What did it all mean?: CHAZ/CHOP Analysis
I’m writing this because I want us to win. Let me backup; we’re about a year out from the era of the CHOP. Specifically, during the afternoon of June 8th 2020, the Seattle Police Department, after over a week of constant protest on the population’s part and violence on SPD’s part (I wrote a whole different thing about the week of protests between George Floyd’s murder and the formation of CHOP), stoped patrolling or servicing the area around the East Precinct. Until they violently retook the station, arrested and roughed-up protesters and build a fence, first of cops then of metal, around the park in the early morning hours of July 1st the whole area, or zone, became the sight of one of the strangest and most unusual arrangements of power in the US this millennium. Like I said, I’d like to win, by which I mean live in a world without police and much closer to the loftiest values the CHOP aspired to, and while I don’t think we were very close at all to creating such a world at large or even lived up to those values while the CHOP existed (and, in many ways that I’ll get into, deeply betrayed some of these ideals), I do think there are lessons to learn and information to consider.
As such, I’m not setting out to write a general history or a personal account. As I’ll get into, this whole event was phenomenally well-documented. People were, at all times and from all angles, filming and streaming and recording and documenting every aspect of these few blocks over those 22 days. It is quite possible to stitch together a complete document of the whole event from instagram streams alone and I’d certainly trust what you see on a stream over what you gather from me here. Any personal account would also leave much to be desired but would be especially lacking because I was nowhere near the most plugged-in or engaged person. I’ve written a brief narrative about my personal experience that is also on this website if you’re more interested in that. I was incredibly lucky that I lived 3 blocks from the north edge of Cal Anderson Park and 4 blocks from the East Precinct. While this meant I got woken up and stressed out by the blast bombs and low helicopter flights that typified this period, it also meant I was able to visit the CHOP every day for its existence (exempting Juneteenth, since there was a call for YT people to stay out of the space). I spent a few late nights, out till 4am walking around, and spent at least a few hours there a day but I was working during this time so I was not one of the people who was occupying through camping, nor was I one of the people arrested when they retook the station. All of these people, and there are a lot of them, know much more about this than me and what I say should be understood in this context. Likewise, I was only plugged into some of the projects. Most of my involvement centered around the daily General Assembly, which was inspired by a similar project at Occupy Wall Street (early on, people purporting to be “original organizers” of Occupy tried to teach us some of their tactics). I attended or attempted to attend almost daily and this was my main point of contact. My partner, who’s a teacher, and was on summer break, was able to go down more often and plugged into an art co-op and we both worked on supporting the people sleeping at the station itself, mostly through doing people’s laundry and walking around with a sign offering “Emotional Support.” That means I don’t have much first-hand experience with some of the other larger groups, like security (though I did spend time with them at the barricade a couple of nights) or the Black Star Farm collective who were doing the gardening (though I did help them pack up quickly after one of many “the cops are on their way right now” false alarms) nor any of the numerous free-stores/free food co-ops so, again, please keep that in mind when your evaluating what I’m saying.
The material conditions that lead to the CHOP were so specific I don’t believe they could or will be recreated anywhere, even Seattle. In many ways the whole thing felt something like a very bizarre side-quest to a larger mission. Irregardless, I hope to squeeze some meaning out of the whole thing and, inshallah, help someone else, with goals similar to mine but in circumstances foreign, use these experiences and insights to avoid some of our mistakes and get closer than us to the ultimate prize.
When the cops pulled out on the 8th it wasn’t immediately clear what was going on. By the end of that day, when night fell and dozens of tents had shown up, along with a projector to show 13th, the police had not reappeared and folks immediately started making plans to hold this cop-free space for as long as possible. Later, we learned that the SPD were staged, along with the National Guard, at a nearby parking lot. Apparently, they were waiting for activists, with arson on their mind, to enter the station itself as their que to ride in and crack skulls as well as their way to let the public see there was no reasoning with these firebug anarchists. When this didn’t happen, it became clear they didn’t have a plan B and we, the protest community, ended up with this strange prize that no one had even considered the day before. While we were out daily chanting for George Floyd, no one was demanding or planning for the police to move out of one of their precincts and the surrounding area for 3 weeks. From the very beginning we wrestled with what to do with this strange set of circumstances and this tension is even reflected in the name of the space.
THE CHAD CHAZ AND THE VIRGIN CHOP: NAMES, AUTONOMOUS ZONES, LEGACY
You might remember the CHOP as the CHAZ. CHAZ was among the first and the stickiest of the terms for the physical space. That very first day I saw graffiti welcoming people to “Free Capitol Hill” as well as to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The first day I noticed that CHAZ was now mostly CHOP was on 6/14, based on graffiti and signage and what people would say when you talked with them. I have never met anyone who claims to have, or claims to know who, came up with any of these names. The “OP” in CHOP itself had 2 definitions, either Occupied Protest, or Organized Protest. I was given an explanation at one point that all of the land in Seattle is already an “occupied” piece of unceded Duwamish land. There was also an attempt, by some, to separate CHOP from the Occupy movement. However, by the time the name had changed to CHOP zone, CHAZ had already caught on and grew far outside of Seattle. The idea of an “Autonomous Zone” might end up being Seattle's most lasting contribution to the global justice movement during this uprising. I’ve seen/heard about “Autonomous Zones,” inspired directly by Seattle, being attempted in Portland (of course), New York City, Austin, Chicago, Asheville NC, Washington DC (where activists tried to create a Black House Autonomous Zone near 1600 Penn.) and I’m sure there are others. Recently, I’ve seen footage of protests in Colombia that have managed to secure the areas around abandoned police stations and journalists are calling them “autonomous zones.” I’m still trying to figure out if this is language that Colombian protesters are using for themselves and if they are aware/inspired by CHAZ. Something about the idea of an “Autonomous Zone” is clearly quite memorable and Seattle didn’t make it up.
One way to trace the history might look back to Minneapolis in the very early days of the George Floyd uprisings, where someone had graffitied an “Auto Zone” store to read “Autonomous Zone.” Of course, this was the same AutoZone that was vandalized by the mysterious “Umbrella Man” who was one among the first subjects of the “Agent Provocateur'' discourse (and who, last I checked, Law Enforcement has decided was a right-winger), a discourse that would occupy an amazing amount of time in the CHOP. The phrase itself, “Autonomous Zone” comes from the famous-amongst-brainy-leftists book, TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES by celebrity anarchist and pederasty advocate Hakim Bey. The basic idea is that we can and should create physical spaces that operate outside of the rules/regulations of the normal world. The most famous example of a space directly inspired by TAZ is Burning Man, and the book itself lists antecedents like medieval carnivals and pirate utopias. It’s actually this high-mindedness, this sort of hippy day-dream quality, that I believe doomed the original “CHAZ'' name. Completely predictably, the critique that the space was being used as a silly YTppl distraction cropped up almost immediately. The idea of a CHAZchella or that this was just another off-shoot of the Capitol Hill Block Party or the Summer of Love, to quote the mayor, was a very active critique, especially at the beginning. There’s a long, depressing history of once-vital protests movements being defanged and transformed into a sort of vague feel-good festival for the comfortable who want to feel like they’re “doing the work.” I was at a GA when a woman who claimed to be “in marketing” did suggest, in an amazing feat of self-parody, that CHOP ought to be rebranded as a “lifestyle” festival in order to win some goodwill back from regular citizens. The history of Pride, from literal riot to branding opportunity for Raytheon is a good example of this dynamic. Calling something an “Autonomous Zone'' rather than an “Occupied/Organized Protest” certainly leaves one wide open to critiques of adventurism or cerebral YT back-patting. But as I said before, while the critiques worked and a few days after the 14th I hardly saw CHAZ stuff at all, the “autonomous zone” meme was out, either inspiring leftists in other cities and nations or getting the rage-fueled attention of prominent right-wing goblins. While it didn’t last, the name Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone does beg the question, how autonomous was this zone?
HOW AUTONOMOUS WAS THE ZONE?: HOMELESSNESS, AUTONOMY AND A WORLD WITHOUT POLICE
On the most literal level, there really weren’t any cops coming into the greater CHOP area or the Polices station during those 22 days. They weren’t responding to 9-1-1 calls inside of the park or any other part of the CHOP proper. They also refused to coordinate with EMS, the Firefighters or the Mobile Crisis team (a group that is supposed to handle mental health emergencies, not uncommon in the CHOP, in a way that minimizes law enforcement presence) rendering these services likewise inaccessible to the CHOP. The SPD managed to be so obstructionist they almost certainly cost at least one of the shooting victims their lives. They seemed very determined to push the message that the police, and the much more beloved/respected firefighters/EMS workers, are a package deal.
They also did not respond to calls near the CHOP. Even if you consider the CHOP as covering the maximum possible area (the boundaries shifted throughout its existence) the police treated residential areas nearby, like where I live, as no-go zones. This had nothing to do with the wishes of protesters or the cops being genuinely worried about provoking violence, this had everything to do with turning the neighborhood against the protests. And, anecdotally, it worked. I spoke with neighbors who were ambivalent at the beginning and then against the Zone when they began to read stories about the violence and realized that they were also not going to receive police assistance.
Early in the CHOP era I witnessed a very intense standoff between the owners/employees/family members of an auto-repair shop located on the edge of the CHOP and a group of protesters. The owners of the shop were holding a man at gunpoint that they, the owners/employees/family members, claimed had been caught in the act of robbing and burning the building. Many of the protesters did not believe the owners’ story and wanted this man freed. Cops were called by people on both sides and they refused to respond. The tension reached a nearly murderous climax when protesters began pulling down the fence and some of the auto body people pointed guns at the crowd. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and no one died that night, but it was illustrative of the sorts of concerns and tensions that arise when the police are removed. This seemed to be a form of collective punishment for the neighborhood, in the hopes of turning sympathetic residents against the CHOP and thus eroding support.
Beyond demonstrating their pettiness, the absence of the SPD in the neighborhood highlighted another ongoing issue. Seattle, like many large cities, especially on the West Coast, and especially recently, has a monstrous homelessness problem. This issue has a historical dimension; Seattle is not new to a huge slum-dwelling underclass. During the Depression, Seattle had one of the largest Hoovervilles, which today we’d just call a slum or a favela or a township, in what is now SODO. The term “skid row” as meaning “a run-down district full of the destitute” originates in Seattle and Yesler is the original Skid Row (the skids were from logs rolled down the hill to the docks). And the recent skyrocketing of housing prices has created a homelessness problem on a totally new scale. I work at a homeless shelter (right next to the historic Skid Row, in fact) so I’m fairly familiar with the phenomena and the way homelessness works and is policed in Seattle. What CHOP brought home for the whole city was the extent to which the police silently maintain the boundaries of the homelessness crisis.
For instance, everyone knows we have a homelessness problem in Seattle. You can see it downtown, you can see it at our bigger tourist sites, you can see it looking out of your car on the highway. However, there are places in Seattle you can go to forget. Places where the SPD are much more diligent about clearing out the area. Cal Anderson used to be such a place. I’ve lived by the park for a few years now, I walk through the park everyday to get to work. Before CHOP, the longest you’d be able to sleep in Cal Anderson was a night or so. Occasionally, I would see people on the grass in the morning, sleeping peacefully in the dew. Rarely, would I see a solitary tent, clearly put up hastily, without the accouterments I’m used to seeing at a more permanent campsite (ie, platform for the tent, chairs and furniture outside, a tarp or some other way to keep out the rain, a generator in the more established and left-alone areas). These would inevitably be gone the next time I’d walk to the station. This is because Cal Anderson is a park in a nice, expensive part of the city where people complain if they have to see the results of our brutal economic system, so the cops used to make it their business to make sure the park was being used in the correct way, by the right sorts of people.
Like much injustice and cruelty, this process was pretty ad hoc and slapdash. The homeless men I work with complain constantly about how the unofficial “rules'' about where one can and cannot camp change constantly and are seemingly based on the whims of the cops and the housed citizens. Camps in out-of-the-way highway traffic islands will last weeks or months until they grow large enough to be spotted from the road and are then broken up. Areas in more rundown segments of the city might last for months or years before someone decides they’re redeveloping the block and the tents are scaring off investors and the sweepers, formerly led by a group called the “Navigation Team,” who have actually since been defunded, a major victory for the movement, are called to begin the process of removal.
As a side note, it’s important to remember that these sweeps are not only heartlessly cruel, they are also counter-productive and stupid, especially so during a pandemic. The homeless lose important documents, medications, cell phones with vital numbers (not to mention sentimental items like photographs of loved ones, etc.) constantly, a process that entrenches them further in homelessness and deepens mental health issues. They are supposed to be connected with shelters or temporary housing but, and I say this as someone who works in the business, this is a joke. The gap between the number of shelter beds and the number of homeless on a given night is in the thousands. But what this means in effect is that the SPD have imposed a set of rules and boundaries that apply to the homeless. While these rules are constantly on the minds of the homeless, the “regular” or housed Seattleite in the nicer neighborhoods is able to forget them (or never consider or learn them) and indulge the fantasy that they live in a city that isn’t as cruel as it is. The SPD, and the city as a whole, put lots of time and effort into maintaining this fantasy. In the “normal” world, which is to say, the policed parts of Seattle (which, like most “normals,” doesn’t actually include most people in the city), there is a fantasy that there isn’t a mental health crisis in the state. We don’t live in a society that funds mental health care or has humane options for those who happen to be poor and mentally unwell, but the SPD can make it look like we do. Instead of bringing reality in-line with what we can tolerate seeing we’ve authorized the police to adjust what we might see. With the CHOP, the SPD decided to punish the neighborhood by reversing the fantasy and constructing a sort of projected nightmare-world without police, to act as a literal example of what would happen to all of Seattle if we weren’t nicer to cops and didn’t shut up about this defund the police stuff.
In some sense, Seattle is already full of “autonomous zones” if we use the phrase to mean an area where the police are not patrolling or enforcing rules. It’s just that they’re typically called encampments and they’re less overtly political than the Capitol Hill version. But if the main feature is a lack of police oversight, these places fit the bill. And they struggle with the same issues the CHOP had to deal with and, sadly, I don’t think we did a good enough job learning from these situations and we, sadly, recreated some of the exact systems we were looking to correct.
Let me be more clear. One of the major problems with homeless camps (and I’m basing this here off my experience with them working in homeless services, which occasionally involves encampment outreach and puts me in close contact with people who’ve lived this way for years and years. I’m no expert and I’ve never personally lived in a camp so take whatever I’m saying here with that in mind.) has to do with how you protect against internal and external threats. As you might imagine, a homeless encampment is likely to feature people who don’t know each other super well, people who have serious drug problems, people experiencing severe mental health issues, people exhibiting strange behavior. It also attracts people looking to take advantage of this quasi-lawless zone through drug-dealing or mugging or general destructiveness/violence. All of these elements were present at CHOP, supercharged because the news that this area was cop-free was widely disseminated. It was big news across the city that there was a part of Seattle the police were staying out of, what sorts of people do you think that attracted?
So, of course, the question became, how do we deal with this sort of behavior and these threats? How do we create a space that is both radical and open and free but also manages to provide safety and security to protesters? Like I said, I don’t think we handled this well. In fact, at many points we recreated the exact power dynamics that the larger protest sought to destroy. By which I mean that “security” often came down to groups of armed folks who at first we’re largely from the John Brown Gun Club, an organization that we knew about from before the George Floyd protests, but after the JBGC quit there were ad hoc groups, most prominently a group calling themselves The Sentinels, that took it upon themselves to “protect” the space. It was never clear to me exactly what their goal was. They didn’t shoot it out with the cops when the police came to retake the building. Theoretically, they were protecting against a Right-Wing assault (there was a large facebook group of self-proclaimed “Bikers 4 Trump,” who were, ostensibly, organizing to invade on the 4th of July. The CHOP was gone by then and the only motorcycle gang I ever saw in the space was a Black club called the Buffalo Soldiers MC) but that also didn’t really materialize. I have heard from others, but did not myself witness, a story about them stopping a group of people bent on burning the station down at one point. I spent a few late nights watching barricades and wandering around the borders and did see Chuds drive up and flash YTpower hand-signals, and pistols and their lights at the people behind the barricades. At one point a group of locally infamous Proud Boys walked through and did not assault anyone until they were off CHOP territory. So perhaps the Chud would have attacked or shot up the CHOP had the Sentinels (what the armed group was calling itself by the end) not been there, but I find this unlikely.
Instead, what this meant in practice was a bunch of different people, many of whom were armed, were going around trying to provide security and safety. As you can imagine, this role wasn’t selecting for people with the emotional maturity and subtly to do this job. Much like police departments, it was attracting people exactly the opposite sort of persona that you’d actually want in that job. Again, I work in a homeless shelter and manage conflict there constantly. What 80% of these self-appointed security folks were doing was very basic rookie mistake stuff that comes from a mindset that I can only call cop-adjacent. What is boils down to is a person who is not involved and doesn’t know the people involved, coming into a volatile or conflicted situation and seeking to impose their will and “solve” the issue as quickly as possible by making a decision about the way things should be and who is wrong and how people should be acting then imposing that decision on others as much as was possible.
Additionally, the CHOP had the unfortunate dynamic of problems escalating due to passerby interest or rumor. Again, this is something I’m familiar with from my work but, basically, if you have 2 people in conflict, adding an audience will make the situation more volatile and the people in conflict less likely to back down. At the CHOP this dynamic manifested itself almost daily. People or small groups of people would disagree or get upset with each other or otherwise get into conflict and as they got louder or became more physically aggressive crowds would form and other “security” people would arrive to “solve” the situation. The audience makes people dig their heels in in order to save face while the waves of “security” people often gave conflicting demands that they thought would be solutions, since each subsequent wave of “security” personnel had less context than the one before. This was most dramatic to me in the car-lot stand-off that I described above where protesters and the shop-owners would calm down and talk to one another and get close to a resolution before a wave of people would show up because they’d heard some crazy rumor about some guy holding someone hostage and would inflame a situation that they were just entering and didn’t fully understand. This back-and-forth played out a few times at the car-lot and fortunately didn’t get anyone killed but did make clear a dynamic that plagued us.
Likewise, there was tons of attention, thoughts and resources coordinating communication, from walkie-talkies to encrypted chats (and long, tedious-to-me, discussions of what encryptions services are/aren’t ops) in order to be able to rush people to the site of an attack or problem when we needed to be figuring out how to do the opposite. How can we coordinate to take the pressure and escalation level down at sites of conflict? Instead of making sure our communication is as fast as possible, how do we shut down dangerous, hyperbolic rumors? Sadly, in our effort to move closer to a world without police, we allowed an unaccountable, armed group to reproduce some of the police’s worst qualities and failed, on a large scale, to behave as the sorts of people who can live without police.
HOW WE SPOKE TO ONE ANOTHER: LEADERSHIP, COMMUNICATION, PARANOIA, GOALS
In this section I’d like to discuss some of the things I witnessed and heard about w/r/t communication (both inter and intra CHOP), leadership and structure. Of course, these questions were ever-present. They were discussed within and between the Coӧps, the various security teams, the gardeners, etc. My main exposure here comes from the People’s Assembly/General Assembly (it never seemed like we landed on a name), which I tried to attend as much as possible during the CHOP-era. As you might be able to imagine, it was difficult to establish a set time and place for a daily meeting. In the beginning I spent many a frustrated afternoon waiting around for a meeting that had either already happened or had been cancelled without my knowledge. However, through the herculean effort and determination of a handful of protesters, we did have a bit of a groove going by the end. The format allowed for people to speak to a large-ish (I’d say maybe around 50 most days) group.
There were people who had the same routine each assembly. Among them were people who were focused on chanting and getting the crowd pumped up and excited, which was slightly out of resonance with the “discussion and listening” vibe the majority were trying to create. There was a one of the self-appointed security guys who would, while 2 guns were strapped to his body, go on a long rant, which remained remarkably similar day to day, in which he’d stress that he was here for the movement and here for peace but if anyone was going to threaten the safety or integrity of the movement (he was particularly obsessed with “whiteboy anarchists”), he wouldn’t hesitate to kill. He’d end the speech, often in tears, saying, “don’t make me kill you” which was at first disturbing but he did it so often it became tedious, as in, “yes yes, the “don’t make me kill you” speech, we know, let’s move on.” There was a man in a yellow vest, who was, in fact, supporting an American Gilets Jaunes organization who gave a speech almost every time about how some of us were CIA agitators and snitches and he was going to figure out who exactly. I actually recognized him from before the GA meetings. On one of the first days of CHOP I saw a man walking up and down the park screaming that he knew that some of us here were CIA affiliated “agitators and agents'' and he was going to root them out. He was confronted because he’d been using the term “Spook” which he insisted referred to a spy while folks in the crowd tried to get him to understand why a YT man yelling, “spook” at a BLM-focused occupation might be a problem. Everyday there were several people who’d get up to give long tedious rants about the tenets of Satyagraha and how powerful non-violence is. It’s these last two recurring issues I’d like to drill down on.
I think one of our big problems was even how we were speaking to and about one another. I think this issue manifested itself in two major ways, one was an unnecessary and non-productive level and type of paranoia, another was an inability to speak in concrete and avoid heroic but vague rhetoric.
The first problem is fairly self-explanatory and was a problem since before the CHOP zone even existed. During the week of siege and marches beforehand, rumors swirled about which march leaders were working with cops or trying to lead people into getting arrested or who were only interested in raising their profile. This dynamic continued and became worse during the CHOP era. We were constantly derailed trying to organize due to this sort of paranoia. We’d get to a place where we’d want to share information, say phone numbers, and people would strongly caution against it. People would be suspicious of question asking. It was hard to get “real” names for bail funds. This wasn’t at meetings discussing illegal activity, this was, as far as I could tell, basically a concern to some degree at every meeting of any sort. One protester summed it up nicely at a People’s Assembly when he told the crowd he wasn’t interested in playing a game of “secret Hitler” with everyone he talked with and begged the crowd to move on.
It’s important to note that it, of course, isn’t without precedent that the government would use sneaky and/or illegal means and infiltrators/snitches/plants to break up a social movement it didn’t care for. Historically, it would be much more unlikely that this didn’t happen. I, of course, witnessed bizarre behavior from “activists” that made me question their motives and allegiances. Perhaps years from now it’ll come out that people I considered very commendable and admirable turn out to be stooges, the Ernest Withers story comes to mind, and I’ll change my position on this. But, I believe, we sadly did the devil’s work for him when we erred so far on the side of paranoid caution we slowed ourselves down. Despite people constantly bringing up COINTELPRO (and often tediously presenting it as new information that none of us, in an anarchist People's Assembly, had heard of before) and related programs, people seemed to miss one of the major lessons to draw from that history. Namely, not only was it the goal of the FBI and others to spy on and infiltrate radical organizations in order to steal actual information, it was also important that those organizations know they were being spied on and infiltrated in order to breed a debilitating mistrust. You can read memo after memo where the FBI is trying to get the Black Panthers to spend all their time “snitch hunting.” We were already weakened by not having a variety and diversity of preexisting structures of organization as well as the normal, American, I-don’t-know-my-neighbor dislocation but we further disadvantaged ourselves by adding to this a harsh layer of suspicion, disguised as hard-nosed realism. It was inspiring that this attitude, as you would guess, melted somewhat over time as people began to recognize one another and, if not learned to agree and get along, at least learned to let their guard down slightly. And, wonderfully, tons of new organizations grew out of connections forged in the CHOP. However, we lost a lot of time and momentum letting ourselves be paralyzed with suspicion.
The other issue is a little more slippery but no less pernicious. There was a problem people had with their tone and register when they were talking to a group. The countless People’s Assemblies and Community Meetings and Discussions I saw all had a similar problem where everyone who spoke wanted to be the person who gave the rousing, soaring, inspiring speech, the one that threw a harsh light on YTsupremacy and pointed a way forward, but it was very hard to speak about current, material concerns. Again and again, people would plead for speakers to stay on topic and talk about, for example, ways to deal with the increasingly frequent public mental health incidents, or the fireworks instead of delivering another verbal manifesto. Perhaps this is the result of our culture. One sees Malcolm X’s speeches in the movies, not the long, tedious, logistical meetings about getting everyone to the Mosque safely under violent police oppression. Our culture, even on the Left, is so hierarchical it only publicly acknowledges the labor of the people at the very top, it’s the same mindset that sees people like Bezos or Musk as the major driving forces in their respective companies. And this mindset drips down to the point that large groups were more interested in writing a “new bill of rights” than organizing for the short-term survival of the CHOP.
Finally, there was an issue with streamers/”new media” folks/documentarians. Technology has made it so that basically anywhere you are, someone is streaming off their phone, broadcasting live at all moments. The CHOP showcased this instinct to an extreme, and, like I said, you can basically watch any moment of the whole event from a dozen angles. Beyond just being a strange experience to walk around an area where everyone is filming themselves and everyone else at all moments (perhaps I should just get used to that) this created 2 problems for the movement itself. The first has to do with police surveillance. I know I just went on and on about people being too paranoid about a certain type of informant, but in the same breath I would stress that the police very much are watching all the social media and documentation going on at all these events. A woman was caught, allegedly, burning cop cars in downtown Seattle based on zoomed in streams that showed her distinct knuckle tattoos that matched an Esty account. As the event went on, people got much better about not streaming every moment and basic best-practice things like not filming the protesters (even when they’re bloc’d up), instead focusing on the police, but we had to stop people from streaming multiple times at every single GA meeting. The second problem, beyond security, is that the streaming makes, definitionally, anything you're filming a spectacle. It removes you from the event, you’re no longer a participant or a curious bystander, you’re documenting what’s going on. You’re actively trying not to influence the events, to remain impartial; you’re just trying to report. We didn’t need more people to report what was going on, if anything, we needed the whole thing to seem intriguing and curious so people would come check it out and see for themselves. We needed few people “documenting” and “making content” behind a screen and more people engaged and plugged in.
Conclusions
Overall, I think we failed to get the most out of the CHOP situation largely based on never coming to an internal agreement over what we were trying to do. Were we trying to fortify, defend and hold this few block area? Was the goal to expand the boundaries and try to disrupt the city as much as possible to force change? Were we seeking to send representatives to bargain with the city, now that we had some leverage? Were we trying to build a model society in this weird liminal space? Again, no one had planned for this outcome. No one was suggesting we’d protest until we drove the police clear out of the neighborhood and then occupy the streets for weeks. Obviously, this went double for the police. They had expected folks to burn the station and give them a reason to crack skulls and look like the good guys again (in the week before the CHOP was formed, they were getting a lot of bad press w/r/t gassing sleeping children). When this didn’t happen they also didn’t know what to do or how to handle the public perception. What ended up happening, from a public perception point of view, was a flourishing of goodwill and interest before the idea of violent anarchy was pushed really hard, throw in a few “unsolved” murders and it became possible for the SPD to retake the station. I here I mean “possible” politically. The SPD always could have rolled up and flashbanged-or-worse’d their way in. Nominally, the leftist gun-toters were there to stop that but I have a hard time believing that most/many/any of them were really ready to shoot it out with the cops. And when the police did roll up, they were gone. So what really changed with what the police thought would be acceptable and I would say the pivot on this perception hinges on the Larenzo Anderson murder on the night of the 19th. From the very beginning there was the perception that the CHOP was violent. Fox News ran a famously photoshopped image of burning chaos and attributed it to Seattle but in the city itself the vibe was much chiller for the first week or so. There were lots of kids and families, there were lots of teens and curious older folks (and, of course, very deeply involved, political older folks and teens present the whole time) wandering through and checking out the scene. This was deep in the pandemic and at the beginning of summer, there was nowhere else to hang out. The CHOP’s earliest days offered lots of creative free services and tons of eye-catching art. While this did bleed over into a CHOPchella attitude and did attract people who were coming to take pictures and not engage with the politics this was also the most creative time and the time when the most outcomes seemed possible.
However, simply removing the police does not make a utopia and as we faced conditions (that should have been predictable if we’d listened to our homeless comrades about the dynamics and dangers of encampment life) that got more violent (you can read my tinfoil hat section about the ways in which I think the police aided this) we didn’t respond as well as we could have and were often mirroring the structures we seek to abolish.
I also think it was a mistake to never have never made a clear demand about the station itself. Seattle has a number of buildings that began as occupations. The DayBreak Star Cultural Center, El Centro de la Raza, The NWAA History Museum (which, at the time of this writing, is the subject of another occupation, which also features a garden from Black Star Farmers) all trace their history to a group seizing the building and holding them until a deal was worked out where the physical space and building was given over to the community. My two cents: people have been trying for years to get a safe consumption site as part of a larger campaign to end the genocidally racist War on Drugs and a former police station makes some poetic sense. And we certainly don’t have enough low-incoming housing or community centers, all of which would be infinitely better than a police station. But, for a variety of factors, there was never a clear demand w/r/t the building issued to the city.
I don’t want to be overly critical or suggest that the CHOP was a total failure/mistake/waste of time. In fact, quite the opposite. On a personal level I saw some unbelievable things and got to be part of some really exciting actions and conversations. Many of the problems stemmed from us, the protest community, not knowing each other and trusting one another and the shared experience of the CHOP has made future actions easier. Put simply, I now know which people I trust and can work with. In Seattle as a whole, we’re still fighting over the CHOP’s legacy. As part of an attempt to save face, the city gave over some property in the Central District to a Black-run organization. A majority of the City Council committed to defunding the SPD, which, of course, they, like cowards, have walked back since the summer of 2020. As it stands at the time of this writing, the SPD is down 20% from pre-CHOP funding levels. Not what we wanted but at least we’ve stopped the limitless increases of the previous years. Additionally, over 270 cops have quit the SPD and I have to feel like CHOP was at least part of that. I’ve been on dozens of marches since last summer and the police have a much more hands off approach, generally, which I also credit the CHOP with. A handful of organizations and networks sprung up at CHOP and are still ongoing. There are candidates running for all sorts of local offices now running on some version of “defund the police” so we’ll see over the next few years if some legislative inroads get made. And, like I said towards the beginning, the idea of an Autonomous Zone or protesters trying to hold an area for any amount of time has proved incredibly sticky and we’re seeing examples pop up all over. As someone who started getting political around the Iraq War, I’ve always associated the American Left of my lifetime as having a tinge or more of a destined-to-lose mindset or a hopelessness in the face of a system that seems like it will go on forever. Maybe other arrangements and systems are possible, here we have a lived example of stranger, unplanned possibilities arising. Next time will both look different and we have an obligation to push it further. I’m hoping that some of the things I noticed and criticized here will allow us to do just that.
ADDENDUM: TINFOIL HAT SECTION
While I want to take my own advice and not spend this essay playing “Secret Hitler'' I would like to use this addendum to briefly indulge and speculate and answer some of the “are we being GLADIO’d/COINTELPRO’d/MHCHAOS’d/CONUS’d?” questions. Like I said, if you want to get more in depth, and say, get my opinion about which CHOP people were working with the police, I’d love to speak with you in person about it. I don’t think I want to “publish” my more specific suspicions but I would like to speculate more broadly on some troubling trends.
All that being said, there does/did seem to be some level of police protection for the most violent on both the Left and the Right and I will speculate directly on a situation in Portland. On the Right, it’s quite clear; obviously police departments, law enforcement agencies generally, and the military attract a reactionary, Right-Wing type person so it is no surprise that rank-and-file officers are consistently caught with III%er tattoos or Proud Boy affiliations. Some of those that work forces, etc. What’s been interesting since Jan. 6th is the discovery that the leadership of these organizations are, in fact, working with and/or controlled by police. The leadership of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, despite all their anti-government posturing, turned out to be FBI “informants.” There’s, of course, the tail-wagging-the-dog question with these revelations but it also brings to mind groups like the Legion of Justice, or the SOA, 60’s Right-Wing groups, made up of “off-duty” cops, who were able to get violent against Left-Wing threats.
There’s something different happening on the Left. Let’s look at the two of the most prominent and dramatic events from last summer in the PNW. In Portland, on Halloween night, a man named Michael Forest Reinoehl shot and killed a member of a Patriot Prayer, a group of violent dipshits from Vancouver, Washington. A few days later, Federal Marshalls and local cops murdered Reinoehl outside of an apartment building in Lacy, Washington, shortly after Trump called for his extra-judicial killing. He died with a gun in his pocket that witnesses (including a literal pastor) and common sense (the cops are suggesting he drew a gun, fired, returned the gun to his pocket then got shot to death) say he didn’t draw, which puts this whole incident in the Fred Hampton-style domestic death-squad territory. Seems open-and-shut, the police are Right-Wing, they were personally offended when one of their own (ie the Patriot Prayer goon) got killed and they sought revenge, knowing they wouldn’t get in trouble. It’s almost the inverse of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation and illustrates what side the cops are on.
However, I’d like to pause on Reinoehl for a moment and highlight some interesting biographical details. Firstly, he reported multiple times that he’d been in the Army but he “hated it,” and the Army itself, as of the time of this writing, have sent mixed signals about exactly what he did in the Army or whether he was in the Army at all. More interestingly, his posting about “Social Justice Issues” as well as his “100% ANTIFA” quote only started after he’s arrested on June 8th. That night, he was caught on the highway, drag racing, at speeds over 100mph, with his underage son in another car and his underage daughter in his. He had weed, prescription pills, a large dog and an unregistered gun in the car, on top of driving under the influence. He walked away from this incident and failed to appear in court roughly a month later. In the meantime, he got himself caught with a loaded gun in public on July 5th in downtown Portland, where he also resisted arrest. Again, he spent no time behind bars and the charges were dropped without explanation. It’s not even clear if the cops kept his gun or gave it back to him. He wasn’t actually plugged into any of the larger Antifa groups, like Rose City Antifa, but his social media was full of stuff talking about him being Antifa and how Antifa needed to get more serious and start fighting violently. Like I said, the police made no attempt to arrest him, they simply murdered him in broad daylight so we’ll never get his side of the story.
So perhaps we need to broaden our understanding of what we think of as infiltration or undercovers or ops or whatever terminology we want to use. I think folks are hung up on the more traditional William O’Neil (who infiltrated the Black Panthers and helped kill Fred Hampton) or Raymond Wood (who worked undercover for the NYPD and FBI and helped kill Malcom X) style infiltration where someone who seems like a protester is actually and consciously a double-agent who is gathering information and purposefully subverting the movement. Instead, what we have here looks looser and less controlled, closer to the agent provocateur model. Instead of the classic undercover (tho, I’m sure they were there too) we have the police adding violent people to the mix and who are making sure they don’t face consequences.
We can look to history, local Seattle history, to see examples of this as well. In May of 1970 the Seattle police were tipped off by the FBI that the local Black Panthers were targeting a local real estate company called Hardcastle Reality since they were engaging in red-lining and otherwise profiting of decimating the Central District. A police informant, a man named Alfred Rudolph "Alfie" Burnett, who was facing robbery charges, had convinced an a-political Vietnam veteran named Larry Ward to help him bomb the Hardcastle office, on the corner of 23rd & Union. When they arrived the police were already waiting for them. Ward attempted to flee; Officer John Hannah killed him with a shotgun blast to the back. Burnett himself was never charged with anything and never appeared in court, even for the civil trail initiated by Ward’s son.
There did seem to be an attempt, especially after the early peace&love, summer of love, reports, to paint the CHOP as violent, unsafe and full of armed maniacs. More broadly, it plays into There is No Alternative (TINA) or Thin Blue Line arguments that keep this world in place. Namely, that the way we have the world set up now, especially w/r/t the police, is the only possible arrangement and as soon as we try something else or criticize we’re plunged into a world of chaos and violence that makes the “real world” seem all that more appealing. It reminds me of people who suggest you “move to Somalia” when you say you’re an anarchist.
On the Seattle front there has likewise been a puzzling lack of police attention on what I’d broadly describe as the “gun folks.” Reinoehl, despite not being part of a group, apparently spent his nights in Portland, “breaking up fights.” There was no shortage of this sort of person in Seattle, a man who has deputized themselves to “solve conflict” but, since they’re unskilled and boneheaded, they typically escalated the situation. They seemed sus at the time, many of them were quoted extensively by ignorant journalists (the “don’t make me kill you” guy got prominent, uncritical coverage in the NYT) and almost all of them vanished as mysteriously as they arrived.
The most extreme example of this is the second murder, the one of Pocket/Mays, which acted as the death knell for the CHOP as a physical space. I’ve heard alot of recollections and theories about what exactly happened that night, and while I won’t rehash the specifics here (talk to me in person for that), I will say it remains interesting that no one has been arrested, let alone convicted, for this pretty spectacular murder. This 16 year-old was killed outside of a police station, in an area of Seattle surrounded by cameras and full of people who were constantly live streaming. I do not believe the station was not under surveillance by the authorities at the time of the shooting. It is not very hard to get a list of people responsible from basically anyone who had any connection to the CHOP. So maybe the cops were genuinely in the dark about who did they and maybe they made a good faith effort to solve this crime and maybe it’s possible that everyone involved, as either a participant, witness or someone who knows through the grapevine, has refused to speak with police and kept their mouth shut, frustrating their legitimate investigation. This would be the first time in the history of Leftwing militants in the USA that this has ever happened, that we were able to hold our own version of the Blue Wall of Silence or Omerta, but maybe. Or, there are other reasons the police don’t want this killing solved or the people involved with the killings discovered, both because the murders played into their narrative about the CHOP and because the nature of their relationship to the killer(s) might be less than savory. Seattle also briefly hosted national figures who seem to be not all the way on the level, like John Earle Sullivan and Dan Baker. Alright, that’s the furthest out, most conspiratorial I’m prepared to get in this essay. Again, these more sensitive and speculative topics are ones that I am interested in but would insist on discussing in the meat-space.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/09/capitol-riot-oath-keeper-fbi/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl
ADDENDUM ii: THE OFFICAL ACCOUNT
We, the public, have now been made aware of the official story w/r/t the abdondoment of the East Precinct, first through a KUOW story, originally published July 9th 2021, and, more officially, through the Office of Police Accountability report (case number: 20200PA-0354) which was released to the public on the 30th of September 2021. I’ll start with a brief disclaimers about the sources. KUOW is a source I find somewhat trustworthy. They’re the typical NPR station. Seattle is home to a large, large number of NPR-liberals, who are almost exclusively PMC-types who are focused on incremental change and would bristle at the suggestion that the SPD isn’t fixable with some bureaucratic tinkering. I find their police coverage pretty naive. The OPA is a different story, like police accountability boards across the country, they are themselves an arm of the SPD and routinely let off cops for literal murder. The idea that they’d hold a cop accountable for anything is laughable. That being said, it is unsurprising that the OPA document finds that no cop did anything wrong, they all tried their best and if there is blame to go around, it’s not SPD’s. Long story short, the cops didn’t want to change anything about the pre-CHOP arrangement besides getting bigger and better barricades. Eventually the mayor, over the objections of the police, orders them to open the streets (12th st. and Pine St.) with the hopes that the protesters would march by. According to the OPA and KUOW the police chief, Best, delegates the authority to make this happen to Assistant Chief Tom Mahaffey, the incident commander, who hates the idea of leaving the precinct but eventually gets cops to empty the station of valuables (evidence, guns, etc.) and abandons it totally (originally, there was a plan to leave some cops in the station itself, but this was eventually deemed too dangerous). This seems like careful buck-passing to me, a bunch of people who don’t want to be thought of as responsible for what happened. Page 20 of the OPA reads, “Ultimately, the evidence is confliction as to whether NE#1 (Best) approved of the plan to evacuate the East Precinct, or if NE#2 (Mahaffey) mad this decision independently. OPA believes it is much more likely that this ambiguity was the result of a number of complicated decisions being made during a highly stressful rapidly evolving situation.” So ultimately we’re left in a situation where no one cop (nor any number of cops) can be held accountable since the decision was complicated and stressful, and since creating such situations is the role of the OPA all we’re seeing here is a job well done.
Some things did stick out to me in the OPA report, first, it is interesting to me that the report mentions again and again that the FBI Seattle Field office was consistently telling the mayor and others that they had “good intelligence” that the protesters meant to burn down the station. Later, the report notes that WO#3 (identified as the Assistant Chief - Criminal Investigations Bureau, aka Deanna Nollette) reached out to the FBI letting them know that the protesters had “painted over SPD’s exterior precinct cameras” and they needed help since the FBI “had resources in the group of protesters.” By its own admission the OPA did not have access to whatever intelligence the FBI was passing on to the police and mayors office so they don’t look further into it. We don’t find out where the FBI was getting it’s intelligence (which turned out to be quite incorrect), we don’t figure out how they got this intelligence (informants? Intercepted calls/text?, reading social media?) which is especially concerning given the FBI’s history with activists and leftists. Seems like we were COINTELPRO’d. The OPA wrote, “The OPA cannot discern any motive for the threat to the precinct to have been either fabricated or exaggerated.” which I guess tell you all you need to know about the mindset of the OPA. Why would the famously honest FBI lie? Why would the police overstate the dangers posed by protesters they’re gleefully assaulting nightly? The OPA can simply not discern a reason. The report is strange for how often it mentions that basically everyone in a position of power thought the protesters would burn down the building as soon as they got the chance, yet abandoned it anyway. Presumably, to allow protesters to try which would allow the police to come back in and look like heroes. And, as an aside, as someone in the crowd, we were all aware that the East Precinct is connected to other buildings and is quite close to a number of residential structures, no serious person was suggesting we do that. Likewise, there was a smaller group of people who suggested that if the barriers were down and the police gone, the crowd would simply march by the station and leave. Both of these ideas were very, very stupid and are helpful in showing how disconnected and confused anyone in authority was about these demonstrations.
Otherwise, it was good to read from a cop that the panicked evacuation of the East Precinct was “gut-wrenching” for the police. An officer is quoted as saying it was “hugely demoralizing” and he saw many officers “crying” and that this was “one of the most difficult events that I’ve been through in my life” (what a great life) which does make the whole situation seem like more of a win for the protesters. I don’t think it was reasonable to expect that we’d hold the station forever, but putting the police into a hard situation that caused hundreds of them to quit and more of them to feel bad while on the job should be counted as a success.
Finally, there is one last aspect I’d like to touch upon. According to the report, if the station wasn’t burned down, it was always the plan to return to the precinct after the protesters had marched past. The OPA claims, on page 4, that, “However by 5:31 A.M. [on June 9, the first day of the CHOP] SPD officers reported that their efforts to gain access to the area around the East Precinct had been stopped by an armed individual who ordered the police off of the protesters’ “sovereign land.” This does not seem true at all. I never heard this story from anyone at the CHOP, I never heard anyone claiming to be this individual, it strains credulity that an armed person stopped police officers, plural, from going to work. In your experience, if someone with a gun tells a cop to leave, what would happen to them? Even if we imagine that they weren’t immediately shot to death, don’t you think they’d be arrested later? No follow up on this guy at all?
https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OPA/ClosedCaseSummaries/2020OPA-0354ccs093021.pdf
https://www.kuow.org/stories/we-know-who-made-the-call-to-seattle-police-s-east-precinct-last-summer-finally