When are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted or in Seattle? They went into Seattle, they took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle. When are those people going to be prosecuted?
CHS was going to stay out of this but even the Seattle Times can’t quite get it right. 15.7 acres is not a “big percentage” of Seattle.
During Tuesday night’s presidential debate while trying to deflect on his role in the January 6th United States Capitol attack, Donald Trump put the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest back in the news.
Fact check: Of course he was full of shit. But the responses and maps from Seattle media don’t really get it right either.
Fact: CHOP was a street and park camp stretching across portions of the 7.4 acres of Cal Anderson Park and the nearby surrounding pavement and sidewalks. E Pine was behind the barriers. 10th Ave and 11th Ave had crude barricades. Blockaded 12th Ave was lined with tents and campers. Nearby buildings were not part of the camp.
CHS reported here that mid-June on the challenges nearby apartment dwellers faced during the protest’s occupation of the surrounding streets after police pulled out and ceased crowd control tactics.
Including nearby apartment developments like the Sunset Electric mixed-use building or the 1111 E. Olive apartments in any mapping of CHOP is disingenuous. The protest stayed outside the surrounding residential and commercial buildings. The Richmark Label building and Northwest Liquor and Wine were also not occupied.
CHS has mapped the real borders of CHOP from our coverage of the protests and the city’s eventual clearance of the zone. We have included the abandoned East Precinct the Seattle Police Department handed over and the restaurant parking lot where the camp’s medics set up within CHOP’s borders.
The diagram maps out 15.7 acres of street and park land — about 0.029% of Seattle’s 53,600 or so acres.
That’s not a big percentage.
But you already knew that.
Capitol Hill bars tuned in for the debate Tuesday night
So what about what Trump was really getting at?
When are those people going to be prosecuted?
The answer is they aren’t going to be. Dozens of protesters were arrested when Seattle Police moved in to clear CHOP 23 days after it formed after a string of gun violence and deadly shootings around the camp.
The city filed charges for specific acts of violence and property damage — not protest — including this conviction last year in the killing of 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Jr. on the edge of CHOP.
Mays
Prosecutors said Marcel Long, then 18, shot and killed Anderson at 10th and Pine in a June 20th, 2020 fracas after what witnesses said was a night of gambling and fireworks as crowds gathered and the CHOP zone took shape amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations, community meetings, and film screenings and art.
The murder and the militarized response by police who had abandoned patrols in the area and swept in as Anderson was dying while being treated by camp medics on the Rancho Bravo patio sent a shock through the city. Tensions rose quickly around CHOP as increased security and firearms began to appear as SPD leadership and then-Chief Carmen Best made inflammatory statements to the public that further heightened the situation.
A week later, 16-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. was shot and killed and a 14-year-old boy riding with him suffered critical injuries on a night of driveby fears and uncertainty including the stolen jeep speeding across Cal Anderson and through the protest camp before a confrontation on 12th Ave that ended in bloodshed. Days after that, then-Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered Seattle Police to sweep the camp.
Nobody has been prosecuted for killing Mays. If his murder was what the candidate was talking about, next time Trump should say his name.
Meanwhile, Seattle continues to sort out its CHOP issues without the help of the Republican candidate. A report from the Office of Inspector General for Public Safety found City Hall and the Seattle Police Department’s response to the Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests and the formation of CHOP on Capitol Hill was dangerously flawed by police lies, mayoral dysfunction, and “intentional manipulation of protestor fear.”
When are those people going to be prosecuted? That’s not happening, either.
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Such an important ting to point out.
Percentages aside, when ARE they going to be prosecuted for shooting those two children and destroying the evidence?
Who is “they”? So far as I have heard, SPD never really tried to find out.
The antifa (or whatever group they were from) cosplayer guys who shot them, that’s who.
And why do you blame the police (who were specifically excluded from that area) more than the people who pulled the trigger?
So the cops who had no problem pulling a 4-on-1 abuse were now too scared to do their jobs even after getting paid a nice salary? The citizens of Seattle should get a refund then.
So, “whichever unknown person or people were responsible”, then? In order for such unknown people to be prosecuted, they would have to become known, which means that the SPD would have to investigate the matter and learn who it was. This has not happened, so far as I can tell. Obviously nobody can be prosecuted until someone has been arrested, which can only happen after the appropriate detective work is done, so the answer to your question is likely “never”.
The police were never excluded from CHOP! How absurd – as though anyone could have kept them out, if they had wanted to return. The police abandoned the CHOP area: the only people preventing them from coming back were themselves.
Wrong, the chief and mayor prevented them from going in.
Like most shootings, the police weren’t there when it happened but did have access to the scene. I’m skeptical about the claim that they didn’t really try to investigate, but if they didn’t, that’s on them. It doesn’t imply that they’re more to blame than the shooters.
What were the shooters cosplaying as exactly? How do you know how they were dressed? What are your thoughts about police cosplaying as military?
The police were not forced out of the area. They abandoned it after throwing a week-long fit where they attacked unarmed protesters, (along with journalists and legal observers) and TEAR GASSED THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD.
After abandoning the precinct SPD lied to media and lied over their scanners (which they knew protestors were listening to) about violent threats in the area which only served to increase tensions, and eventually led to this murder.
There were so many points in the chain of events where SPD utterly failed. They failed at accepting and learning from criticism. They failed at deescalation of a tense situation. They failed at not attacking innocent people with weapons banned by the Geneva Convention. They failed at doing the bare minimum of their duty by abandoning the east precinct. And they failed at accepting any responsibility in the years since.
So yeah, I blame the police.
They aren’t; they’re pointing out that the SPD didn’t do their job. They quite literally walked away from the situation, which is what led to CHOP in the first place.
lmao, because you’re asking people on a blog to be gumshoes for a case you only give a shit about for associative partisan rhetoric.
Go on and ask us to solve the case again, it can be a real team effort that doesn’t even require the police, since they’ve basically been stumped for years now.
Since I was there, let me shake some trees among my folks I connected with there, see if we can start working in shifts on it.
lol – let us know when you and your folks crack the case. For all we know, since you were there as you say, maybe you did it
What did you hear they could’ve tried that they didn’t?
I was wondering the same thing. Nobody was held accountable. Also, lawless anarchist zone abandoned by the city (e.g. car tender) also extended further.
And the night racing continues. I used to love Seattle, worked in Seattle, was in Seattle for night events. I left my good doctor, don’t want to go in for any reason when not absolutely necessary. Get thru it when I must. It’s a sad loss of a culture.
Extremely honest question, just because I’m curious: if you don’t live here & avoid the area, why are you on this blog anyway?
Also, I’m concerned that he bakes Daniels.
The police investigation into the murders was certainly hampered by the existence of CHOP and the fact that officers/investigators faced hostile crowds if they entered that zone. For a while, it was unsafe for them to do so.
Bullshit. The police were at the scene that morning. The investigation was hampered by the people there having good reasons not to trust the police.
Do you think anyone was motivated not by “good reasons” but something more like: “someone was shot to death and people who know the shooter helped cover it up”.
By “children”, you mean the carjackers who drove recklessly through the park and toward the crowd across the street?
Whoever destroyed evidence should be prosecuted. The shooters should come forward, but based on the available evidence, they acted in self-defense.
Then their innocence at trial is a slam dunk. Come forward and let’s get this trial done and those innocent folks back to living their lives.
And now everything is back to normal. Get back to work everyone.
I might extend the zone a bit further to the north on 12th ave. Just a bit because 12th ave arts bldg did not have any first responder access due to the location of blockades. We would have to wheel tenants past that perimeter for any emergency. That whole time was a nightmare to live through.
I am tired of local progressives trying to sweep this under the rug like it was no big thing. It was only a couple blocks…It was f*cking crazy that city and state officials allowed any portion of the city be taken over by anarchists for weeks. F*ck CHOP. It is fair game that the other end of the political spectrum would use it as a cautionary tale of what happens when the left goes off the rails. It is not unlike MAGA.
Glad you agree that this wouldn’t have been an issue if SPD never abandoned their precinct like the cowards they are!
Though, hypothetically, if my fellow officers and I had acted like a gang of chimps in the face of non-violent protest over the systemic murder of black US citizens, then maybe I would have been too embarrassed or humiliated to show my face there again, too.
Yup… it took a few days for their free utopia to turn into Lord of the Flies.
And if people want arrests/charges against the people who harmed others, then they need to march their butts into the SPD and spill what they know. I’m absolutely sure that many people know the names of at very least the “security” who shot the kids.
Nandor, the only people who want arrests and charges are couch potatoes who don’t know anything and couldn’t possibly, and are just stewing over a sad incident in a disheveled scene, years ago, to affirm their own political and partisan wisdom.
That’s all we’re doing here about this at this point.
The shootings happening at CHOP happen daily in other parts of Seattle and there’s crickets.. please
Yeah, and no one is willing to come forward in those cases either….. If people here want shootings to stop the ones who know the people doing it need to drop the no snitching BS… otherwise it’s just going to continue. The cops can even have a good idea of who it was, but if absolutely no one is willing to testify, they can’t do a thing. No prosecutor will ever take a case based on ‘we know, but we’ve got no actual evidence’… it’s a waste of time and resources and once you’ve lost a case, you are done, you can’t do it again…
Asking things be reported accurately isn’t sweeping things under the rug, my dude.
It is not being reported accurately. It has always been downplayed. This is just another example.
Area-wise it was not a “big portion” of Seattle.
However, if you take into account population density, a lot of people who didn’t ask to be were definitely affected by this. I’m left-of center myself and I’m not proud of what happened during CHOP at all.
those who criticize these protests without also criticizing the racist, immoral and unjust system that brought them about are nothing but wage slaves who gladly polish their chains and fawn over their masters to keep their status in life.
Oh, Emma. You silly goose!
His point was to get CHOP and the lawlessness back into the consciousness and tag the current admin for being supportive (hence pointing out Kamala’s tweet raising money for a bail fund for rioters in MN). No one listening cares about whether he exaggerated the size.
If I point out you have a glaring huge hole in your shirt and your response is “but it’s a smaller hole than you’re saying”, you’ve lost.
If you have to lie and claim that the hole in my shirt is glaring and huge, when everyone can observe that it’s a smaller hole than you’re saying, then not only have YOU lost but you’ve proved yourself a fool.
May I ask you, your username, does it mean you are a gay landlord or that your landlord is gay?
The gay landlord supports trump, surprise surprise
I actually agree with your last sentence.
However, I have to take issue with this: “No one listening cares about whether he exaggerated the size.”
Honestly Gay, that’s just indefensible.
Few who lived through CHOP as a legacy resident or business owner came through with flying colors. It was a burden, a theater of the absurd, and a disgraceful abandonment of the social contract by the leaders of this city.
That said, it doesn’t serve truth to allow a ridiculous claim like Trump’s to go unchallenged. And ultimately, truth is what I care about more than Trump or Harris.
Oh no kids selling zines on the street! How HORRIFYING!!!! Everyone who whines and moans about CHOP is endlessly annoying
It would be nice if the zines were sold without the murdering happening
It was a disgrace and not a civil rights movement by any means. It was social media influencers who were trying to make a name for their self. Most of the black organizers were not even from Seattle. They just popped up of instagram and decided to be live and on location. How do I know? I’m black and from Seattle. Such a 🤬show
“A week later, 16-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. was shot and killed and a 14-year-old boy riding with him suffered critical injuries”
“Was shot and killed.” But by whom? Minutes after Mays’ murder, Converge Media’s Omari Salisbury took a camera to the scene of the crime, the CHOP roadblock at 12th and Pike. There he interviewed CHOP security personnel who excitedly talked about their gunning down Mays.
Mays was shot and killed by members of the security team for a protest against blacks being killed by police. The idiocy of CHOP.