Seattle protesters announce their aims
Movement won’t stop, even if CHOP is closed
SEATTLE — Protesters that have been active in an “occupied” protest zone near downtown Seattle held a news conference Thursday saying the goal of their movement is to dismantle systemic racism.
“We fight for equality and human rights including those of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities and the differently-abled,” said Naudia Miller of Black Collective Voice.
The collective of protesters, activists, educators and volunteers in the Capitol
Hill Organized Protest was born after clashes with police who tear-gassed people protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
After the police left the East Precinct last Monday, people met each other, camped in the park, grew gardens and provided food, security and medical care, Miller said.
“Our shared experience of police brutality and media misrepresentation — instead of generating fear — brought us closer together. The truth is even if they force activists out of CHOP it will not stop us or this movement,” Miller said.
She, along with other collective representatives Jesse Miller and Marcus Henderson, said the group wants its demands met, including defunding the Seattle Police Department by at least half and using that money to fund community restorative justice, housing, and healthcare, as well as releasing all jailed protesters.
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said earlier this week she believes a community-led re-envisioning of community safety — and the police department’s role in it — is needed and that the department is committed to doing this work.
Mayor Jenny Durkan has expressed support for the protest, calling it “a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” and the city has provided barricades to better protect participants. She has asked the police department to prepare models of what 20 percent, 30 percent and 50 percent budget cuts would look like.
In other developments:
Calls are intensifying for the removal of twin Emancipation memorials in Washington, D.C., and Boston that depict a freed slave kneeling at Abraham Lincoln’s feet — optics that jar and offend many in a nation confronting racial injustice through a fresh lens.
President Donald Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday, “I can see controversy but I can also see beauty” in the Emancipation Memorial in Washington. Trump suggested that activists who want to see certain memorials removed should petition government.
“You know, we can take things down, too,” Trump said. “I can understand certain things being taken down. But they ought to go through a process, legally. And then we take it down, in some cases put ‘em in museums or wherever they may go.”
But Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting delegate in the U.S. House, said the monument ignores the fact that Black Americans played a pivotal role in securing their own freedom.
“Blacks too fought to end enslavement,” Norton tweeted this week, saying she was introducing a bill to move the statue to a museum.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network distanced itself Thursday from an unaffiliated activist whose comments sparked the ire of Trump, saying the activist was not speaking on behalf of the movement.
Trump lashed out on Twitter after Hawk Newsome appeared on Fox News this week to discuss the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd.
“Black Lives Matter leader states, ‘If U.S. doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it’. This is Treason, Sedition, Insurrection!” Trump tweeted.
In a statement to The Associated Press, BLM Global Network managing director Kailee Scales said Newsome’s comments were not an official statement of the network.
A suspect has been arrested and charged with vandalizing the Texas Capitol during a Black Lives Matter demonstration last month.
Keegan Dalton Godsey, 23, of Austin, was arrested Tuesday after being charged with felony criminal mischief, riot and interference with public duties, according to a statement by the Texas Department of Public Safety. Court records list him as free on bond.
Funding for a key Minneapolis Police Department accountability initiative after the death of George Floyd has fallen through, officials confirmed Thursday, meaning potential delays as the city scrambles to find another source for the money.
Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced June 10 the department would contract with Benchmark Analytics, a Chicago company, to use its data-driven system to identify problematic behavior by officers so supervisors could take corrective action.
The nonprofit Minneapolis Foundation was to fund the project for the first year, but CEO R.T. Rybak — a founding member of the Benchmark Analytics board and a former Minneapolis mayor — confirmed Thursday that the foundation has dropped its involvement.