Tag: Capitol Hill Organized Protest

Arts, Mayor Durkan, Parks, Police

City’s Decision to Deny Permit for Event Commemorating Art at CHOP Could [UPDATED: Did] Backfire

By Erica C. Barnett

UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon, the ACLU of Washington and Public Defender Association sent a letter to the city attorney’s office, along with several city department leaders, calling the decision to deny CHOP Art’s permit “unconstitutional” and saying “we may need to take emergency legal action” if the city doesn’t act. The says the denial was clearly based on the content of the event itself rather than any legitimate “safety” concerns.

The city, as we reported this morning, has claimed that community members have said that any event commemorating CHOP, including an event celebrating the art of the protest, “would be disturbing or even traumatic” and that they applied a higher-than-usual safety standard because of violence that occurred during last year’s protests.

Original story follows.

Mark Anthony doesn’t know why the city declined his permit for an event in Cal Anderson Park after working with his group, CHOP Art, for the last eight months, but he has a theory: “I think that it got up to the mayor’s office, and I think they’re trying to say that CHOP itself is something that’s violent or negative, which isn’t true,” he said.

Capitol Hill Seattle was first to report on the city’s last-minute decision to deny a permit for a long-planned street fair this coming weekend commemorating the one-year anniversary of last year’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest. CHOP turned into a longstanding, entrenched protest area after Mayor Jenny Durkan and her police chief, Carmen Best, responded to protests against anti-Black police brutality by indiscriminately tear-gassing protesters and targeting them with blast balls, pepper spray, and other “less-lethal” weapons.

CHOP Art was formed to store and steward the art created at the event, which the city removed but promised to display at some later date. The location of the art is now unknown after a dispute between the organization’s founders that is still ongoing.

“They completely didn’t respond to me for over a week and a half, and then [Tuesday], three days before the event, they finally got back to me saying that due to the violence that has gone on in Seattle and the violent groups [at CHOP], they said that it was not going to be a safe environment.” — CHOP Art event organizer Mark Anthony

Anthony said his intent was to have a kind of “Black renaissance fair” on the site of the protest, with the blessing of the city’s Arts in the Parks program. “They’re the ones that reached out to me,” Anthony said, adding that he’s been meeting with Randy Wiger from the Parks and Recreation department regularly for at least six months to discuss the event. When the city told him they wouldn’t support “anything in relation to CHOP,” Anthony said, he changed the name of the event, “removed every reference to CHOP,” and reframed it as a Juneteenth celebration.

“They completely didn’t respond to me for over a week and a half, and then [Tuesday], three days before the event, they finally got back to me saying that due to the violence that has gone on in Seattle and the violent groups [at CHOP], they said that it was not going to be a safe environment,” Anthony said.

The Parks Department responded to PubliCola’s questions by providing a brief statement saying that they denied the permit because of community concerns. “We have heard from community members expressing concerns that any events celebrating or commemorating the events that occurred at Cal Anderson in summer of 2020 would be disturbing or even traumatic to the community,” the statement said.

In response to a followup question about which community members had opposed the event, a Parks spokeswoman said, “We heard from neighbors, artists who had previously worked with the CHOP Art group, and other members of the general public that the proposed event would be traumatic considering both the destruction to the park and the acts of violence that took place last summer.”

Charlotte LeFevre, an organizer of the Capitol Hill Pride March and Rally, said she was disappointed but not surprised that the city denied Anthony’s permit. “It’s infuriating that the city did the same thing they’re doing to Anthony they did that to us in 2017,” she said, when “the city yanked our permit before our scheduled National Pride march.” (The controversy over that event got wide coverage at the time.)

“The city does not have the right to deny a person or an organization the right to schedule a community public event in a public park based on so called perceived security risks,” LeFevre said. Continue reading “City’s Decision to Deny Permit for Event Commemorating Art at CHOP Could [UPDATED: Did] Backfire” →

Cops, Equity, Featured, Mayor Durkan, race, South Seattle Emerald

After CHOP Sweeps, Mayor Durkan Says City Will “Memorialize” Protests, “Reimagine Policing”

This post originally appeared at the South Seattle Emerald.

About 10 hours after Seattle police officers moved in to remove barriers, tents, artwork, and people from the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area this morning, Mayor Jenny Durkan, police chief Carmen Best, and other department heads called a press conference to explain their actions.

There was a lot to unpack. Why did the mayor issue the executive order in the pre-dawn hours, a time when most people living in tents in the area (and most reporters) would be asleep? Will the city prevent protesters from gathering at the East Precinct building in the future, and are they planning to use force? What will happen to the art and community gardens? Why did the city expel members of the media from CHOP, when the press is explicitly allowed to remain in an area after an order to disperse?

Durkan did get into a few specifics. For example, the mayor said the city would consider “memorializing” the protests by creating space for “a new garden, a speakers’ corner, or new art,” and would add a “community room in the East Precinct and things in and around Capitol Hill and the East Precinct.” It’s unclear how a community room could fit into the cramped layout of the East Precinct, leaving aside whether anyone would want to go there.

For the most part, though Durkan’s comments focused on lofty, nonspecific goals, like “statewide reforms,” “generational change,” and “investing in community.” The word “reimagine” appeared no fewer than seven times in Durkan’s 12-minute statement. “I will continue to refocus our energy on the hard but critical work to answer the voices demonstrating and demanding change, to reimagine, with Chief Best, what policing looks like in our city, and to invest in the true health and safety of our communities,” Durkan said.

Best, characteristically, described the CHOP in near-apocalyptic terms. “If you have watched the news footage you have seen how absolutely devastating the damage to this neighborhood is,” she said. Walking around the perimeter of the area, she said, “I was just stunned by the amount of graffiti, garbage, and property destruction.” She described residents and business owners coming out of their homes, like survivors of a natural disaster, to “profusely” thank her officers. “We don’t even know how much trauma” the protests caused to residents and business owners in the area, she said.

Durkan has reportedly been at odds with Chief Best in recent weeks, but there was no sign of division this afternoon. Instead, Durkan effusively praised the police chief and her officers (who Durkan described, in an apparent slip of the tongue, as “troops”), calling her “one of the best leaders in this country on policing” and crediting her “very steady hand” for this morning’s relatively smooth removal of tents, people, and barricades from the CHOP.

Durkan said she was expediting assistance to businesses in the area that experienced property damage or lost revenues, and had already spoken to the city attorney’s office about expediting their tort claims so that they could get financial reimbursement quickly. “I heard very clearly from them the pain of seeing their businesses close, the graffiti on their walls, calling back their employees but not yet able to open,” she said.

Asked whether she bore any responsibility for the two young men who have died in shootings in the area, Durkan declined to answer the question directly, calling the deaths “regretful” and saying that she hoped to meet with the victims’ family members. “We’ll have lots of opportunities to do after-actions on what people could have done at what junctures,” she added.

Best said the police would welcome peaceful protests outside the reopened East Precinct, but “there’s not going be lawlessness.” The police force is under a federal court that bars them from using “less lethal” weapons such as tear gas, pepper spray, and blast grenades, and the city council passed legislation barring the use of such weapons last month.

Earlier this week, city council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold wrote a blog post revealing that Best had confirmed that one of the police department’s primary reasons for setting up heavily fortified barricades around the East Precinct was not true. The chief and mayor had previously claimed the FBI had informed them of specific threats to bomb or burn down the East Precinct. In fact, Herbold revealed, what Durkan previously described as “credible threats” were actually “a generalized assessment of threat to ‘police and government structures’ in Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.”

The mayor and police chief have had to walk back a number of false or misleading statements about the protests, including claims that armed guards were forcing people to hand over ID and pay a bribe to enter (not true) and that police used force against protesters because one threw an “incendiary device” (it turned out to be a candle.) This afternoon, Best was not ready to let the threats to the East Precinct go. There were “threats to police precincts and to government facilities,” Best said. “We verified that and that information came from our local special agent in charge at the FBI.” 

The area that used to be CHOP will be closed to anyone who isn’t a resident or business owner for the next 10 days, Best said. According to at least one report on social media, police are requiring people to show identification to enter their own homes or businesses—exactly the scenario police department officials accused protesters of setting up last month.

Featured, hate speech, LGBT, Mayor Durkan, race

Durkan Seizes on Graffitied “Homophobic Slurs” as Another Reason to Close CHOP

During a press conference earlier this week, Mayor Jenny Durkan, who is gay, said that small businesses within the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone had been vandalized with anti-LGBTQ graffiti by people inside the protest area. “I have talked to many small business owners that literally have just been holding on. It was their week to reopen, and their businesses are sanctuaries for many people, including the LGBT community,” Durkan said.

“They’re not only closed, but there’s graffiti with homophobic slurs written on their buildings. That’s not who we are in Seattle and we’re going to do everything we can to change that dynamic.”

Two days after Durkan’s comments, I spent a couple of hours in the CHOP searching for homophobic graffiti on buildings in the area. I didn’t see any (on this or any prior walk through the CHOP), although I could have missed it or it might have been scrubbed away. There were, however, many signs and spray-painted messages supporting the black trans community, which one of the groups most targeted by hate crimes and police violence in the United States.

In fact, the only “slurs” I could find were the spray-painted message “Fags against cops,” painted on a rainbow crosswalk across from Cal Anderson Park, two that read “Dykes 4 BLM,” and one that read “Dykes 4 Anarchy.”

When I sent a couple of photos of these messages to the mayor’s office to find out if this was what Durkan was referring to, a spokeswoman said, “She met with [business] owners including some LGBTQ biz owners who had mentioned the tag of the f-word on/near their business. Not sure the specific location of the photos referenced below. But that specific word in graffiti is what she was referencing.”

Louise Chernin, the head of the Greater Seattle Business Association (the city’s LGBTQ+ business group), said she had not seen any homophobic graffiti herself, but added that “more than one person told me they saw homophobic graffiti around the neighborhood.”

Reclaiming words meant as slurs, of course, is a long and proud tradition among oppressed groups of all kinds. (“Queer,” the Q in LGBTQ+, is a great example of a term for identity that began its life as a slur.) Bottom line: Calling the “f-word” homophobic in every context is like saying it’s misogynistic for women to start a magazine called Bitch.

Durkan has repeatedly implied that the ongoing presence of protesters, barricades and graffiti in the six-block CHOP area is harming the LGBTQ+ community on Capitol Hill, a “historic sanctuary” for LGBTQ+ people. What is clear from even a brief walk through the neighborhood, however, is that the majority of the signs, graffiti, and even pro-protest posters hung up by businesses themselves, are overwhelmingly pro-queer—and that a lot of it is explicitly anti-Durkan.

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Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job. Every supporter who maintains or increases their contribution during this difficult time helps to ensure that I can keep covering the issues that matter to you, with empathy, relentlessness, and depth.

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City Hall, Cops, Featured, Mayor Durkan, Police

Bellicose Seattle Police Chief Claims Police Access to Tear Gas Could Have Saved CHOP Shooting Victim’s Life

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said Monday that the life of Horace Lorenzo Anderson, the 19-year-old who was shot in the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone on Saturday night, “might have been saved if not for the circumstances created by hasty legislation” barring police officers from using tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other “less lethal weapons” to disperse protesters.

Best made her comments at a press conference Monday afternoon to announce the imminent shutdown of CHOP and the reopening of the East Precinct as a police station. “It is time to restore order and eliminate the violence on Capitol Hill,” Durkan said.

Best accused protesters of creating circumstances that allowed several Black men to be shot and then prevented Seattle Police Department officers, the Fire Department, and EMTs from coming in and delivering care. “I cannot stand by, not another second, and watch another black man or anyone here die in our streets while people aggressively thwart the efforts of the police and other first responders,” Best said.

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During this unprecedented time of crisis, your support for truly independent journalism is more critical than ever before. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation supported entirely by contributions from readers like you.

Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job. Every supporter who maintains or increases their contribution during this difficult time helps to ensure that I can keep covering the issues that matter to you, with empathy, relentlessness, and depth.

If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and supporting, The C Is for Crank.

The police department has presented no specific evidence to indicate that anyone at the protest was violent against police officers. In fact, both bodycam video released by SPD and the police department’s official timeline of events contradict this claim. According to the timeline, officers showed up at to a staging area on 12th and Cherry, about seven blocks from the shooting, around 2:30 in the morning and entered the area around six minutes later, when they were informed that medics had already taken the victim away. The bodycam footage shows protesters stepping aside for police while screaming that the victim has already been taken to the hospital. I don’t know what else was happening outside the frame, or how much is left out of the timeline. But what the police and mayor have offered so far are assertions, not evidence.

“SPD spent years developing the gold standard of use-of-force policy. Let that work. Allow us to use these [weapons] when absolutely necessary.”—Seattle police chief Carmen Best

And speaking of assertions: Best insisted that none of her statements were political before producing a stack of police reports and waving them in the air while asserting that “there are groups of individuals engaging in shootings, in rape, assaults, burglary, arson, and property destruction.” It’s unclear what was in the reports Best was holding or whether they indeed contained evidence that there were “groups” of people engaging in multiple assaults, rapes, and other crimes. One man was arrested last week in the and charged with sexual assault against a CHOP resident, and another man was arrested during a burglary in White Center for allegedly breaking in to an auto shop in the area and setting a desk on fire.

“This is happening,” Best continued. “We cannot walk away from the truth of what is happening here. This is not about politics and I am not a politician. This isn’t a debate about First Amendment rights—this is about life or death! So we need a plan. The council legislated away officers’ access to less lethal weapons,” Best continued—not mentioning that the legislation barring these weapons is not in effect yet—leaving officers with no options beside “a riot baton or a gun. … SPD spent years developing the gold standard of use-of-force policy. It was done in coordination with the federal monitor, the Department of Justice, and the federal court. Let that work. … Allow us to use these [weapons] when absolutely necessary.”

“The council legislated away officers’ access to less lethal weapons,” Best continued—not mentioning that the legislation barring these weapons is not in effect yet—leaving officers with no options beside “a riot baton or a gun.”

It’s unclear to what extent Durkan, who echoed Best’s narrative that police tried to respond to Saturday’s shooting but were forced to stay outside by a hostile crowd, agrees with her chief that tear gas and pepper spray could have allowed police to save Anderson’s life. Historically, and without exception, when police have attacked protesters in the area with chemical and “less-lethal” weapons, it has resulted in an escalation, not a deescalation, of conflict along with injuries to protesters, some of them grave.

Durkan may be attempting to distance herself from Best and her bellicose statements, but to what end? If she doesn’t fire the chief (and this seems vanishingly unlikely, given the optics of sacking a black female police chief who enjoys support from many Black clergy and other community members), seeming like the more “reasonable” public servant has its own obvious political advantages—including the fact that it allows the mayor to be the “good cop” when proposing a midyear budget later this week that will fail to meet one of the protesters’ chief demands: Defunding the police by 50 percent and reinvesting that money into community programs.

City Council, Cops, Featured, Mayor Durkan, Police

SPD Chief Who Accused CHOP Protesters of Extortion Racket Calls Sawant “Irresponsible” for Putting Out Dubious Information
Assistant Seattle Police Chief Deanna Nollette

Deanna Nollette, the Assistant Seattle Police Chief who told reporters that SPD had received “incredibly credible” reports that someone wanted to burn down the East Precinct, sent an email this morning to city council member Kshama Sawant excoriating for putting out information that was unconfirmed.

Nollette, who declined to provide any details about her claim that the precinct was in imminent danger, also pushed out the narrative that the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (known at the time as CHAZ) was guarded by armed forces engaged in an extortion racket, an assertion that the police department was later forced to retract.

Her email accused Sawant of politicizing two recent shootings by suggesting that they may have been perpetrated by right-wing agitators, and called Sawant “irresponsible” for using “this crime to advance your own narrative.”

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During this unprecedented time of crisis, your support for truly independent journalism is more critical than ever before. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation supported entirely by contributions from readers like you.

Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job. Every supporter who maintains or increases their contribution during this difficult time helps to ensure that I can keep covering the issues that matter to you, with empathy, relentlessness, and depth.

If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and supporting, The C Is for Crank.

Sawant is an elected official who represents the district in which CHOP is located; Nollette, who promoted an equally political narrative by suggesting that people protesting against police violence were engaged in an illegal protection racket and that the protests themselves were putting the precinct building in danger, is an appointed public servant.

Here is Nollette’s letter to Sawant in full:

Good Morning
I am the Investigations Chief for the Seattle Police Department and a Seattle resident. I read your comments on the Department’s homicide investigation for the shooting that occurred yesterday in the East Precinct neighborhood.
You speculate that it was a right wing hate crime. While it is early in the investigation we have not received ANY evidence that this is accurate. It is irresponsible of you to use this crime to advance your own narrative.
We are committed to a through, robust, and non biased investigation on the facts and evidence of the case (as we are on every homicide). Divisive rhetoric does not advance the investigation, calm the situation, or elevate the conversations about the underlying issues.
Should you have any evidence of your theory please contact me so that I can ensure the information is relayed to the case Detectives.
AC Deanna Nollette

Three people were shot in or near the CHOP, which covers six square blocks on Capitol Hill, over the weekend. In both cases, the victims were transported to the hospital by volunteer medics.

Mayor Jenny Durkan is meeting with a group of protesters this morning, reportedly to negotiate a deal that will completely or partially shut down the organized protest zone. Over the weekend, Durkan’s office issued a statement to reporters saying that she had met with “trusted messengers and de-escalators, led by Andre Taylor with Not This Time, to engage with many of the organizers. This work will continue and the City will be meeting with some of the organizers today on next steps. We believe there can be a peaceful resolution. Taylor has appeared alongside Durkan repeatedly at press conferences and events. The mayor’s office is expected to make an announcement about “next steps” later today.