In Seattle’s CHAZ, fear of losing traction
Reforms may be elusive in mostly white city
SEATTLE – Tracy Stewart stands on a street corner in the newly claimed Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and shakes her head.
Young white people wander what’s become known as CHAZ, White Claw seltzers in hand as a tuba player lofts a jaunty tune into the evening air. A woman draws chalk art on the street as dozens of others wait patiently in line to buy hot dogs, ignoring the free food piled across the street at the “No Cop Co-Op” tent. A red-haired woman roller-skates in turquoise boots, and couples wander the six-block area with $16 craft Negronis. A Pilates instructor poses for photos at the “Free Cap Hill” sign and a group of people sit on couches at the “Conversation Cafe” near a Post-It covered Dream Board.
“Somebody’s dead. Why do Black bodies have to be in the street for people to have to show up?” says Stewart, a Black mental health therapist. “These people, I’m not even sure they know why they’re here.”
In a few short days, Seattle protesters who violently clashed with riot police over the death of George Floyd have had their rough edges dulled by tens of thousands of tourists and sightseers. Once criticized by President Donald Trump and Fox News commentators as a haven for anarchists and the far-left antifa move
ment, CHAZ has morphed into what looks and feels like a mini-Burning Man festival, complete with its own corps of volunteer street cleaners and medics, as well as dreadlocked white girls blowing soap bubbles and taking selfies in front of paintings of men and women killed by Seattle police.
The autonomous zone’s evolution from a somber protest site to street festival highlights the problem Seattle’s Black residents say they face: The city’s overwhelmingly white population loves to protest but might not be taking the Black Lives Matter movement as seriously as they should.
King County, home to Seattle, has about 2.2 million residents and is about 65% white. Only about 6% of residents are Black, and the Seattle Police Department has a long history of using excessive force against the area’s minority population. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department implemented strict oversight of Seattle police, leading to a 60% drop in the use of serious force against the community over the next eight years as taxpayers poured an extra $100 million into the department.
In early May, city officials asked a federal judge to remove the decree, arguing Seattle police were no longer the racist, violent department they once were.
Eighteen days later on Memorial Day, Floyd, 46, a Black man in Minneapolis, was pinned to the ground by officers. Floyd gasped for breath as officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Floyd’s death sparked a wave of protests internationally, and Seattle’s veteran protesters swung into action in a massive demonstration May 30. There were incidents of looting and violence, and a police officer was caught on video restraining a man by kneeling on his neck.
The protests grew more confrontational, and police used tear gas and pepper
spray to disperse the massive crowds protesting police brutality. Then on June 8, police withdrew from the East Precinct station, ceding control over what’s now known as CHAZ. Protesters ransacked the building, and with spray paint renamed it the “Seattle People Department.”
Most businesses in the area have since closed. Police officers have showed no sign of trying to reassert control in the area, and a steady flow of city officials have visited to discuss trash, sanitation and emergency response concerns.
In an interview with TV station King5 on Friday, Police Chief Carmen Best, who is Black, declined to give a time frame for reasserting control, although she noted losing access to the precinct station has dramatically increased response times of officers responding to 911 calls in the area.
Friday, poet Roberto Carlos Ascalon visited CHAZ with his family and friends, towing children in a small wagon. He and his wife live in a nearby neighborhood, and they wanted the children to witness history unfolding.
Ascalon, 46, says the national response to the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates that society can transform itself when and if it decides to.
“If we have a chance to abolish systemic racism and white supremacy, shouldn’t we do everything we can to take that chance?” says Ascalon, a firstgeneration Filipino American. “We are changing the entire system of the world on a dime. We can actually do this.”
Stewart shakes her head as she thinks about the problems and solutions.
A big part of the problem, she says, is that white people who love to protest fail to follow through by holding city officials accountable for new police contracts or spending priorities.
“White people need to stay in when it gets uncomfortable and stop treating this like it is a party,” she says. “The marching and the protesting, all of that is important. But the work is every day holding the mayor and the City Council and the Legislature and all the way up to the president accountable.”
A big feature of the Seattle protests is the lack of specific leadership and who gets to negotiate change with the political establishment.
Participants posted signs calling for changes ranging from maintaining the police consent decree to reducing police funding.
Other protesters demand financial changes to prohibit the super-wealthy from getting richer without investing in their communities and to call for more assistance for the city’s large population of people experiencing homelessness.
“We are not here to become a bunch of armed mercenaries. We just want equal rights,” says Matthew “Bootleg Bill” Born, 40, who is white. “This is so into the unknown. We can only ask for so much and try to leverage that. We’re trying to leverage space at the table. We’re tired of being victimized by police officers in riot gear. We’re not at war.”
If the CHAZ lacks a leader, it most definitely has two visible faces: community journalists and activists TraeAnna Holiday, 38, and Omari Salisbury, 44, who have been conducting live Facebook and YouTube broadcasts daily from next door to the abandoned police station, based out of a loft borrowed from a Microsoft techie.
Holiday and Salisbury, who are both Black, work for a marketing firm, Converge, using its resources to raise questions and highlight issues they’ve pushed for years.
Walking around CHAZ, Salisbury is greeted like a celebrity: People stop him for selfies, they boast how often they watch his videos or ask for advice on how to get started in citizen journalism.
He has been on the front lines of the protests for days, capturing videos that he says show police lied about who started confrontations.
Like many Black residents in Seattle, Salisbury has a deep-seated fear that these new white allies will once again quickly lose interest.
“This is a time for tough questions,” he says. “A lot of the things the community has been saying, especially the Black community, they’ve been saying for a long time. There’s hardly anything out there that’s new. These aren’t new things.”