Seattle may learn expensive lesson

During the summer’s nationwide lunacies — statues toppled and stores looted, ostensibly to demand better law enforcement — Seattle’s government chose to turn 16 city blocks into an exploration of the delights of life without law. And now the city might get an expensive lesson about existing law.

On June 8, Seattle’s police department abandoned its precinct building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Into the vacuum flowed visionaries who settled on the name Capitol Hill Organized Protest, declared CHOP a “no-cop” zone and instituted what they termed a “loose form of governance and justice.” Living in the streets and a park, some citizens of this spontaneous republic of virtue, some carrying guns, organized a “replacement police force.”

The city government, according to the businesses, homeowners and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit, supplied CHOP with “medical equipment, washing/sanitation facilities, portable toilets, nighttime lighting and other material support.” CHOP, said Mayor Jenny Durkan, “is not a lawless wasteland” but “a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world.”

CHOP’s sandbox revolutionaries and their city government sympathizers soon learned Thomas Hobbes was right: In a state of nature — a situation without a sovereign authority — life is “nasty, brutish and short.” If the accumulating trash, feces and other refuse did not dampen what Durkan serenely called the “block-party atmosphere,” the two murders and other shootings and injuries did. So, on July 1 the city reoccupied CHOP, where Seattle’s police chief said she was “stunned by the amount of graffiti, garbage and property destruction,” adding “we don’t even know how much trauma people were experiencing.” And some of CHOP’s casualties — including businesses cut off from suppliers and customers, and others denied the enjoyment of their property — headed to court.

The plaintiffs charge the city “adopted a policy supporting the CHOP occupation, acting with deliberate indifference toward those suffering harms from it.” The city’s policy of “no response” by police within CHOP should itself suffice to establish liability, before tabulating the material and moral support the city government gave to this embryonic utopia.

The injuries claimed by the plaintiffs include unconstitutional takings. The Fifth Amendment says private property shall not be taken “for public use, without just compensation.” The city, by enabling CHOP, deprived plaintiffs of protected property interests.

Furthermore, the 14th Amendment says no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The absence of law was a CHOP aspiration, one facilitated by the city.

While a government’s failure to protect an individual from private violence does not constitute a violation of the due process guarantee, there is an exception when a local government acts to restrict the individual’s freedom to act on his own behalf. Or when there is a “state-created danger” — when a local government acts with “deliberate indifference” to a “known or obvious danger.”

The mills of justice grind slowly, so this litigation will live a lot longer than CHOP did. If the suit results, properly, in financial restitution for CHOP’s victims and financial pain for Seattle taxpayers, CHOP will have been, on balance, a net public benefit.