In the nearly three weeks that the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, has occupied Seattle’s densest neighborhood, the experiment in police-free self-governance has proved impossible to pinpoint. An early name change flummoxed the media. It has no officially defined leadership. And multiple shootings, one fatal, have damaged the occupation’s hard-won peaceful image. The protest’s one reliable feature is flux. It is ever evolving. The CHOP you visit today will not be the same CHOP you visit tomorrow. Just how in flux? Look no further than last week—Tuesday, June 16th, eight days into the occupation.
Morning broke with the rip of a Caterpillar engine. Around 9 a.m., in the community formerly known as CHAZ (the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), a line of Cat loaders rolled down East Pine Street, hoisting slabs of concrete, as workers from the Seattle Department of Transportation, in hard hats and orange vests, lugged rectangular planks of plywood and wielded shrieking handheld drills. In its short life, CHOP had drawn the leering gaze of cable news and netted the President’s faux-wrath—and also that of conspiracy theorists and people with an unhealthy preoccupation with acronyms. The six or so cordoned-off blocks that surround the Seattle Police Department’s abandoned East Precinct building had been called many things over the previous week. A takeover by domestic terrorists. An armed shakedown of local businesses. “Crazy town,” in a Fox News headline. But no one, not even Tucker Carlson, had ever once characterized it as something so pedestrian as a municipal construction site.
Yet here they were, a swarm of men in hard hats, commanding heavy equipment and installing concrete barriers as part of a contested agreement between city leaders and protesters. Officials from multiple city departments clustered at the top of the street. Only the fire chief, Harold Scoggins, appeared to make forays away from the pack, strolling up and down East Pine to survey the progress of the plan that he’d help negotiate. They were going to “re-shape” CHOP, the chief could be overheard saying. That was news to many protesters who had occupied the area since its creation: a white ally who ran the No Cop Co-op, where donated items—bottled water, pizza, toiletries—are free to all; the demonstrators emerging from their tents in Cal Anderson Park, roused by the clang and drum of construction; and William Parham, manning the white-tented checkpoint station at Twelfth Avenue and Pike Street.
Parham, a thirty-five-year-old black man who is often seen around CHOP and at marches wearing a T-shirt silk-screened with the crumpled mug of the cartoon character Popeye, stood guard at the zone’s southeastern entrance. Reports that the far-right Proud Boys were nearby had swept through the community, as well as accounts of cars attempting to drive into the crowd, as had happened nine days earlier, when a Honda Civic barrelled down Eleventh Avenue and its driver shot a protester.
Parham kept a watchful eye on the street until, around 9:45 a.m., one of CHOP’s self-appointed sentinels, a white ally wearing a bulletproof vest who goes by the handle Slate, approached and asked Parham if he’d been briefed. “Yeah, man. I don’t necessarily agree with it,” Parham said. Like so many others, he was learning, in pieces, what had been negotiated.
Over the weekend, Scoggins, the fire chief, along with the director of the Seattle Department of Transportation and the general manager of public utilities, had met with a handful of informal protest leaders and two people representing neighborhood real-estate and business interests. The representatives of local businesses said that restaurant owners, who were largely in support of Black Lives Matter, were hurting financially as a result of CHOP; food-delivery drivers trying to pick up orders—the restaurateurs’ main source of revenue during the coronavirus pandemic—sometimes couldn’t enter the zone. Scoggins complained that CHOP’s heavily fortified border—a mix of police barricades once used against protesters and demonstrators’ personal cars and trucks, which could be moved when access was permitted—violated multiple fire codes.
Touted as a way to protect protesters, Capitol Hill residents, and businesses alike, the plan that the groups settled on shrunk the footprint of CHOP by removing multiple gates and establishing a new border made of concrete blocks, which would be spaced apart just enough to permit foot traffic. The protesters lost a street lane, given over to one-way car traffic; an access alley; and, most concerning to Parham at the moment, nearly all of the Twelfth Avenue block between Pike and Pine Streets—the block he’d been guarding.
“We’re, what, a week and a half in, and we’re already making concessions to the city?” Parham said, incredulous. He’d been peacefully protesting since the beginning of the local George Floyd-inspired demonstrations. Night after night, Parham demonstrated for his right not to live in fear of the state. He was teargassed, repeatedly. He was teargassed even after Seattle’s Mayor, Jenny Durkan, promised the protesters that they would not be gassed. Through unity and peaceful perseverance, they had taken this small pocket of the city, after police ceded the East Precinct, on June 8th. Giving up even a sliver now felt achingly close to defeat.
Slate, the sentinel in the bulletproof vest, countered, “I would say that this isn’t concessions to the city,” and cited past examples where coöperation with local businesses and public officials led to better negotiating terms for activists. You can’t anger the powers that be too much, Slate argued.
“But that’s what has to happen to see long-term change,” Parham said. He believes that many of the well-intentioned white allies in CHOP are scared of being called terrorists. It frustrated him that white protesters, after being gassed and lied to by city officials, would be willing to work with the city. “You guys might be out here for CHOP and CHAZ,” Parham told Slate, “but I’m here for Black Lives Matter, because, when I go out on that street and I see a police officer, I have the possibility of that officer trying to kill me.”
Those in power should be uncomfortable, Parham said. Making one of the city’s densest—and priciest—neighborhoods even more of a tourist attraction wasn’t going to accomplish that. “I’m just afraid that it’s going to be an open-air shopping mall in, like, four years. . . . You guys are increasing the property value right now by putting in the one-way [street].”
“We have to have some degree of local popular support,” Slate insisted.
“A week and half in, though?”
Up the street, construction continued. Crews kept dropping concrete slabs in the center of Twelfth Avenue, giving the road what looked like a gapped smile of cement teeth. The workers shouted in the universal way of construction crews—screeched, clipped calls that sound to passersby like something between yelling, in order to be heard over the noise, and bickering, about how to get the job done. Scoggins, wearing a black uniform jacket, a black hat, and a black face mask, stood at the corner of Twelfth, looking down Pine, its surface an incomplete canvas of protest messages—“Defund SPD,” “The Truth Is Here,” “Black & Fearless”—as crews dropped more teeth.
Maurice Cola, another protester who opposed the agreement with the city, paced at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Pine Street. The city’s involvement is going to turn the occupation into a sanctioned event, Cola said. “We’re losing traction by working with them.” Cola, who is black, wore a black oversized hoodie, dark-gray sweatpants, and faded black leather sneakers that had seen him through days of protest. Flecks of silver showed in his hair and beard when he moved his head in the sun.
Ali, a Pakistani-American and a friend of Cola’s, chimed in, noting that the cinder blocks would be effective in “stopping idiots from coming through, so from a pragmatic perspective—”
“No. No, look,” Cola interrupted. “Now they can get right up to us,” he warned, referring to the Proud Boys and other potential threats. “They can throw rocks. They can shoot every protester in the whole thing now.” He held up an imaginary rifle, miming, presumably, a Proud Boy picking off demonstrators with an AR-15.
“A fire hazard’s still a fire hazard at the end of the day. The fire department’s trying to do their job,” Ali, who preferred that his last name not be used but jokingly referred to himself as Cola’s talent agent, said. “Look, the whole city is not bad. There’s bad actors who teargas us, but there are good actors who want to make sure that fires don’t kill people.”
“O.K.! Thank you, Ali!” Cola said, sarcastically. “This is not the time for that conversation. . . . This is a protest. Us trying to coördinate with them in that way is giving too much compromise, when they need to be fucking defunding.” One of the protesters’ unmet core demands is that the city defund the Seattle Police Department’s budget by fifty per cent.
Cola was among a dozen or so informal leaders who had convened on June 13th to change the name from CHAZ to CHOP. The “autonomous zone” name, Cola argued, suggested that protesters wanted to secede from the U.S. He doesn’t want to secede. He wants change. He expressed frustration with the protest’s festival-like atmosphere, with tourists, parties, and stage performances. Like Parham, he feared that all they had really accomplished was making the neighborhood more appealing to investors. “We got pepper-gassed and maced to give Cap Hill the best farmer’s market in the fucking state, the country. . . . It’s a fucking minstrel show, a farmer’s market with ice cream, and the fucking community center that no one from the hood’s going to go to,” he said, over the sound of hammers and drills and the beeping of Cat loaders.
In the coming days, CHOP would undergo more change. Its downsized footprint—and the concrete barriers topped with plywood and soon covered with protest art—would be old news, as other conflicts grabbed local and national attention. Trump would ratchet up his threats to order a National Guard invasion. (“Any time you want, we’ll come in, we’ll straighten it out in one hour or less,” he said.) Around 2 a.m., on Saturday, June 20th, gunfire broke out at CHOP. A nineteen-year-old victim, who had just graduated from high school, was pronounced dead at Harborview Medical Center. Another victim was in critical condition. On Sunday, another shooting occurred, wounding a seventeen-year-old. On Tuesday, a fourth gunshot injury was incurred, just outside the zone.
As of this writing, the suspects and their motives have not been made public. But the death and the injuries had the community back in flux, as informal leaders sought ways to keep the protest on the path of nonviolence. On Monday, Mayor Durkan and the city’s police chief, Carmen Best, announced that police would retake the East Precinct “soon.” The Mayor said, “It’s time for people to go home.” The following day, the Mayor, in an apparent attempt to negotiate with protesters, announced a proposed cut of twenty million dollars to police funding, a small amount compared with demonstrators’ demands of fifty per cent. Organizers showed no sign of relenting. While the zone remained, crowds began to thin. On Wednesday, some Capitol Hill residents and businesses filed a class-action lawsuit against the city, citing officials’ decision to let the occupation remain unchecked, which subjected the plaintiffs to “extensive property damage, public safety dangers, and an inability to use and access their properties.” Earlier that morning, many protesters broke camp in Cal Anderson Park, some with designs on the Seattle Center, the home of the Space Needle. Others remained, to hold the East Precinct. Again, the CHOP you visit today will not be the same CHOP you visit tomorrow.
Back on Pine, last week, on the day that municipal crews installed the new barriers, Maurice Cola spoke of occupying another precinct, maybe even city hall, of making sure that demands were taken seriously and that the Coachella vibe ended. The construction noise drew closer, and a worker in a hard hat approached. “We’re going to have this loader coming down right here,” the man said. “So, you guys, be careful here.”
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
