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“THIS IS MY BLOCK. I FOUGHT FOR IT.” It was a moment that seemed to perfectly capture what is going on in Seattle now, with CHOP — Capitol Hill Organized Protest — demonstrators digging in for a long occupation of the six-block part of the city they captured more than a week ago. The city, ever accommodating, is putting in semi-permanent barriers in the middle of some streets to facilitate traffic, visitors, and protesting. When workers came to one street, a protester, bullhorn in hand, stepped out to stop them. “You can leave, because this is my block,” he said through the bullhorn. “I fought for it.”
The protester clearly seemed to think he had a right to exercise control over the street — a formerly public place — because he took part in demonstrations that led police and other officials to abandon the area. That’s the feeling the government of Seattle has fostered by essentially giving a big chunk of the city over to protesters.
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Now, the city seems to be recognizing the right to a permanent protest zone. “The Capitol Hill Organized Protest has emerged as a gathering place where community members can demand change of their local, state, and federal government,” a spokesman for the mayor said Tuesday. “The city has successfully worked with protesters onsite to reconfigure the CHOP to allow for public safety and better access for the local community. That has involved rerouting traffic, freeing up alley access, opened streets, and replacing makeshift barriers with heavy concrete barriers that can be painted.” It was during that work that the “This is my block” moment occurred.
Now Seattle seems to have ceded the governance of CHOP to protest groups, including Black Lives Matter, Urban League, Choose 180, Not This Time, Africatown, and others in an effort to make the area a better place to occupy. It appears the police department will mostly stay out of CHOP, except to “respond to significant life-safety issues in the area.” The city defined those as “an active shooter incident, an assault, a structure fire, significant medical emergency (i.e. heart attack stroke, trauma) and other incidents that threaten a person’s life safety.”
That has consequences. On Sunday night, the owner of a car parts store in CHOP said a protester broke in and tried to steal some cash and set a fire. According to an account on local news station KIRO7, the business owner grabbed the suspect and called the cops — “but despite more than a dozen 911 calls, police and fire never showed up.” As Brit Hume tweeted about the incident, “so by all means let’s defund the police.”
Is there anything the federal government can do? President Trump has threatened action. When asked at the White House Monday about negotiations to end the occupation, he answered, “They’re not negotiating. You know what they’re negotiating? Garbage removal. These people have taken over a vast part, a major part, a very good part of a place called Seattle. Seattle is big stuff. That’s a major city. And we have a governor who’s a stiff, and we have a mayor who said, ‘Oh, this is going to be a lovefest.'”
Trump vowed to do something about it — he said the federal government had a number of options, “any one of which will solve the problem quickly.” But the federal government has no clear role, and the issue in Seattle is that the local and state governments don’t want federal help. They appear to be OK with a significant part of the city being occupied. It’s a problem that will have to be solved, if it is solved, in Seattle and not the White House.
