Hey to clarify with your post about the autonomous zone, are you saying the zone is a good thing / is helping? Or it's bad and theyre unwelcome and violent?
Iâm going to use this ask as a springboard for a followup post I wanted to write -- to be clear, the rest of this post is not so much a response to your ask as stuff I wanted to say at some point anyway. The âyouâ below is a general you, âthe reader.â
This turned out to be super long and kind of rambling, so be ready for that.
I was definitely saying thereâs less violence in the neighborhood since the cops left, which was also when âthe Zoneâ started.
But, like . . . I also want to communicate that âCHAZâ is way, way less of a big deal one way or the other than the national media appear to believe it is. If you donât live in Seattle and youâve only heard about it from the national media, your view of the situation is almost certainly very skewed. Not politically skewed, necessarily, but skewed in terms of magnifying tiny things and overlooking huge ones.
This is just an information problem.  If you were to go and binge-read the last two weeks of Seattle local news, local journalistsâ blogs and twitter feeds, etc., youâd come out the other side a few hours later, ready to laugh with the rest of us about how goofy the national âversionâ of this story is. But thatâs easier said than done, so . . .
Letâs forget about the Zone for a moment: this is a city whose municipal politics are in a state of chaotic upheaval. The mayor and police chief have come under withering scrutiny for their role in the pre-Zone situation. Hereâs just some of the stuff thatâs been happening lately, at the same Trump and everyone else is freaking out about ~the Zone~:
⢠Three of nine city council members are openly calling for the mayor to resign (see also this this article, this one)
⢠This is the tip of the iceberg -- â#ResignDurkanâ is the hot new slogan, a petition saying Durkan must resign has been signed by enough local politcos (mostly people involved in the local Democratic party org) that their names fill around 5 pages of a Google doc as of this writing, etc. etc.
⢠The city council is so on board with defunding the police that theyâve spent no time arguing over whether it should be done -- theyâve immediately jumped into the details of the police budget and the question of which parts specifically to cut (see also this article, again, and this post)
⢠Even the most right-leaning city council member, Alex Pedersen, is on board with defunding and (admittedly way back on June 1 -- I havenât been following him too closely) was saying stuff like âI stand in partnership with my council colleagues on all of this. I pledge to be a genuine allyâ
⢠One council city member, whoâs been a prominent speaker at the protests, used her key to city hall on Tuesday to let the protestors in so they could demonstrate there
[... I promise weâll get around to ~the Zone~ eventually, bear with me]
So clearly the city council is really pissed off at the mayor and police chief. Much of their ire is about what I talked about last time, the tear gas and stuff. Thereâs also the thing with mourning bands, which I wonât go into detail about here, see here or Google it.
But also. Itâs not just that Durkan (mayor) and Best (police chief) are the local authority figures who happen to be nominally responsible for bad police behavior. They have also, in their daily public statements, been creating the most incoherent, least reassuring narrative possible, displaying the opposite of strong leadership.
Durkan, ridiculously, has been trying to frame herself as vaguely âwokeâ on twitter. This at a time when many of her municipal peers are calling on her to resign because, among other things, sheâs refused to take clear responsibility for tear gassing BLM protesters and those in their vicinity. I imagine that (say) a transparent, consistent position on riot control methods would go a lot further with everyone -- protesters or not -- than any number of preening tweets about âwhite menâ possibly could.
Durkan and Best, who often make public statements at the same meetings, have also established a pattern of making assertions and proclamations that are themselves often mysterious, then contradicting them almost immediately, as a confused populace tries to understand WTF is going on.
I already talked about them âbanning CS gasâ and then using it again within 2 days. The next bullet point is another example.
⢠On Sunday 6/7, the mayor claimed the barricades by the East Precinct -- thatâs where the nightly cop/protestor standoff was happening -- could not be removed, because they were protecting the building and those surrounding from some unspecified âcredible threatâ of property destruction which the FBI had passed along. The relevant quote from her speech:
Since last Saturday, Chief Best and I have talked multiple times a day about reducing the tension, de-escalating and de-militarizing the posture, and removing the barriers Downtown and on Capitol Hill. [...]
Based on the best assessment of Chief Best, in part because of specific information from the FBI about threats to the East Precincts and buildings in Seattle, they concluded that removing the barrier would jeopardize the safety of the public and the community, especially considering there are approximately 500 residents that live in that block.Â
The very next night, Monday 6/8, they started . . . removing the barricades. Then they announced that the cops would be leaving the East Precinct entirely. To be perfectly clear: they didnât say âwe are doing this because that credible threat to the safety of 500 people is gone now.â The action they said would constitute an unacceptable threat to public safety on Sunday was just, literally, the action they were conspicuously taking on Monday, no explanations or reassurances given.
In fact, they did the opposite of declaring the threat resolved: at least according to this generally trusted blog, they sent around an ominous message to area businesses that day:
[...] The Seattle Police Department (SPD) will be removing existing crowd barriers in order to support a peaceful protest march. While the protest is expected to be peaceful SPD has credible information about a potential intent to set fire to the East Precinct at the intersection of 12th Avenue and Pine. We donât believe that this will happen, but out of an abundance of caution, the Seattle Fire Department (SFD) is taking some preventative measures to protect the East Precinct building and the surrounding apartment buildings and businesses. They will be assessing the need to spray a biodegradable foam fire suppressant on the buildings tonight if needed, as well as reaching out to the community. [...]
This was the day on which the protesters got âcontrolâ of the area, if you want to put it that way.
From being glued to twitter and livestreams that evening, nervously wondering whether something horrible would happen, I can tell you the mood at the protests was not âwe won, we threw the pigs out, letâs declare autonomy!â It was fear that some other group -- the default hypothesis was Proud Boys -- was going to come in and burn the precinct building, just like the FBI said, the protesters would get blamed, and it would be a Reichstag Fire kind of situation.
The #seattleprotest and #seattleprotestcomms twitter tags that night were full of people talking about staying wary, reporting groups they thought might be Proud Boys, discussing how best to defend the precinct building against arsonists (!), that sort of thing. You are free to relive that twitter experience for yourself, if you like.
Maybe Iâm missing something, but the whole FBI thing is still pretty confusing to me! A credible threat of arson, close to where I live, potentially affecting the homes of ~500 people, is a scary thing. No matter what your perspective, I think we can agree that âwe think someone may burn down our police station, and weâre leaving the station behind and letting protesters deal with itâ is a bizarre and unsettling thing for a person in a municipal leadership role to say.
Thankfully, no one burned down anything. When asked by a journalist later why this threat seemed âcredible,â the assistant police chief apparently said
I consider them incredibly credible in that there were incendiary devices used [against] some of the officers that were on the line in earlier protests, when you look at the fact that we had businesses downtown looted and set on fire, I think they were very credible.
Yes: this FBI tip abut arson, which me and plenty of other people (incl. the protesters) took seriously and were pretty scared about Monday night, was so âcredibleâ because some people had committed arson elsewhere in the city recently, and some people threw some things that were on fire. All of which was widespread public knowledge at the time. Where thereâs fire, thereâs fire, I guess (????)
⢠I donât have the time here to go into the whole candle thing but there was that too.
⢠Oh, and the curfews!  Ah, the curfews!  One of Mayor Durkanâs first notable moves in this whole thing -- to be clear, back at the end of May, in the one weekend where the protests really did involve lots of looting, burning cars, etc -- was to announce a 5PM curfew . . . on 4:46 PM the same day.
14 minutes is enough time to get out of downtown during a chaotic event, right? Â This surely wonât piss people off and further escalate things, right? Â (Ha ha ha.) Â And thatâs if you happen to be tuned in to twitter for some reason at said event. Â IIRC, I got the official emergency system alert well after 5 that day, though I happened to be already home at the time. Â For a week after that, the curfews turned on and off in a seemingly random fashion, with little warning.
⢠Letâs share one last moment of unintentional Seattle Police Department comedy before we move into the main event.
Have you heard the thing about ~the Zone~ extorting local businesses? That thing that one right-wing clickbait guy picked up and ran with, which made its way from there to other culture war clickbait peddlers like Rod Dreher and even newspapers with reputations?
I was originally going to quote the various reporters whoâd tried to find these extorted businesses and come up empty-handed -- remember, the âCHAZâ is tiny, there just arenât many businesses in there -- but while I was writing this post, the Seattle Times has come out with the following, which Iâll just quote in full here:
Police walk back report that Capitol Hill protesters extorted businesses
The Seattle Police Department walked back its claim, widely repeated in the news media, that denizens of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone are extorting businesses.
"That has not happened affirmatively," Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the police department had based earlier claims on anecdotal reports, including in the news and on social media. "We haven't had any formal reports of this occurring."
That contradicts earlier statements from the police.
In a news conference Wednesday, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Deanna Nollette said police have heard from Capitol Hill community members that some protesters have asked business owners to pay a fee to operate in a roughly six-block area around the precinct. Best repeated the claim in a video address to officers Thursday morning.
The police narrative rang false to many in the Capitol Hill business community. Restaurant owners said they hadn't heard any reports of extortion in the Autonomous Zone. On the contrary: Sales are strong and the increase in walk-up business is cutting down on delivery costs.
"This protest has not hurt us at all," said Bok a Bok Chicken co-owner Brian O'Connor. When he came to the Autonomous Zone Wednesday, rather than extortion, he said he was met with an offer of a free bagel-and-cheese sandwich.
The claim seems to have gained traction after it was published in conservative blog The Post Millennial, in an article written by former Seattle City Council candidate Ari Hoffman. The article quoted unnamed police officers who alleged protesters were extorting businesses for protection money. Hoffman said his sources were "rock solid" and that he had first heard of the alleged extortion on conservative talk radio station AM 770 KTTH.
The claim was later repeated by a commenter under the name "Marcus S." on the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, and in a tweet by Andy Ngo, editor-at-large of The Post Millennial.
Apart from those sources, Christina Arrington, who heads the Capitol Hill branch of the Greater Seattle Business Association, said she has had "no other indications that this is taking place." The GSBA "found no evidence of this occurring," the group tweeted, based on conversations with area business.
The Seattle Times, among other local news outlets, repeated Nollette's claims that the police had received reports of extortion from community members.
But enough of all that boring shit, am I right? I know what youâre here for. You want to know about the marvel and the terror, the secessionist enclave of armed intersectional warlords and/or the next Paris Commune. You want to hear about...
I walked around there for half an hour earlier tonight! By âthereâ I mean âthe neighborhood,â itâs literally just a small part of the neighborhood I live in, nothing especially wild has been done to it.
Uhh... any of you guys ever been to a hippie festival? A Phish concert? It was like a relatively restrained version of that type of thing.
Cal Anderson is a lovely little park. I used to walk through it every weekday, before the pandemic. Cal Anderson as the epicenter of âCHAZâ basically looks like Cal Anderson would look in the past, at times when an unusually large number of cheerful but otherwise sedate people were hanging out there. If you donât have ârelatively sedate hippie festivalâ available as a mental point of comparison, imagine a public park on the 4th of July where a bunch of people are milling about and thereâs a generally cheerful vibe.
Wasnât subjected to any âcheckpoints.â I donât know how to emphasize this enough: I walked through much of ~the Zone~ and it was literally just the experience I have whenever I walk through the same stretch of streets on a nice day, except this time with a lot more people. If I had encountered the same thing on my walk home in 2019, I would have thought âhuh! wonder whatâs going on, I guess thereâs a political rally or something?â Wouldnât even have registered as mildly abnormal for the area.
If this Raz guy is keeping the area under an iron fist (lol), he sure doesnât seem to be scaring anyone away. Tons of people there, mostly white (looked demographically typical of the area), milling through a park and some adjoining streets. A genial street musician playing Pachabelâs Canon. Some really cool chalk art on the ground. Stands where people are soliciting signatures for the #ResignDurkan petition. Somewhat heavier weed smoke than usual for Seattle gatherings.
This tweet captures the amused, weary tone I think youâll hear from anyone who actually lives nearby, re: Trump and other national commentators:
Or see this post, âAn Exceedingly Chill Day at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zoneâ
Last week, the constant background soundtrack of the neighborhood was a police helicopter. The standard nightly experience, if you were housed and not working or protesting or something, was being kept up by flashbangs, thinking âthat was a flashbang, right? that was a flashbang and not a gunshot? right?â over and over again, and saying to your spouse/housemate/whoever âoh, did you remember to pre-emptively close all the windows? The sun is going down, weâre nearing the tear gas time of night.â
This was apparently the price we had to pay for . . . I honestly donât know? The cops backed down and now we can walk in the neighborhood again without thinking about the omnipresent helicopters, the prospect of a randomly created curfew effective immediately, and the question of exactly which flavors of tear gas are consistent with being a woke progressive mayor and whether the answer has changed in the last 12-24 hours. Now itâs just back to normal.
Iâm seeing tons and tons of articles about ~the Zone~ whenever I go to Google News. Itâs apparently captivated the imagination of politicians, chin-stroking Op-Ed writers, and others in the same rarefied echelon in a way none of the preceding could.
The national conversation doesnât care as much, it seems, about city governments having crises of authority, about justified loss of public trust in established authority, about those governments sitting down and saying âokay we are definitely defunding the police, the question is which lines in the budget to start cutting first,â about cops tear gassing protesters and bystanders when they explicitly said they were no longer permitted to do that (see under âjustified loss of public trust in established authorityâ) . . .Â
. . . they donât care as much about that as they do about some crunchy left-libertarians deciding that, well, if the cops have suddenly left an area unilaterally and without warning as a big dramatic flourish, you might as well make a meme out of it and start calling the area an âautonomous zone.â
The atmosphere in the neighborhood jumped straight to âwarzoneâ out of nowhere, and when the cops left it jumped back from âwarzoneâ to âpicnic,â and lots of people who didnât know or care before are now going into fractal self-stimulating bullshit loops, inventing dystopias or utopias extrapolated from badly sourced rumors about the picnic, arguing with each othersâ extrapolations. Itâs a picnic. In a park you can walk across in three minutes, and thatâs the long side.
Meanwhile, Iâd guess the CHAZ people are happy they can finally relax, just like the rest of us, and also happy that theyâre winning at least the local hearts and minds -- although, given opponents so perversely talented at seeming both evil and buffoonish, it world be pretty hard to lose the local hearts and minds.
This is a weird kind of âbona fidesâ to cite, in this or any context, but Iâm not an activist, and Iâm not usually someone who engages with local politics to the extent Iâm doing here. If all of the above sounds extreme and even cartoonish, that isnât because I have an agenda to push, and would push it anywhere, and just happen to be pushing it here.Â
Itâs because this situation is just like that. I cite a ton of sources in this post, and of course thatâs mostly because I want you to know the information contained in them. But I also want to convey to you that, yeah, this really is what reading Seattle news is like these days. If it seems one-sided and cartoonish and blackly comic, thatâs because the news and the stuff you experience day to day is one-sided and cartoonish and blackly comic. Not all situations are like that, but this one is, and it would take a contrarian read on the news to tell any other kind of story.
The concept of ~the Zone~ appeared in the context of this fast-moving situation. It only makes sense if you know basic things like âthe cops suddenly decided to leave, without warning, one day as the next step in their sequence of erratic moves.â
Once you know that, you can understand how crowing about the space they left as an âautonomous zoneâ could be a funny and cool move, if not necessarily a radical or even important move. If the police are reacting to you by dramatically storming away from a precinct, and your whole deal is that you think communities can police themselves on their own, you might as well say âyeah, itâs ours now, time to show we can do without you.â
This was clearly not where they expected this to go, and itâs arguably even a distraction from the broader issue of police brutality, which exists all over the place for all kinds of reasons that are not nearly as fun to talk about as ~the Zone~. I donât know where itâs going to go. Maybe it will become less of a goofy LARP strapped onto an existing protest movement and more like an actual independent âzoneâ with its own rules and ways, I dunno, anything could happen.
Meanwhile, George Floyd is still dead, no one knows what the Seattle Police Department is thinking, the mayor may well resign or get recalled, the police are definitely getting defunded and the only question is what exactly that means, and Seattle as a whole is definitely going to change as a result -- remember, Seattle is ~4 million people, not six city blocks, and includes numerous huge businesses including one called âAmazonâ which you may have heard of. The mayor and cops have just made a stirring case against themselves, in a self-destructive performance which would seem like amateurish satire if it had appeared in fiction.
Big stuff is happening, and itâs going to keep happening, and we have to keep shooing people away from âthe supply level of the food cart that people are wheeling around a tiny park and whether it speaks to the horrors of the Hobbesian State of Nature,â and toward shit that anyone -- including the people wheeling around the food truck -- actually cares about, over and over again, itâs going to get old fast. But we donât have to do that, and I have hope that we wonât.
