This letter underscores that CHOP was a total failure and that nothing good came from months of violence and economic devastation.

@1 Failure perhaps, but whose?

Bellevue Police don't answer to the ineffective and spineless Seattle City Council. They will not tolerate vandalism and violence. Engage in those acts and you will be arrested and prosecuted.

I'm trying to wrap my head around "realtor anarchist"...

This is COMPLETELY TRUE and a CLEAR REAL LOOK AT WHAT A CLUSTERFUCK SEATTLE IS.

Black Bloc
Back To
Bellevue

@5 I thought only Trump people were allowed to label something Fake News if it didn't adhere to their world view.

@7: A distinction without a difference.

There were Molotov cocktails thrown at the East precinct. This has happened several times. They may have been ineffective but they were thrown nonetheless.

Absolute best thing I've read in the Stranger in fucking YEARS. And I do mean fucking and I do mean years.

See I can swear gratuitously just like all the Stranger writers. Fuckity fuck! Fuckity fuck fuck fuck!

Crimethinc has a nice rebuttal to that NCRI hack job.

@1: There was no workable alternative to CHOP/CHAZ. Nothing but direct resistance to authority can ever make a difference anymore. It would have been pathetic and useless for people to do what you'd prefer and just politely campaign for Biden. And it wasn't a total failure- it got the world's attention on the issues involved in a way no tactic you would ever have approved of could do.

Politeness means defeat. Quite means surrender. Nothing that isn't dramatic can make a difference.

I thought this IA was going to be about the Republicans and the Democrats but it turned out to be even better. Good job to the author. And isn't it always the case - the troublemakers don't to destroy their own status quo - just someone else's. A rumble in a parking lot in the burbs, priceless.

@17: The Capitol Hill Unorganized Murder Patch ('the CHUMP') existed only because the SPD abandoned their East Precinct station house. Seattle's elected leaders then most conspicuously did NOT place a priority on restoring these police services, which Seattle was legally obligated to provide. (In an especially ludicrous example, CM Herbold, who had campaigned for re-election by citing her strengthening of SPD, wrote a stupid essay about the CHUMP in The Stranger -- instead of demanding the SPD return to their East Precinct NOW.)

The CHUMP ended at least two Black Lives, amongst the (at least) six violent assaults which took place during the CHUMP's miserable existence. The CHUMP thus detracted from the important cause of #BLM, and eclipsed better episodes, such as a crowd of (mostly white) Americans listening politely to speakers (most of whom were Black) at the many #BLM events at the West Seattle Junction.

Virtually all the shitbag larpers “protesting” and lighting fires and trashing Capitol Hill are upper middle class white kids who live in their parent’s basements in the suburbs with no life, lots of privilege and delusions of grandeur. Pathetic.

Bridge and Tunnel Anarchists are the new woo girls

Anonymous: your good, necessary comment resonates with many. Thank you!

This letter belongs with the rest of the FOX News garbage peddled on the comment section of the Seattle Times, not here. Christ.

21: The CHOP/CHAZ happened because uptight corporate centrists never even tried to address the issues of race and class that are tearing Seattle apart. All your sort care about is "order"- never mind that order for order's sake and obedience to the police simply because they arrogantly, violently demand it benefits no one but the wealthy. The fact is that that precinct never played any positive role in that neighborhood, never protected people of color from violent crimes- in every black and brown neighborhood, virtually everyone will tell you that the cops are constantly roughing people simply for hanging out on their own streets- something they have every right to do- but never show up when people actually call them up needing help.

All you care about is creating a culture of intimidation and fear for everyone you think is beneath you in the social order, and you political model is clearly Bill Clinton's Nineties- the decade in which the Democratic Party decided it had to be just as rigidly repressive to people of color and the poor and just as unquestioningly deferential to the prison-industrial complex as the GOP. That approach gave us an era where the poor and the non-white were totally out in the cold in BOTH major parties and where humane values completely vanished from public life-all in the name of the useless and barbaric goal of looking "tough on crime".

Nothing would have been better if the CHOP hadn't happened, and none of those who denounced and vilified it either care about institutional racism, corporate dominance of politics and life, or fighting homelessness and poverty. Punitive, authoritarian solutions have never made any city any better for the many, and nothing your obvious political heroes-Mayor Daley, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and the Seattle Police Guild- have ever proposed or done has anything positive to offer your city. That's why SPD was driven out of the East Precinct- it was always part of the problem, it never tried to connect with the people of the neighborhood, it never supported any meaningful reform proposals, it never deviated from its "all we care about is making everyone defer to our authority" model, even in an era when police should be focusing solely on de-escalation and keeping people alive. The East Precinct and the SPD never said anything on any of these issues but "we deny there's a problem and we refuse to change".

That's what caused CHOP/CHAZ; the intransigence.

If authority refuses to even consider changing, if it refuses to listen, why SHOULD authority be respected by any person of good will?

And why shouldn't it be defied and brought down when it creates the conditions in which there is no other way to work for change?

What alternative did the people who put together CHAZ/CHOP-much of which, with its mistakes, was an inspirational model for the possibility that life could be run without repression- even have, given the conditions they were facing?

Nothing short of that would ever even have been listened to by the power structure. All other possibilities of change had vanished.

It was once again proof of the validity of the wisest thing JFK ever said-

"those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable".

The existence of CHAZ/CHOP was made inevitable by every single one of you who refused to offer any other for change to be worked for.

@28 the data doesn't back up your anecdote that cops refuse to help POC. From the ST this morning, "Interim Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz said last week Seattle police officers have recovered 2,400 shell casings and 820 firearms so far this year and the department is on pace to exceed 1,000 guns taken off the streets. Shootings, he said at an Oct. 19 news conference, are now at the highest level seen in 11 years and homicides are on the rise." Diaz also noted in a conference that the majority of shooting victims are POC.
Seems that moving on violent criminals and removing their weapons is a great benefit to all of us but especially POC who fall victim to violent crime more frequently. Who will do these investigations and confront violent criminals to remove their weapons after we disband the evil, racist police? The Hug-n-Kiss Squad? A bunch of true crime podcast enthusiasts who think they can play detective?

@28: "The CHOP/CHAZ happened because uptight corporate centrists never even tried to address the issues of race and class that are tearing Seattle apart."

The CHUMP existed because, and only because, SPD abandoned their East Precinct house. The SPD therefore shares responsiblity for the six violent assaults, two of them murderous, which took place during the CHUMP's brief, yet miserable, existence.

And, "...[T]earing Seattle apart?" Hardly. This city is better and stronger than it has been at any time since the Boeing Slump. Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft, Starbuck's and many other employers provide tens of thousands of high-paying jobs. Until Trump's COVID-19 plague arrived this year, Seattle had seen ten consecutive years of declining unemployment. Most of Seattle's homeless, by their own admissions, arrived here already drug-addicted, unemployed, and homeless. Instead of solving this problem, we pretended it was part of our housing-affordability issue, and built a parasitic homeless-industrial complex, headed by six-figure salaried poverty pimps. We'll need to dismantle that before we can solve our actual homeless issues, but those issues are not large. Fixing SPD will be a larger problem, and our City Council seems unable or unwilling to do anything useful about it, but we can always keep voting in new members until we get a Council who can.

"The fact is that that precinct never played any positive role in that neighborhood, never protected people of color from violent crimes..."

The CHUMP existed for less than a month, and covered a tiny part of Pike-Pine. Yet there were at least six violent assaults in the CHUMP during its miserable existence, two of which ended Black Lives. Those rates of assault and murder are orders of magnitude higher than when the SPD actually shows up to work in their East Precinct.

"Nothing would have been better if the CHOP hadn't happened,"

Two more Black Lives might still be with us. Four (or more) other persons might not have suffered violent assaults. I personally think those would have been "better" outcomes, but you're free to continue your disagreement with me on that.

"...was an inspirational model for the possibility that life could be run without repression..."

Not investigating violent assaults and even murder counts as "inspirational" to you? Really? Seriously, what good do you think the CHUMP did, and how does it look against the violent assaults and murders which took place there? The CHUMP detracted from #BLM, diverted attention from the new willingness of Seattle's whites to look at the conditions of Black lives under SPD, and was an international joke. Tell us what in the CHUMP was worth the lives of those Black men, and tell us why.

(And, punching your usual straw bogeymen won't cut it, so please give that a rest for once.)

As a resident of Bellevue I assure you, Bellevue cops don't stop graffiti. The citizens do (we paint over it). Our cops could not care less. And I don't mean the BLM spray painted slogans near Crossroads, which they kindly leave up as residents allowed it. I mean random shit on the trails and at the mall and at the beach.

Bellevue is much smaller and has an older population than Seattle. It is not some magical place where problems are solved through a mysterious civic process. It is a difference of scale.

That said I agree wholeheartedly that people need to stop driving to Seattle to stir up shit to prove a fucking point.

Vote, give, march, strike.

Ha ha ha! "The hug and kiss squad". I laughed and laughed at this. Great comment, too. Care to make a t-shirt with that? I would help you design it. Or, buy one.