Seattle business owners who have called 911 about incidents occurring around the city’s new autonomous police-free zone have found themselves experiencing lengthy delays or even no response from city officers about break-ins.
John McDermott, who owns an auto shop in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, said he called 911 more than a dozen times about someone trying to start a fire and steal money and car keys, but police nor firefighters showed up, according to a report by Seattle’s KIRO-TV.
McDermott and his son Mason said the suspect put hand sanitizer over a cassette tape, pulled out the film, then lit it on fire on the store counter. Mason McDermott pinned the suspect on the ground after he allegedly came after him while McDermott’s father continued calling 911.
John McDermott said he was told 19 times that police were sending someone then later said they were not going to send anybody into the area.
“I don’t know what to expect next,” he said. “If you can’t call the police department, you can’t call the fire department to respond, what do you have? Heartbroken. I mean, they are the cavalry.”
John McDermott’s shop lies in the newly designated Capitol Hill Organized Protest, which was previously known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The area, which is centered around the Seattle Police Department’s now-closed East Precinct, was loosely established by a group of protesters in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. It is designated a police-free zone.
Videos that circulated on social media showed a group of protesters toppling a chain-link fence outside the auto shop after McDermott tried to call 911.
The Seattle Times reports the city’s police Chief Carmen Best said police reviewed a 911 call of someone breaking windows with a hammer and the caller saying their business was on fire.
“The officers responded to the call, and they observed the location from a distance,” Best said. “They did not see any signs of smoke or fire or anything else, and they did not see a disturbance. The officers did not observe, from the report that I read, anything they perceived as a threat to life safety, and they did not go in.”
A supervisor tried to contact McDermott, but the call had gone to voicemail, Best said. She said police would follow up with McDermott.
Best also refuted claims that CHOP was a police-free zone, saying officers have written up multiple police reports for crimes in the area within the last 48 hours. Dispatchers and officers are coordinating with crime victims or callers to meet police on the edges of CHOP boundaries, and police will enter the zone if there are threats to life.
“There is no cop-free zone in the city of Seattle,” Best said. “I think that the picture has been painted in many areas that shows the city is under siege. That is not the case.”
The Police Department is working to get city officials to negotiate with CHOP leadership about a possible police return to the East Precinct. Best said in the week since police carted off equipment and boarded up the precinct’s windows, police response times throughout the East Precinct have tripled.
“It’s taking three times longer to get there,” she said of the police response to 911 calls in the area. “We can’t continue in that vein. It’s really untenable.”
