Nonviolent Protests at Officials’ Houses Are Protected Speech. Political Leaders Want to Shut Them Down.

Elected officials and the police chief of Seattle, who holds the most powerful unelected position in city government, have come together in opposition to a form of behavior that all agree is inexcusable, reprehensible, and violates “every democratic principle that guides our nation.”

No, I’m not talking about teargassing and shooting rubber bullets into the bodies of protesters, or the fact that the budget for the police department dwarfs that for human and social services. I’m referring to the fact that protesters are showing up at officials’ homes—specifically, the homes of most city council members, the mayor, the county executive, and Police Chief Carmen Best—to demonstrate for police defunding and against police violence, including the violence against protesters that helped spur the current protest movement.

Over the last few weeks, the mayor, council members, and their surrogates have suggested repeatedly that protesting outside these officials’ houses, in and of itself, is a violent act that exists beyond the bounds of “decency” and civility. They have maintained, further, that spray-painting the street in front of people’s homes—an act that has recent local precedent at the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, where slogans briefly filled pavement and walls in a neighborhood where hundreds of people live—is an act of violence. (The fact that people in the CHOP area live in apartments, as opposed to the officials who own one or more houses, speaks volumes about which Seattle residents these officials believe have a right to peace and quiet in their homes.)

To give just one example: A recent email from the Neighborhoods for Safe Streets PAC, which was originally formed in opposition to bike lanes on 35th Ave. NE, suggested that protesters who left “‘defund the police’ literature” at Juarez’s doorstep were “trespassing” and engaging in “illegal intimidation tactics.” (For the record, leaving campaign or other political literature at people’s doors is very common, especially during elections, and is not illegal.)

This weekend, the Seattle Times also condemned the protests, saying that “nighttime marches to council members” are not a legitimate form protest but a form of “bullying” and “intimidating” that is “downright Trumpian.”

And just yesterday, police Chief Carmen Best applauded residents of rural Snohomish, some of them reportedly armed, for blockading roads with pickup trucks and prohibiting protesters from walking down public streets toward “a residence” she owns in the town.

“My neighbors were concerned by such a large group, but they were successful in ensuring the crowd was not able to trespass or engage in other illegal behavior in the area, despite repeated attempts to do so,” Best wrote in a letter demanding that the city council denounce the protests. “These direct actions against elected officials, and especially civil servants like myself, are out of line with and go against every democratic principle that guides our nation.” Best’s letter concluded by accusing protesters of “engaging in violence and intimidation.”

In fact, the practice of protesting at powerful elected and unelected officials’ homes has a very long tradition in the United States, going back at least to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The principle behind protests of this kind over the decades has been that people feel unable to access their leaders through “ordinary” means, such as requesting meetings and showing up at City Hall, so they take the protest to their houses.

In Seattle, the tradition of protesting outside leaders’ homes has recent precedent in the SHARE/WHEEL protests of 2009, when activists demanding funds for bus tickets camped overnight at city council members’ houses, in 2012 when homeless advocates showed up at then-mayor Mike McGinn’s house, and in 2016 when Black Lives Matter protesters set up shop outside former mayor Ed Murray’s house to protest his support for a new youth jail.

Then as now, some officials—including then-council member Bruce Harrell—came out to talk to the protesters and listen to their concerns, an act that defused the situation considerably, since, again, one motivation for showing up at people’s houses is frustration at not feeling heard.

Today, protests at elected leaders’ homes aren’t just normalized—they’re typical. As much as Seattle likes to see itself as unique in both our political progressiveness and our collective response to injustice, protesters are gathering outside the homes of local officials in cities across the country—from St. Petersburg, FL to New York to San Francisco. To watch these protests is to watch a norm shifting in real time: Standing outside elected officials’ houses and waving signs or painting on the street was a phenomenon that wasn’t all that common—until now, when it very much is.

Some of the things that protesters have spray painted have been misogynistic or violent, which is unacceptable. It is never okay to threaten violence against elected officials or use misogynistic or other hate speech to target people at their homes or anywhere else. Historically, this language has been used by the political right to bully women, people of color, and LGBTQ people on the left, but it’s equally unacceptable coming from the left.

Similarly, the small amount of actual vandalism on elected officials’ property, such as the messages scribbled on the glass of council member Alex Pedersen’s front door, is not okay. These actions, particularly the use of hate speech, threaten to diminish the voices of the vast majority who are exercising their right to protest on public streets.

That said, the point of the Every Day Movement protests is to make voices of dissent heard—not in a way that’s convenient to elected officials, or within a city-designated protest area, or within a curfew that would restrict protests to daylight hours. (Although Best said the protesters showed up in Snohomish “late [at] night,” photos and video of the protest clearly show that it was still light out when the demonstrators were turned away by the truck blockade.)

Moreover, it is unnecessarily incendiary of Best, the Safe Streets PAC, and the Seattle Times to refer to nonviolent, disruptive protest as “intimidating” or threatening in the context of recent protests in which crowds of people, and the residents of a dense urban neighborhood, were indiscriminately tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, targeted with flash grenades, and shot with rubber bullets by Seattle police officers night after night.

In particular, the police chief’s characterization of a group of frequent protesters known to be nonviolent as a “violent” “mob” must be viewed in light of her reaction to last month’s protests against police violence on Capitol Hill. Then, police attacked protesters—there is no other word for it—justifying their actions on the ground that some in the crowd were throwing plastic bottles, rocks, and an “incendiary device” which turned out to be a candle. Weeks later, the police department held a press conference in which officials described sparklers and smoke toys that can be purchased in grocery stores around the Fourth of July holiday as dangerous “pyrotechnic explosives.”

These and other statements from police exaggerating the threat posed by protesters calls the credibility of other statements from the police department about the threat posed to police officers, the chief, or elected officials like Juarez and Pedersen into question. The eagerness of Best and her police department to define “violence” down to include spray paint on streets and plastic bottles tossed over barricades should alarm anyone observing the current debate over whether and how to defund the police department in Seattle and in cities across the country.