A Year After Seattle's CHOP Formed, Some Questions Linger

SEATTLE — Wednesday marked one year since the formation of an occupied protest zone on Capitol Hill, which captured international attention during its three weeks in existence and drew the repeated ire of then-President Donald Trump.

First known as Free Capitol Hill, then the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), and finally the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest or Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), the six-block area began to take shape on June 9, 2020, the day after police boarded up and abandoned the East Precinct.

In the week leading up to CHOP's inception, the precinct and its surrounding blocks became ground zero for Seattle's racial justice protests, as an escalating police response included nightly deployment of tear gas, blast balls and other "crowd control weapons" on demonstrators.

The evening before police left the precinct, a man was shot in the arm as he intervened to stop a driver speeding through a group of protesters. Shortly after midnight, a 26-year-old protester was hit in the chest by a police flashbang and temporarily lost her pulse.

Later that day, then-Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best announced a "decreasing footprint" around the precinct, calling the area a flashpoint and saying police would reopen the roads and adopt a different posture as an "exercise in trust and de-escalation."

Throughout the day, police loaded items into moving vans, boarded up the windows and put up fencing, then abandoned the East Precinct entirely. Over the next 24 hours, protesters repurposed barricades and reclaimed the area as a police-free zone.

In its earliest days, the CHOP had support from some city officials, including Durkan, who at the time described a "block party atmosphere" and referenced the "Summer of Love" in a CNN interview. The area played host to rallies, gardening projects, art displays, a Black Lives Matter mural and outdoor documentary screenings.

The situation quickly shifted later in the month, beginning with the shooting death of 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Jr., on the outskirts of the protest zone. Best blamed protesters for preventing police and medics from reaching the scene, but later reporting by KUOW would find that miscommunication between the police and fire department slowed the response.

Last August, Anderson's father filed a lawsuit against Seattle, King County and Washington over his son's death. In April, Anderson's mother filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging negligence in abandoning the precinct.

Another shooting on June 29 left 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. dead and a 14-year-old boy hospitalized with serious injuries. Two days later, more than 100 officers descended on Cal Anderson Park in the early morning hours, forcibly removing those still in the area and making dozens of arrests as officers in riot gear blocked off the streets and began moving back into the East Precinct.

Exactly who ordered officers to vacate the precinct in the first place remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in the year since. Both Durkan and Best have repeatedly insisted they did not make the call.

"As officers were taking things out of the precinct, they didn't want to come back into the precinct, and many of them did not," Best said last June. "We're still going to evaluate exactly, pinpoint exactly, why that changed, but it didn't come from me."

Best went on to retire in August, and Durkan announced in December that she would not seek a second term as mayor. In a podcast interview last month, Best repeated that she did not give the order to abandon the precinct and was caught by surprise when it happened. The former police chief did not elaborate on who made the decision, saying only that it was one of her subordinates.

"Well, it was a command decision, and these things happen," Best said. "I want to preface this by saying often there's dynamic situations. Things are happening in the middle. You're in charge and you're making decisions. And I think people question, 'Why weren't they talking to you about it? You're the chief.' I said, 'I would have preferred that happen, to be honest with you. But also, there's lots of things that happen in the field that are happening right then.'"

Best said she resisted opening up the streets and removing the barricades, citing potential threats to the precinct, but was pressured by the city to do so. Officers also expected they would be able to return within a day or two, she said.

As the Seattle Times reported in May, getting to the bottom of exactly what happened may prove to be difficult, as text messages from the Durkan, Best and Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins are missing from that period. Last week, the Times sued the city over Durkan's missing texts, alleging the mayor's office violated the Public Records Act by withholding or destroying information. Durkan's office said the mayor's iPhone had been set to automatically delete messages every 30 days, between August 2019 and June 25, 2020.

An investigation into the East Precinct's abandonment is ongoing at the Seattle Office of Police Accountability.

On Friday, the city approved a provisional permit allowing a group called CHOP Art to host a Juneteenth celebration at Cal Anderson Park. According to the Times, Seattle's Parks & Recreation Department denied the permit initially, then reversed course after a legal threat from the American Civil Liberties Union on first amendment grounds.