Pirate's Cove

Most people are probably thinking “yeah, we need police, even with their faults”. Not in the world of Ann Scott Tyson at the Christian Science Monitor

‘History in the making’? Seattle protest zone prompts rethink on policing.

As a police chopper circles overhead, a protester named John, wearing a Black power pin, stands watch at a barricade at the entrance to Seattle’s spontaneous new hub of activism – a six-block area that demonstrators initially dubbed the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

Orange barricades left behind by police, who abruptly vacated the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct building last week amid rallies against racism and police brutality, are now plastered with posters calling to “Defund SPD” – a key demand of activists here who seek to shift half the police budget into community services.

But views are mixed on the police role and future of the station. Many signs and graffiti are hostile to cops. Yet John, an unemployed theater worker who lives a block away and withheld his last name for privacy, says “autonomous zone” is a misnomer, and stresses that police can return to the station “whenever they want.” City officials, including police, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and Mayor Jenny Durkan, have freely entered the “zone” in recent days, along with flocks of visitors.

“There is no reason peaceful protest can’t coexist with police presence,” John says of the CHAZ, which over the weekend was renamed the CHOP. What that stands for, however, depends on whom you ask – a reflection of the movement’s evolving goals and leadership. An entry sign calls it the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest; some say the O now stands for “Organized.” John and others say they sought freedom to protest, but never asked police to leave.

This is the very definition of a gaslighting article. This is the kind of thing the media got away with pre-Internet, and when there weren’t lots and lots of different news channels on your TV.

“It’s showing the world that having police breathing down your neck all the time is not necessary,” says Black Lives Matter organizer Mark Henry Jr., standing in front of the boarded-up precinct building, its sign altered with gold spray paint to read: Seattle People’s Department. “This place will be a monument to social justice, and a beacon of hope to the world that police reform is not only possible, it is necessary.”

The people in that zone didn’t have the police breathing down their neck all the time: in fact, they relied upon them. Now? Many are living in hotels because they cannot get in, because of the violence, because of the noise. Even just outside the zone, the cops are not coming even when you call them 19 times and the protesters are trying to set your store on fire. Stores in the CHAZ have been destroyed.

“This is a pivotal moment in history,” Chief Best, the first black woman to hold SPD’s top post, said Sunday in an appearance on Face the Nation. “We are going to move in a different direction and policing will never be the same,” she said, after participating in a Black Lives Matter march of 60,000 people in Seattle on Saturday that she said brought her an “epiphany.”

Right now you have armed idiots (suddenly the leftist gun grabbers are not demonizing guns) patrolling CHAZ, a self proclaimed warlord, all sorts of violence, rape, arson, robbery, and other felonies occurring. I think most of us prefer the old style policing.

“It seems to be a good place to live. I’m not going to be bothered by the cops,” says Ada, an out-of-work computer programmer who moved here from Dallas several weeks ago and has been living out of her car. “It’s history in the making. It’s cool,” she says, cooking a pan of beans and rice over a camping stove set up in a red wagon, “but also complicated.”

Let’s block them all in. Since they think they are no longer part of the U.S., no leaving. Shut the power and water off. Let’s see how well they do. They can’t survive without help from the outside. They really do not have food without outside help. Shut the power off and there’s no Internet. How will they charge their phones? Seriously, this entire article attempts to paint a rosy picture, but we can see the photos and videos.

Photos Confirm Warlord Raz Simone Was Running Guns from the Trunk of His Teslahttps://t.co/OsD6L3xXGr

— Jack Poso ???????? (@JackPosobiec) June 17, 2020