
Just kidding, no she didnât. But she DID say that the police are getting âanecdotalâ reports of armed ID checkpoints and extortion around Capitol Hill. Her word was good enough for KOMO, Fox News, and a handful of other blogs (along with several hundred Twitter users whose profile pics feature wrap-around sunglasses), all of whom repeated the rumor without asking, âwait ⊠is that true?â
If the prospect of armed stop-and-frisks within the CHAZ seems too terrible to be true, thatâs probably because it is. Take a stroll around the neighborhood right now and youâll find some (slightly haphazard) community gardens, chalk art on the pavement, and probably someone playing a guitar. There was music and dancing. Businesses are open, albeit on a limited basis due to coronavirus.
And get thisâthe police are still in the neighborhood, doing routine police stuff. Last night I watched two cops deal with a person who had passed out on Broadway. They prodded her and asked âyou wanna go to detox?â until medical professionals arrived. (Obviously, we should be funding social workers to take care of these kinds of problems instead of cops!)
I reached out to the SPD for comment on the allegations. The first media number listed on their website has been disconnected since January; the second goes to voicemail and Iâm not exactly holding my breath to get a callback. The SPD used to make their 911 call logs publicly accessible, but they seem to have stopped updating it a few months ago.
I also submitted a request for any records related to extortion on the Hill. Expected response time for my request, according to the SPD: six to twelve months.
But just think about this for a moment. The Assistant Chief of police says theyâve heard âanecdotesâ about armed gangs roaming the streets, and mafia-style shakedowns of local businesses? Anecdotes? Is that what the police are in the business of, hearing rumors and then going âdamn, thatâs crazyâ? They don't have any, you know, evidence? Or is that just a thing TV cops do?
I get why conservative news wants to paint the CHAZ as some kind of disastrous Mad Max state. Obviously, those writers donât really care about the safety of a six-block zone on Capitol Hill, theyâre just looking for any story that justifies their boot-licking. And if that story isnât true, oh well, theyâll repeat it anyway.
(Hilariously, some conservatives are passing around an anonymous Reddit post as proof of a breakdown in CHAZ leadership. That post is actually just a slightly-reworded transcript of the âanarcho-syndicalistâ dialogue from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)
Look, maybe extortion actually is happening. Itâs not impossible. Itâs also not impossible that the extortionists, if they exist, are cops. So far, the most compelling evidence of wrongdoing seems to be an anonymous comment on a blogâis that the only thing the Assistant Chief is going off of, something she read online? Because Iâm writing a blog right now, and I can write âarmed guards wouldnât let me use the bathroom in Cal Anderson park until I French kissed a telephone pole,â now is that going to wind up on Fox News in a few hours?
Anyway, hereâs a helpful hint for my colleagues at other news outlets: I have a friend who works with people experiencing long-term mental illness, and sometimes heâs found that the stories they tell can be hard to understand. On those occasions, heâs learned, it can sometimes help to ask, âIs that something thatâs true? Or something thatâs fun to imagine?â