pulled off people for a 7pm march, berating the crowd. People tried to say that there is already an 8pm march but they dismissed it saying that this one is led by Black women. The 8pm one is as well, but they didn’t know this. At this point there were now two daily marches from CHOP to the West Precinct; I typically marched with the 8pm one.
Friday the 26th was the first day the city attempted to clear the CHOP. Early in the morning, it appeared that a construction crew tried to move some of the barriers. They were there at 5am but enough protesters laid down on top and besides the barriers that the crew couldn’t move them and there were no cops with the crew to arrest the protesters and give the crew access to the barriers. After this failure, the Mayor agreed to meet with a group of 25 protesters and it is my understanding that there was tension about who this would be. I went to the GA later that day and this meeting was still a topic of debate. Not only was there the question of “who should represent us to the city?” but also, “should anyone be authorized to speak on our behalf?” Different groups, including the newly formed Black Femme Voices and the older, established Africatown, attempted to crowdsource a list of demands which got confusing.
One person partially hijacked the meeting by saying he was running for governor and would take questions (never heard from this guy again). Additionally, a YT woman, who claimed to work in “marketing finance” suggested turning the CHOP into a festival. We also learned that last night’s march had been attacked on the way back to the CHOP. My partner and I had left the march around 10 but apparently they were out and on the highway until 1am. During the mile or so hike back to the CHOP a car drove through the group and some said a gun was pulled (tho a friend of mine who was there denies the gun part).
The next day, Tuesday the 23rd, we marched again but halfway to the station we got a call that the 7pm march folks, who were already at the station, were under police attack. We sped up and got down there quickly. The crowd was in commotion and a front window was broken. Then the police exploded out of the door in riot gear like a trapdoor spider and pushed into the crowd. The crowd retreated but they grabbed a woman and pulled her into the station. The crowd began to chant “let her go” and it was very tense. Black Bloc folks pushed a dumpster against the garage door. Eventually the police let an older Black man I haven’t seen at marches before, inside the station to see an alleged video of the grabbed woman breaking the window. When he tried to tell the crowd what he’d seen on the tape, they turned on him, since the implication was that she deserves to be in jail if she broke a window. I missed the actual window breaking but the crowd was pretty sure that this other gentleman who I also didn’t recognize from previous nights, and who was both belligerent and visibly intoxicated, was actually the person responsible. Lots of folks were yelling at him. A row erupted w/r/t men speaking over women. The police claimed that they were going to book the woman but wouldn’t transport her until we all left. The group decided to take the highway.
Over the next few days of marches we had several cars driven through our group, drivers jumped out to yell and threaten us, sometimes armed. We had water and potatoes thrown at us from rooftops. Over the weekend my partner and I kept going on the marches, offering to do people’s laundry in the park and attending the GA meetings. There was increasing tension between the more protest-oriented people camping in front of the station and the scene in the park, which at this point was mostly people who had been homeless before the CHOP. Some of the station-camping folks were upset that the violence and craziness of the park was distracting from the political message of the movement while the homeless people in the park, who, of course were disproportionately Black, felt that protesters were putting rhetoric and ego over their lives.
Early Monday morning there was another shooting, this time fatal, of a young man we later learned was Antonio Mays jr., but who people around CHOP had been calling Pocket. I saw the car the next morning, which was still crashed into the barrier around the station, broken glass and blood on the ground, in the morning, and went to the GA that afternoon to hear people talk about the incident. I’ll be a bit coy here about exactly what I was told, given the open nature of this case and the rumors surrounding it, but the general consensus was that a group of young guys were hanging out and getting lit, then, after dark, started assaulting and robbing people up. A person spoke to us who said he’d been blinded by them. There was controversy both about whether there was such a group and, if so, whether or not Pocket was part of the group. Eventually a group of people living in the park fought the marauders off. Shortly thereafter a SUV returned and, according to some, drove around the field, where people were camping, shooting at tents randomly. Eventually that SUV, which had been stolen from a near-by neighborhood, drove by the station, perhaps shooting, where someone(s) on the security team, who were no longer the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, but a new organization called The Sentinels, shot into the car killing the 16 year old driver and badly wounding a 14 year old in the passenger seat.
As you can imagine, the tension around the CHOP was heightened yet again. The reputation for violence now crowded out any other CHOP related discussion. The CHOP had now been the site of the deaths of two Black men. It was also in these last few days that the daily marches to the West Precinct split into 3 distinct times. There was now an 8pm, march that I typically attended, a 7pm march that was led by high school students and a morning march which was led by a group of activists, one of whom I consider to be the best chant leader in Seattle (a different discussion). We continued to have more people drive through our group, including at least one off-duty cop, as well as people brandishing weapons at us.
Early in the morning of the 1st, I got a message on my phone, an SOS, that they were sweeping the park and station. I rushed down but by the time I got there the whole area was blocked off with what must have been all of Seattle’s cops (we later learned the FBI and DHS were involved in this part as well). They arrested around 40 people, who they roughed up, assaulted and abused, and threw out all of the camping mutual aid supplies. When I got off work and came back in the evening a group of protesters were yelling at a group of cops who were holding the line on the edge of the park. The CHOP ended exactly as it began.
one of the early days on the Bobby Morris Playfield
The early stages of the community garden
The barriers were moved often around the police station