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Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

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588 pointsobilgic852 comments

All: this story is here because it's an interesting phenomenon, a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Before commenting, please make sure you're up to date on those rules and post in the intended spirit (curiosity and conversation) not the opposite one (ideology and battle).

This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place, so that it can be collapsed and prevent too much offtopicness at the top of the thread.

Thanks for leaving this one up. I understand it's not the discourse this site is directly interested in, but the occasional opportunity to debate such issues in an intelligent forum is something I have trouble finding elsewhere on the internet.

Having said that, I'm sure these types of post create a lot of work for you. I appreciate the upkeep and please keep up the good work!

> the occasional opportunity to debate such issues in an intelligent forum is something I have trouble finding elsewhere on the internet.

That's maybe the good place to ask:

What are other places (maybe places more open to political discussions) the HN crowd would recommend for "intelligent discussions"? Twitter and Reddit are an awful mess at the moment.

This might merit its own Ask HN post. I’m curious what responses you might get.

This has been asked before here. The best answers were essentially niche blogs with commenting systems and niche subreddits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023209

Thanks, it’s the first time I hear about https://www.well.com

I'd suggest ActiviyPub servers (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) There are a ton of instances out there or you can start your own. There is a lot of good discourse out there .. and cat pictures.

LessWrong and niche subreddits depending on the political views you hope to find.

> depending on the political views you hope to find

It seems like the really good discussion places wouldn't have to carry this caveat. It's too bad those are even harder to find.

You cannot fit too much of the Overton window in any one place. And a lot of politics these days relies on entire parallel media structures so that what even happened is under dispute, let alone the moral response to them.

Wonkery can be debated; humanity can't.

> It seems like the really good discussion places wouldn't have to carry this caveat.

Ideally, yes, but if the political views you are hoping to find are ones that overtly limit any dissent or respect for any other view (extreme absolute authoritarianism for example) then the views themselves subvert the ability to have meaningful discourse about them.

I was more thinking about how all the right leaning subs have been co-opted by the alt-right gamer types and trolls. The far left subs aren't much better, but there are plenty of open minded moderate subs. I find neoliberal to be a great place to discuss center-left policy.

Yeah Lesswrong has gotten good again; the coronavirus discussion has stood out. They don’t really do politics but as an old user one could probably force a discussion through.

this is not an interesting phenomenon, this has happened many times and still these places exist, whats not interesting is the civilians got caught in these dummies crossfire.

I think it's interesting in the context of current events.

Nothing interests everybody. If one story doesn't interest you, there are plenty of others to read here, and if you run out, the 'past' link in the top bar will take you to many threads you missed. Some of those will surely be interesting.

Can we have this reminder posted on every ratio'd post? (Given the circumstances) things have gotten a lot more political on HN as of late (yes, my opinion, not driven by facts) and I find myself not making my daily lunch-time visit because of that.

Ratio meaning more comments that points?

This post has been killed and unkilled, downweighted by flagging and then unweighted by mods, then after a front page surge now downweighted because it has more comments than points.

That sentiment makes me pretty uncomfortable given the proximity of this article's topic to wider ongoing events. Like we should all pour glasses of single malt and sit around a table in our smoking jackets having a languorous discussion. These issues are too important, and the horror and shock and outrage are too fresh, to react to nauseating views by politely sipping your whisky instead of throwing it in their face.

I understand the feeling, but what good does throwing it in their face do?

If you're dropped into a totally foreign culture and one remark to your guide results in a slightly-discomfited "that's not really how we do things" then you might not think too much of it, but if you venture a comment that's met with an expression of abject revulsion, you know you've said something unacceptable. We're all constantly calibrating our sense of such things in everyday social interactions and those normative pressures ultimately define acceptable discourse. At the moment the Overton window unfortunately admits some very ugly things and I'm not sure it makes sense anymore to persist with gentle nudges in the right direction given the manifest urgency of the problem.

Those unwritten rules that govern social behavior can induce real internal change too. People's attitudes and beliefs are shaped by what they perceive to be customary and deviant in their culture.

A friend lives in Seattle and texted me today about his visit last night:

> I was there last night and it's such a cool pseudo utopian place

> The media coverage of it is WILD

> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival campground

> There are speakers, musicians, art walls. I took a group pic for a bunch of black guys last night and they were so proud of what was built because they felt like they fought for it, which in a sense, they did.

> like a music festival campground

Every generation needs a Woodstock. Burning man is not real enough.

The tricky part of ephemeral culture is keeping it ephemeral while still allowing it to reoccur often in new forms, and not just having a crystalized form of spontaneity that future generations are supposed to appreciate in the correct way.

>Every generation needs a Woodstock

A massively failed capitalist project that leaves behind an enormous mess?

Yes, actually.

The ability for people to make a mess on occasion, for whatever reason, is an essential freedom to be cherished and fought for.

Every generation needs an act of rebellion. It's a sort of fundamental law of nature, as a right of passage in a way.

The organizers of Woodstock knew they weren’t going to profit, and they did it anyway.

They also knew that crowd control was going to be a problem; instead of hiring police, they brought in people from a commune who were used to doing crowd control for large peaceful gatherings.

Then there was Altamont.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert#Security

> a music festival campground

Which is fun for a while until people start dying or fighting like they always do and suddenly you need a group of people who spend their time dealing with it. Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long.

What examples do you have in mind when you say this? The main case studies that I see get brought up are Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Paris Commune, but the wartime pressures that led to their collapse strike me as much different from the present situation. I think the CHAZ will be an interesting experiment given the context.

Specifically the music festivals I've been to. It's fun and a wonderful feeling for a while, but eventually the idiots/assholes will become a problem that needs to be dealt with. Or nature throws a disaster at you and there is chaos.

It's a little hard to come up with historical examples because the utopia portion is often quite short and overshadowed by the negatives that follow. Generally, I would point to almost any historical 'revolution' as a warning that tearing down a system and rebuilding it from scratch does not mean improvement, even if it appears to be at the beginning. You could probably point to the August 1789 period of the French Revolution as an example of the 'utopic' phase, but I'm not certain. The fall of Saddam's government in Iraq would be another example. Kurdish Syria is probably another decent example.

  eventually the idiots/assholes will become a problem that needs to be dealt with

Like the police force?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. While many of the police actions are inexcusable, trying to have a society without an active group of people enforcing law and order doesn't work well. Just look at Baltimore for the downsides of police inaction.

Baltimore police are not exactly inactive, they are more like an organized gang (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/b...).

Here's data on the drop in police-initiated policing following Freddie Grey's death - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...

When people start policing the police force, don't they become....the police (by definition, not legality)? And therefore susceptible to becoming just like the "idiots/assholes" they were empowered to deal with.

Certainly an interesting recursion problem.

The solution to that is not having an "empowered" caste, and leaving it to a community to police themselves.

Everyone tends to get nervous about that though.

Something about witch hunts and lynching perhaps?

Both of these represent the same phenomenon as the modern police force, which is class oppression (in the first case anti-intellectual misogyny, in the second the same base racism underlying the current struggle). Communities can and will self-regulate, when let out from under the thumb of state-sanctioned violence.

What is “the community” supposed to do if there’s a murder or rape?

no, because they don't have authority to police civilians. there is no recursion here.

police force -> used to arrest dangerous criminals only

police wardens -> used to review, charge, change police policy, and arrest police officers who violate the law.

social officer -> used for all non-violent community enforcement. fines, ticketing, homelessness, mental health issues, etc. have no power to arrest anyone.

They're trying out the many proposed and proven methods of community management other than armed, poorly-trained cops. Music festivals aren't trying to prove the viability of alternative societal structures. They're different things.

And I hope it works. But history says it's going to go poorly and they're going to need to end up with something resembling a police force, even if they don't call it that.

I don't know how your interactions with police have gone, but I've never had them show up when I called, and most accounts I hear are that they don't do anything at best when they do. At worst, they kill someone. Most of what they do is not stuff they should be doing.

There's some niche a well-trained police force can fill, but it's a lot smaller than what the poorly-trained forces do now. Almost no one is actually calling for a complete and permanent abolition of police. Just a redefinition of their role.

The first line of the CHAZ demands:

> The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police

Also, I would look at the Baltimore police/crime post-Freddie Grey to see how diminished police action leads to much increased crime. What the BPD did was horrifying but so was the rise in crime once they became less active.

With regular assholes you have the right to self-defense. With the police you don't.

Without police or “criminal justice apparatus” your rights are merely theoretical.

If you feel this insecure, you should purchase firearms and practice using them. Many of your neighbors are doing this.

Or we could keep the police and purchase firearms.

Why not have the government hire people to do that for me? Call it "socialized defense" or something.

Your experiences with this may have gone better for you than those of many of your neighbors went for them?

American police departments have no duty to protect you. They are law enforcement officers who choose at their own discretion to arrive at your home seven minutes after you dial 911.

Make it their duty to protect you.

What do you do with all of the people, and the entire system, that's been built and trained for a century to not do that?

I doubt many people are against the idea of a specialized government role that provides protection services.

What they are against is:

* Thinking we can get that role by reforming existing police systems, given how opposed police systems are to such reform

* That these systems need the absurd budgets of police departments

* That the role requires absurd levels of protection for violent actions

* That the role requires armaments in the majority of cases

Going form police to a role that fits those criteria is going to start with not having police.

You fire them all and rehire the ones that are capable of being proper police officers.

It's federal case law that the profession of policing doesn't require what you're asking.

Then you make it law that it becomes required.

I guess I'm just on the side of: if the only thing we think police should be doing is something they already legally don't have to do, achieving the goal of getting that covered is better handled by tearing the entire system down and building a new system with a new name and new members than trying to force reform on orgs that have fought it tooth and nail. The actors that have gotten rulings like Warren v. District of Columbia obviously don't want reform in this area, and I don't see much success in forcing it on them. They have the time, resources, and inclination to fight it at every step, and piecemeal subvert the spirit of the reforms as they occur.

Maybe we haven't voted hard enough?

I'd say Minneapolis voted pretty hard the past couple weeks and are getting tangible results from it.

Absolutely. Now we realize the decades of voting more softly were just a waste of time.

That's what I pointed out upthread, tear it down and rebuild it.

I guess the point I'm dancing around is that words have power, and rebuilding a force called police is still a half measure. Don't just rebuild, but instead create a new force with a new name as part of gaining new semantics. People bring baggage with them when you use the same words.

I don't think that is true, plenty of police forces around the world call themselves police without feeling the innate urge to shoot at innocent protesters with lethal force.

I don't think they'd be qualified for the job.

Then they don't get hired.

It's really strange how people in this thread refuse to believe that the "reform the police" option even exists. As though we must either have a subpar police system or no police system at all. It's also strange how many people think that getting rid of the police will just work itself out.

1. Abolish police.

2. << A miracle happens. >>

3. Prosper.

Many other countries have a police system that works much better than the US but obviously the only possible solutions in the search space are "Americanism" or "Nothing".

"Reform" is a well known word in the US that translates to "do the very minimum necessary to shut most people up for a while". The fact that proponents of radical changes to policing have not come up with terms you like more should not be an indictment of their perspectives.

If reform worked it would have already worked.

Right, because police rarely break the law?

Hence you ought to rebuild it from the ground up and if the police breaks the law they'll be punished for it.

Why is it so hard for americans to imagine that it's possible to have atleast a semifunctional police apparatus?

I have a gun and my right to defend myself is a practical, factual statement. American police have no duty to protect you and are free from legal punishment if they choose to idly wait while you are assaulted and raped.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia...

You missed the point. You can assert your rights all the livelong day, but without a criminal justice apparatus all you have are a gun and some fine words. Given the relatively high mortality among armed gang members in America's underpoliced inner cities, your gun isn't the reason you and yours enjoy relatively low mortality--the difference is either one of policing or fine words, and I'm pretty sure it's not the latter.

No, you are missing the point. Without a gun there is nothing keeping you safe aside from a cop's whims. If someone wanted to walk into your house/office and kill you, a cop would (1) stop them, (2) choose not to stop them and not get punished for it, or (3) not get to you in time to be of any help. Defending yourself is the fourth option you exercise with your right to self-defense. If you really think that cops are bad, arrange your life so that your life doesn't depend on their whims. I live in a state where at least two thirds of people own guns (usually multiple guns) and the crime rate is very low.

I really don't think I'm missing the point. I might be missing your point, since you seem to have misinterpreted the thread and gone off onto your own digression. I'm all for 2A and I don't think cops are bad, but guns aren't keeping the peace, the police are keeping the peace, even if they aren't a perfect institution. There are lots of places with lots of guns and few police, and they are not known for being nice places to live. This conversation has reached the absurd--those of us without guns aren't dying multiple times per day as your "without a gun..." comment suggests. I'm not interested in debating absurdities, so I'll leave you with the last word.

police are not the reason we have safety.

a police force doesn't prevent you from being attacked, they only dispense justice after the fact and only sometimes.

welfare, courts and legal systems have a far larger impact than police as a means to prevent violence by having a peaceful way to resolve issues between individuals and ensuring basic needs are met. they also happen to be cheaper.

most violence happens at the edge of society where people cannot avail themselves of the court system. (drugs/prostitution)

Yes, I was using police as a shorthand for the criminal justice system. The fear of being caught and sentenced has a deterring effect on crime. The criminal justice system, however, depends on police, and police officers visible in the community also deters crime.

If anything I would think them even more practical, but require one to be more active in their enforcement.

But that is the thing I don't see being recognize. While the current institute that is the police could pass away, society will still have rules and will still want enforcers of those rules (though not all rules are equally enforced). And you see this in any supposedly anarchic community, they still have social standards they enforce, they just do not rely the nearby government for enforcement of smaller issues (though there is still a reliance for larger issues, such as stopping annexation by an entity with a larger force). In turn this makes me think all such communities are actually minarchist instead of anarchist, which is a drastic difference in base assumptions.

On the other hand, rather "diminished police action", the NYPD went on strike for a couple months in 2014-2015 and crime actually went down. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

The book Animal Farm is a great representation of this concept as a fable.

Animal Farm is not intended to be a fable. It is an allegorical retelling of Stalin's co-option of the Russian revolution - and that co-option is presented as only being possible because the populace is illiterate and ill-informed, which allows for revisionism from the Stalin-figure.

Orwell almost certainly did support anarchist revolution and utopia, given his role in the Spanish Civil War - and his concern about the suppression of anarchism through a totalitarian control of information is exactly what 1984 is about. He never would have felt that "Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long."

Is it? I thought Animal Farm was specifically about communism (it's been a while since I read it). Wouldn't Lord of the Flies be a better fable?

The continued existence of Christiania in Denmark should prove to you sufficiently that these types of attempts are not automatically doomed.

I mean would Seattle residents really consider CHAZ turning into Christiania a win? For a community of less than 1000 people, it seems to have a ridiculous amount of violence and crime.

What violence? How many serious injuries or deaths have occurred?

There were quite a few utopian socialist (not necessarily anarchist) projects started in the United States in the 19th century, especially following the proto-socialist Charles Fourier. Wikipedia has a list based on a wide variety of different philosophies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_commu...

Look into what happened with the various hippie communes that sprung up across the US in the late 60s/early 70s, and how they fared.

Most came together with utopian ideals but fell apart as tension arose between those that just wanted to drop out and take acid and those who actually worked hard and tried to build something. Only one remains AFAICT and that one is atypical, enforcing sharing of everything, down to having a communal wardrobe, and having work schedules etc.

Revolutionary Catalonia and the Paris Commune are interesting examples of libertarian socialism. You could also look at the Korean People's Association [1], Rojava more recently [2], or the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Chiapas (EZLN), which seem to be exceptional in having lasted 30 years or so.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People%27s_Association_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Mun...

> Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long.

At least one counterexample to this is Exarcheia[1] in Athens, which has been relatively unpoliced for the last 50 years.

I was there about a year ago and was struck by how both peaceful and lively it was. Nowhere in Athens felt nearly as alive.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exarcheia

> relatively unpoliced for the last 50 years

Source on that? 75% of that link talks about:

- riots following police action

- attacks on police stations

- special policing tactics for that region

- evictions by the police

My source is first-hand experience: the police do not enter Exarcheia, because they know that they'll be attacked if they do.

The Wikipedia page documents precisely what has happened each time the police have tried to establish a foothold in the neighborhood since the 1973 student uprising. They currently operate from patrols and bases outside of the neighborhood. Any effects they have on the neighborhood (like squat clearing) tend to be impermanent.

Very interesting. Although from what I could find on it, it doesn't really sound like a good example to argue that an unpoliced society can be a nice, safe place to live. I certainly wouldn't describe it as utopic.

> locals and activists help with the cleaning and cooking and even take turns being a night watch after someone – reportedly far-right activists – set a squat on fire.

> “It’s hard to live in peace when teenagers come here just to get high or you need to run to your car because protesters are setting them on fire,” says Dioni Vougioukli, a journalist who has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years.

Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen is an anarchist commune too. [1] The police have largely left it to its own devices since 1971. They show up from time to time as the political whims change. Their green light district is something to behold, with the street vendors and their bricks of hash.

I've been a few times, quite lovely, would recommend.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania

One of the general trends on anarchism is that most people have never heard of the anarchistic communes that have been around for a while.

I was there about fifteen years ago. Great place. Try the “Gluug”! (Spiced mulled wine with raisins soaked in liquor for a year).

I have first hand experience from both Exarcheia and FC. I grew up in central Athens until 2 years ago where I moved to Copenhagen. I have been at both regions a ton of times and have very close friends that live in the regions.

Exarcheia has a very long history of participation in the movement and a lot of anarchistic spaces but the organization is not at all as cohesive as portrayed here. Police presence has varied through the years. There is a police department very close to the heart of the region (the square) and 2 years you would have clashes between the police and anarchist groups ~bi-weekly. Due to the absence of police there is and was a problem of drug trafficking (something that a lot of comrades fight against). Now there is a way stronger police presence.

FC had a stronger system in place, because of circumstance, politics and culture. Regardless, police has swept through FC quite a few of times, on charges involving drugs as well. I have not been part of any organizational elements in FC, but my ignorance here should not be considered as a guide.

Nevertheless, my point here is that both communities do not have combative capabilities against the organized force of police.

If you'd like me to elaborate more on a specific subject regarding my experience, especially about Exercheia, please let me know.

Hmm. Now I want to visit these areas. They both seem relatively small enclaves though. They must depend heavily on the outside state for .. everything. I wonder if it just evolved into a "they're cute, let them have their fun, don't let them vote" type acceptance from the rest of the community.

If you want to learn about a real breakaway province, look up Transnistria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria

I've only been to the border. I was staying with Peace Corps volunteers and they risked getting fired if they crossed the boarder (I was told there have been kidnapping situations, but not sure if that's true).

US embassy officials have gone, but they are required to turn around if asked for passports since the US doesn't recognize them as a State. Members of the Peace Corps told me the Russians have supported the region with troops which they've brought in via Ukraine with Moldovan escorts, so there's all types of corruption leading up to that. I was visiting around the time the head of state of Moldova was arrested for embezzling several billion euros.

It's not a utopic commune though, it's a normal neighborhood, apart from frequent violent and spectacular fights with police.

Yes, that's the end goal of a utopic commune - normal life.

i mean, the neighbor is not a commune. only a handful of squatted buildings are

Unpoliced and relatively unpoliced are drastically different.

Does self policing constitute anarchist? The few times I've dug into the background of anarchist communities have shown they do have some enforcement of social standards, and can effectively be viewed as a smaller scale government that the larger government has decided to take a more hands off approach compare to other areas of similar size that attempt to act legally independent.

Yes! Anarchist does not imply "individuals can do whatever they like", that's more a right-Libertarian thing. Anarchism (or at least the relevant bit here) is largely the idea of challenging and trying to avoid creating persistent power structures and dynamics, so communities regulating themselves without creating a persistent, external-to-the-community police force is very anarchist.

It's like we're watching Animal Farm play out in real time.

All animals start off equal, but some animals will eventually grow to be more equal than others.

Yeah, eventually it will end up with all homeless people and drug addicts, unfortunately. For now, there's enough regular people to keep it feeling safe and fun, but eventually it will get 'scary' and the normal people will leave and it'll basically be skid row.

Well to be fair it's not like Cap Hill wasn't already full of "homeless people and drug addicts" before, and that hasn't stopped it from also being a hip neighborhood.

It'll be a decent experiment to see if they can come up with non-violent policing alternatives to keep order, or if they resort to the same tactics as before.

the annotated maps are funny, portraying a vibe of relatively relaxed occupation. but serious too, monitoring police activity nearby, like swat.

"they were so proud of what was built"

Curious, since I can't trust news media to not sensationalize this:

What has been built, according to your friend? Have they set up infrastructure of some sort for housing people? Kitchens, latrines, etc?

An amateur map of infrastructure right on the site: https://capitolhillautonomous.zone/img/16.jpg

There's a more recent map. It's a lot busier, but looks like they're building out.

https://capitolhillautonomous.zone/life.html#pid=23

Direct link: https://capitolhillautonomous.zone/img/23.jpg

Wow, that's grown up and filled in quite a bit since last I saw the map. They seem ready for a longer haul. Now that they have our attention, I wish them the best in making their voices heard. So this is what democracy looks like.

Do the property owners have a say in this democracy?

They're only really on public land in the parks and to be honest I bet a lot of the people are pretty happy they're not getting second hand tear gassed every night or having choppers overhead all day.

They put up a cardboard sign that said "you are now leaving the USA" and graffitied some surfaces.

https://i.imgur.com/f6VHPJ0.jpg

I wonder what the end game is. The police is not going to disband. People asking for that don't understand how States work. You cannot have a State without a monopoly on violence. America disbanded police once, in 2003, in a city called Baghdad. That turned out wonderfully.

I suspect they'll all just get bored at some point.

It's less about end game than it is simply about practicing a set of ideas, and really just about living life the way they want to live it. Isn't that the essence of America? And will it last forever? No, probably not. That doesn't mean it was a failure or that it wasn't worth doing.

> I wonder what the end game is

I don't know, it's like a massive catch-22. People are sick of police abuses, but society needs police to some extent. I agree with much of what the protests are about, but struggle with their solutions.

But if you look at the numbers, police abuse has gone down. There were 1007 shootings by US police last year. Yes, that's still terribly high, even per-capita, for a high income/developed nation, but police departments have been embracing body cameras.

If you watch YouTube channels like Donut Operator where people do police breakdowns, a lot of people .. really do deserve to get shot. Body cameras also make it way easier to get rid of police who are psychos who shouldn't be on the force, and can help push back against police unions.

Body cams are great solutions, and we're already seeing departments firing people who turned them off in bad faith (mostly due to these protests). Maybe more money should be diverted to training and wages, and less to equipment and vehicles?

I think there were already a lot of positive changes, and this whole set of protests may give us more. By disbanding or defunding the police is an absolutely crazy idea, that I think the vast majority of Americans do not support.

I get it. I hated cops in my 20s. I hated speeding tickets and saw friends get busted for pot and minorities get pulled over a lot. But a lot of that changed via policy. Pot is less of an issue in many places, and legal in several states. As far as people calling the cops on people (one of my good friends, black, had a neighbour call the cops on him, while he was jogging in his own neighbourhood, where he was a home owner)... yes that's racism, but not from the police; from a person in his community. That said, I have seen neighbours pulled over and searched in Cincinnati and it seemed like it was totally because they were black in a cheap car. shrug

I no longer hate cops. I've seen some do really amazing things for people they didn't need to. Yes there are probably 8%~10% that are psychos and I think most officers wish they could get rid of those people from their ranks too, but hating police just for hating police is childish. All these people calling for disbanding feel like they're just children.

> Maybe more money should be diverted to training and wages, and less to equipment and vehicles?

The police in my town make more than I do. NYPD officers make way more than I do and get sweet benefits I will never enjoy. In return they act petulant and ignore their duties whenever someone forces them to apply less than brutal tactics to non-threatening people.

They need comprehensive retraining and removal of the problem cases.

I grew up in a small city in Tennessee. I remember reading about a cop whose income topped out at $38k when he retired. I was making $45k in my 2nd job, in my 20s, only a few years out of college. Sure my job probably required more knowledge, but I'd argue his was more dangerous. I dunno .. there are a lot of trade-offs and it varies greatly per municipalities. Not all police departments in all cities and counties can be lumped together under the same metrics.

Depends on the city of course, but a lot of officer compensation is in the form of overtime, pension, early retirement, and other benefits.

85k for almost 6 years of experience in New York is pretty severely underpaid.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...

How so? The median individual income in New York City is $50,825 [0].

[0]: https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-nyc#:~:t....

> There were 1007 shootings by US police last year.

Shootings aren't the only abuse. When a cop shoots their weapon, there is a bunch of paperwork, body cameras get reviewed, lies have to be created to cover it up, etc etc.

Lesser forms of violence get little or no scrutiny. The officer who killed George Floyd didn't have didn't have any problem with sitting on his neck for nearly 10 minutes and his partner didn't see fit to stop him even though the 2 rookies with them and multiple witnesses tried (verbally) to get him to stop. It's pretty clear the Floyd arrest was not that unusual for this guy.

The other big problem is "Discretion". Cops are encouraged to pull people over for random things and what happens after people get pulled over varies greatly based on who you are. If you are black, a broken tail-light pull over can quickly turn into a vehicle search and escalate from there. This hasn't improved either.

> Yes there are probably 8%~10% that are psychos and I think most officers wish they could get rid of those people from their ranks too,

The problem with the "Bad Apple" theory you espouse is that in so many cases the other officers at the incident, the police department, and the union are perfectly willing to circle their wagons and cover up for the Bad Apples. Cops refusing to stop bad cops and lying to protect them is super common. It's become clear that so long as cops are policing cops, the bad apples will remain.

> but hating police just for hating police is childish. All these people calling for disbanding feel like they're just children.

I suspect the people who hate cops, hate them for a good reason. Likewise, I suspect the people who call for disbanding cops honestly feel like it's the best solution to a difficult problem. Yes, some cops do amazing things for people... but for a lot of people an encounter with the police is literally the most dangerous experience of their lives. In order to address this problem, you need to fix that last bit or we're going to see this problem over-and-over again.

> Yes there are probably 8%~10% that are psychos and I think most officers wish they could get rid of those people from their ranks too

I personally don't think it's even close to that high. We never see a denominator; how many millions of police interactions are happening that we just don't hear about because nothing went badly?

How do you count bad-apples?

Are we just talking about the guys who actually murder people in custody, or do the ones who beat the crap out of them or rape them count also?

Also, do we count the cops who lie and cover up for the abusive cops as bad apples or are they just like neutral apples? If these complicit cops count as bad-apples, then we're talking something like 60-70% of the force.

And it's that last category is the one that concerns me because ultimately so long as the whole "Brothers in Blue"/ "Snitches get Stitches " attitude is pervasive in police culture, it's going to be impossible to root out the actual psychos. "Good cops" are willing to cover up for bad cops, the DA won't prosecute cops, judges take cops word at face value... so long as that exists, this problem exists.

I don't think people hate police just to hate police. Here is Dave Chapelle's "8:46" video:

https://youtu.be/3tR6mKcBbT4

The endgame is a radical re-think of society, and how society is funded. You've probably seen "defund the police" as a slogan bandied about lately -- police departments have been taking an ever-increasing chunk of city budgets, while education and other social services have either remained at the same funding level or have been cut. Spend less money on the state's monopoly on violence, spend more on reducing the need for violence.

Not according to marginal revolution[1] who presented a graph showing it remaining flat relative to other spending

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/ha...

They apparently also did it in Camden, NJ, and that turned out quite well.

I think the real issue here is: the police want to show that without them, things turn to chaos. Instead, they show that with them, things turn to chaos. Meanwhile, the protesters want to show that without the police, things are peaceful, and they seem to be succeeding.

That's not a great story for people who believe in police brutality, of course.

And yes, if the entire police department believes that they need to use force to dominate the American people, they refuse to stop when ordered to by the civilian government, and resist change, then disbanding the police and starting over with a better organised police force might not be such a bad idea at all.

It's not easy, and it's important to quickly have some alternative to fall back on, but when it's the police itself that's part of the problem, something needs to be done about that.

> Camden, NJ

People keep brining up Camden, but in that instance, didn't the State Troopers still maintain control of the area during the transition?

From a political perspective, "disbanding" will most likely mean just making existing cops re-apply for their current roles (like how TVA did mass layoffs and rehires in the 90s).

I'm still convinced actual disbanding, without a security force in the interim, will be straight up disastrous.

Some other, less toxic police force during the transition seems totally fine to me. Didn't State Troopers also take over at some point in Ferguson?

I don't know what state troopers in Minnesota or Washington are like, but having them step in during the transition while those cities rebuild healthier police forces, sounds like a reasonable idea.

Though I'm not convinced it will actually be disastrous to do without police, or with dramatically reduced police, for a short period.

>They apparently also did it in Camden, NJ, and that turned out quite well.

This is an appalling misunderstanding of what really happened in Camden. Take a trip there, know what you'll find? Police cars, policemen and police stations. THEY STILL HAVE POLICE! What they REALLY did was a police reboot, essentially fired everyone and rebuilt from the ground up. People who point to Camden to try and support their narrative are dangerously misinformed.

The city is maintaining a row of porta potties, and someone rented one privately a block or so away. Some businesses are opening their restrooms too. As of this evening I saw at least three soup kitchens, two well equipped aid stations, a community garden plot with zucchinis and other food, a row of freshly planted trees, planters of decorative plants which double as barricades, and lots of barricades. Half of that wasn't there yesterday.

Pretty sure the community garden plot was there before the protests.

Bit ironic that they are building a wall to protect their community.

Sounds a lot like Occupy

That comparison kinda worries me. Occupy had some hygiene issues and did not have a coronavirus to worry about.

The city has put in Port-a-potties and there are maps of nearby businesses friendly and with restrooms. Iirc, there is also some sort of plan for trash collection.

The coronavirus bit still isn’t good, but the city has learned for the hygiene bits.

I was just down there and saw a volunteer with a trash stick cleaning the streets. Seems like a good culture.

worries? its the most accurate obvious observation

It seems much less densely populated than the various Occupy camps ever were. Also their relationship to the cops seems 100x less adversarial given SPD has willingly abandoned the area.

the people involved in this have a very adversarial relationship with SPD, which is likely a big part of the reason SPD abandoned the area.

but the fundamental nature of these people are live and let live. So i'm not surprised at all that the area is doing fine and is perfectly safe.

Occupy was in a pretty tiny little park, that was stuffed full of people. You could barely walk through it - you had to step over people sitting on the ground.

CHAZ is multiple city blocks. I doubt it's comparable in terms of hygiene.

This iteration of the Black Lives Matter protests has a lot in common with occupy. The main difference seems to be that this time the protests and direct action are actually causing the intended change in society, which as a cynical person that loves the aesthetic of protest, is really beautiful and surprising.

> The media coverage of it is WILD

I live 7 blocks away from "the zone" and can confirm, I have never in my life seen anything alike in this regard. The scale of the misinformation being spread in social networks and news media reached a level I couldn't believe possible before. Seriously, it's beyond absurd.

If anyone is interested, I have been taking some pictures of the ongoing protests (including a few of the zone): https://www.flickr.com/photos/peramides

Were you around for Occupy, can you compare?

Very similar.

Unfortunately not here in Seattle.

got a URL that doesn't require an account?

this url (maybe they updated it) does not require an account

You're right. What actually happened is it opened in the Flickr iOS app, to which I hadn't logged in. (Poor UX, giving new visitors a much better experience than logged-out users w the mobile app installed.)

Nop sorry, but I'm surprised that Flickr asks you for one! I wonder if it's some sort of geographical restriction.

What actually happened is it opened in the Flickr iOS app, to which I hadn't logged in. (Poor UX, giving new visitors a much better experience than logged-out users w the mobile app installed.)

It looks....empty. Thanks for taking these - looks nothing like the media portrays it.

BTW - love the church picture (I think it’s the one in Spain?)

Thanks! I'm not sure which one you are referring to (maybe Sagrada Familia?) but yeah, they are all in Catalonia :)

I saw the archway and thought it looked very similar to Seville cathedral! But the tower is nothing like Seville, it's much more modern.

Sagrada. Very cool church. Must have been fun to photograph.

I'm also about that far away and walked through there last night. It felt more like a summer street fair festival. I also took a few pictures. https://photos.app.goo.gl/UN8RpwWS5TYAY5Nn7

But then there's also this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaQyClgU4AEJnWf?format=jpg&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaQyCmMUEAEn_1o?format=jpg&name=...

I've not before seen a summer street festival where armed militias wearing bulletproof vests patrol the streets.

How many summer festivals have you been to where to people in charge are at risk of being attacked by armed white supremacists?

Putting aside the question of who is going to attack these people, that's my point. It's not a summer festival.

That's just a plate carrier, with no plates in it. It won't stop a bullet, definitely not a rifle round. Maybe he has some soft armor jammed in there but doubtful based on the rest of his "I bought this from the local gunstore 3 days ago setup."

You cannot buy a semiautomatic rifle in 3 days in WA. There is a minimum 10 day waiting period.

You could buy the pieces and build it yourself, but you'd need some tooling.

Yes, you're correct and it's a good clarification. Thanks. The rifle in this photo is definitely purchased and would've been subject to the waiting period you mention.

I was being a being a bit sarcastic about his gear being brand new and forgot about the relatively new laws as part of my joke. :)

True, I'm being needlessly pedantic here :)

And who knows, they could have bought the parts and assembled it, if they can find things in stock somewhere.

Looks like a completely stock S&W M&P 15 Sport II, 16” barrel, GI style mag, collapsible stock, plus a cheap airsoft optic.

M&P 15 is a complete knockoff of US military M4/M4A1 carbine, except barrel is longer and has no full auto function to comply with regulations.

Way too boring configuration to build from parts or build out of an 80% blank, and also probably not an airsoft.

Disclaimer: I’m an airsofter outside US at best in the context

You got this backwards, an M4 is actually a knock off of the AR-15. That is to say the AR-15 came before both the M16 and the M4 and both of those guns were built from the AR-15.

I mean that pictured gun is an M4gery isn’t it

Sure? If you mean it's probably a 16" with a carbine-length gas system, tube-like handguard that probably isn't floated, and a carbine stock, that looks about right.

It's kind of an ill-defined term, and doesn't really mean that it was purchased whole. It could easily be a stripped lower + lpk + complete upper, or complete lower + complete upper. Either of those sidesteps the 10 day waiting period, and it's about the same price - you can get a lower+lpk with buffer tube and halfway-decent buttstock for something like $120, or you can buy a complete lower for about that same price.

Assuming you just buy a stripped lower and not an 80% lower, assembling requires minimal tooling - a couple roll pin punches, a hammer, some pliers, a hex wrench, and maybe another wrench. A vise grip makes it easier but isn't strictly speaking required. Takes like an hour or two even if you have no idea wtf you're doing.

That said, I agree it's probably more likely they bought it whole, or bought a lower+upper and just slapped it together (which takes 5 seconds and zero tools).

What's the waiting period on rifles looted out of stores, cop cars, and police buildings?

I truly don't understand the problem here. Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine?

You draw a false dichotomy. Nobody in this thread said that armed protestors or the police aren't scary.

I'm not drawing any sort of dichotomy; I'm just asking for an explanation as to why this is notable.

I expect that someone with an assault weapon and what looks like a bullet proof vest is scary for quite a lot of people. And that's notable in the sense that is goes against the idea of "a peaceful event similar to a music festival" (paraphrasing).

But you see stuff like that at music festivals as well, in the form of police. So I'm asking why this is scary or notable but that is not.

The only big music festival I've been to is Sasquatch (twice). I certainly did not see people with assault rifles there. Which festivals are you talking about?

Police and security at festivals almost never take guns into them (it's almost always private security) as the chance of someone taking their weapon in the chaos is too high and discharging a firearm in a crowd has a high chance of hitting a bystander. Pepper spray and batons are standard practice (though, of course, there are always bad actors. These are the exception, not the norm).

EDIT: Sorry. I should have stated that this is for liability issues more than any other reason, not out of any "goodness of the heart". Though, given the opportunity, most people will do the good thing rather than the out right psychotic thing, clinical testing has shown.

Just my personal opinion: I’m from a european country, so not a US perspective. Anyone with a weapon is scary as hell. I avoid to come close to any military or police people if they seem to be armed.

Also I don’t know how are festivals in the US, but I’ve never seen armed cops at one, and would be really uncomfortable if there would be some.

> Anyone with a weapon is scary as hell. I avoid to come close to any military or police people if they seem to be armed.

I agree. But most people who have been claiming that "CHAZ is being ruled by warlords" (or some similar permutation) are the same people who were totally fine with armed anti–lockdown protests at government buildings a month or so ago. They're the same people who have sided with the police as they attack peaceful protestors in the name of "law and order".

My presumption was that the OP basically shares these views. So I'm simply trying to understand why this one guise of "person with a weapon" is especially scary but others are not.

> are the same people who were totally fine with armed anti–lockdown protests at government buildings a month or so ago. They're the same people who have sided with the police as they attack peaceful protestors in the name of "law and order".

I didn't see where this person up thread was fine with the anti-lockdown armed protesters or claimed to side with the police attacking peaceful protesters. Can't those things be wrong and having local warlords in charge also be wrong?

All police are armed in the US and Canada, and police doing crowd control is fairly common. I can think of a few where it was entirely private, but every "aboveground" festival I've gone to has had armed police.

The policeman is a trained and vetted, albeit imperfectly, professional standing in a venue, the likes of which you've encountered many times. That policeman's goal is (highly likely) to keep order at the venue and collect a paycheck.

Contrast this to armed anarchists, anti-fascists, whatever, occupying city blocks as part of an organization that's connected to street violence and looting. The CHAZ guard, hasn't been trained and vetted and you don't know what his goals are and you haven't experienced it before.

As others have noted, it's a bit of a false premise to ask "Why are we scared of these people but not those other recent protests?" Because, of course, you assume people weren't scared by the other protests, which is not necessarily the case. Imagine someone who worked in one of the government buildings that the end-lockdown people occupied, there are now a hundred guys with masks and rifles occupying the building - is that imaginary worker scared or disturbed, and can you see why "But you aren't scared of the armed courthouse guards" isn't exactly equivalent?

I've never seen police wearing armour with rifles at a music festival.

Your experience of music festivals and heavily armed people going hand in hand is not universal.

You don’t see a police officer at a music festival in the US with an AR-15. In fact in california (yes seattle) that specific rifle has been under attack for private ownership for a while with such things like “that gun is only meant to kill efficiently, no person needs one”. So, while not entirely on subject, I have a question as to what changed and why now the same groups of people trying to get this rifle banned are now walking the streets with them.

"There are no armed guards", "It felt more like a summer street fair festival" picture of armed guards with semi-automatic rifles "Why do you think this is notable?"

There are armed guards in everyday life as well (police). So again, why is this especially scary or notable?

Because this entire subthread is about some claims that people are misinformed about CHAZ, including:

> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards

Armed protesters aren’t scary. The fact that armed protesters managed to occupy a statehouse was confirmation that we still live in America.

People aren't just scared of the idea of armed police, they're afraid of police departments who have a history of getting away with murder. John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt don't have that history.

There were also rumours of proud boys and other far-right groups attacking CHAZ. It's understandable that people would be more comfortable with vocally anti-fascist gun clubs defending them than the police, who often treat the far-right as friends.

can you describe what you mean by “proud boys”? I have a bad feeling this word should actually be “patriots”

A downvote and no answer. Interesting

It’s possible you were downvoted without being answered because it’s trivial to Google “Proud Boys”. Here, I’ve just done it for you and here’s the first link: the Wikipedia page on the group —- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys

Fair enough, but with a name as generic as “proud boys” and given this same phrase is being used negatively to describe people who are actual patriots you can see the confusion. TIL “proud boys” is an actual, far right, org.

What makes these people dangerous and scary is that they're carrying dangerous and scary weapons. The flak jackets and face masks aren't making it any less scary either.

Personally, I'm not afraid of the police, of protesters, of armed militias, etc. I'm afraid of people with guns. Why does anyone carry a gun, unless they intend to use it, once some set of conditions obtain? I don't want to be around people like that, and I really don't want to live in places where they go around on public streets like this.

"Why does anyone carry a gun, unless they intend to use it"

Oh you mean like police officers?

Sure, that's fair — my question is really "what makes this person with a gun scarier than the other people with guns that we've seen lately?"

Nothing. They're all scary people with guns. That is my point. Apologies if that didn't come across.

I think of it like nuclear weapons: it'd be great if they didn't exist at all, but if they do exist and are stockpiled by people who want to hurt us, then the only responsible action is to arm ourselves in self-defense.

In other words:

> An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

> -- Huey P Newton

That's MAD, right? Mutually Assured Destruction. Well, that is the logic of a species that has gone kookoo bonkers bannanas bongos mad and thinks that "let's all threaten each other with total anihilation" is "rational". Why is it so hard to agree to not destroy each other needlessly instead?

Game theory. The instant someone doesn't agree not to destroy, they have a massive upper hand.

this seems to be a common attitude in America. It’s game theory, but you should look more to the nash equilibrium than the prisoners dilemma. Unfortunately it must all start with trust, which seems like the fundamental scarcity in the US

The problem is we have basically 2 "phenotypes" (gross oversimplification) with radically different risk tolerances, one "tribe" is okay with abstracting away their security/defense, the other wants granular control over it.

So there's 3 agents:

1. Government. Trustworthy, until it isnt.

2. "Union" - Trusts govt. Ok with "gun grabbing" because civians with guns make them feel safe.

3. "Rebels". doesn't trust government. Ok with guns - armed society is polite society.

So it's a very unstable dynamic. It's stable at the extreme ends - everybody has guns, or only government has guns - but the transitions are high activation energy states.

And then, what?

Suppose the world agrees to dismantle its nuclear arsenal but a single nation, the great atomic nation of Nuclearia, decides that it will keep its weapons and it will destroy the world unless every other nation obeys its rule. And assume Nuclearia has magickal weapons that do not affect Nuclearia lands, or its citizens. The world refuses to obey and Nuclearia unleashes the nuclear holocaust.

Now what? What did Nuclearia achieve by destroying the rest of the world with nuclear weapons? What will Nuclearia do in a world of its own? Note that the rest of the world is now a radioactive waste where nothing lives and nothing grows. Other nations' lands cannot be annexed and used for farming, because there is no fertile soil left anywhere. While some intrepid souls no doubt long to visit the great glass fields of New York, spending any time outside Nuclearia is deadly and most of the world is a depressing burned desert so travel is pointless and tourism is a joke. International commerce of course is out of the question because there is no other nation than Nuclearia. Any resources, such as metals, gases, fossil fuels etc are limited to what Nuclearia has in its own territory. Any scientific progress is limited to what Nuclearian scientists can achieve on their own, without any input from the outside, given that there is nothing on the outside.

How does destroying everyone else increased Nuclearia's chances of survival?

How do you protect yourself by destroying everyone else?

I was actually talking about gun ownership, not nukes, but it's eerily similar.

You don't glass everybody immediately. Nuclearia basically does a protection racket. Do what we want, or we progressively make an example of you. Each "round" is 1) issue demand 2) if no compliance, respond with N units of force 3) N++ 4) repeat until results. Rebels get the Alderaan treatment. Rule by fear. Either every country decides to let themselves get scorched to prevent Nuclearia taking resources as a last FU, bend the knee, or re-arm. But one well-placed rebel ICBM ought to dissuade Nuclearia from their racket.

Having some subpopulation (police or even military) with guns but not the populace is a similar power dynamic. It doesn't take many "rebels" to make the hegemony think twice about a takeover. But a complete monopoly on power means a "clean sweep" military coup with minimal bloodshed is possible. My finding of the world is that most people just want to live their life and do their thing. So in such a takeover, I believe most people would just fold. But a small rebel % can turn that bloodless takeover into an indefinite boondoggle.

I feel like you need to read the history of at least WW2 again just based off of that 3rd to last sentence.

Again, I don't think that we should threaten each other with total annihilation, but if someone is threatening you and ignoring your requests that they stop threatening violence what other avenues do you have? Fight or flight.

If given the option to run away, you should absolutely do so -- but that shouldn't stop you from learning self-defense in case the 'flight' option isn't available.

We shouldn't have guns, but I don't think that we should disarm ourselves unless everyone else agrees to disarm themselves as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

> Why does anyone carry a gun, unless they intend to use it

Yes, I carry a gun because I intend to use it. In self-defense, if ever necessary.

What is wrong with wanting to protect my own life?

Deterrence also counts. You don't need to pull the trigger on order to use a gun.

For some people it feels dangerous and scary because they're on the other side

For other people it feels dangerous and scary because rhetoric about "abandoned by the authorities" and "siezed by anarchists" alongside an unofficial militia sounds like the state's monopoly on violence being usurped.

The police follow orders from their chain of command that goes up to an elected official. You can petition the elected official, occupy their building, grill them in the media, and vote them out if you convince the other citizens. For example the knee-to-the-neck move was a part of the "orders" in that it was part of standard procedure and it is now being revised and removed. Similarly the tear gas was part of the procedure and has now been suspended by the order of the mayor. This can only be done because of the chain of command.

The people with masks and weapons on the street report to no-one we know, it's either a loose anarchic group or some sort or they report to a warlord. Can you petition the warlord? Occupy their office? Vote them out? This is a regression to the medieval model of governance.

It's all fun and games when no one really disagrees about anything important, but things change for the worse when disagreements start happening. This is how communes fall - either they fail to disagree constructively or they get subjugated by a dictator who forces an agreement.

This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced. The alternative is the violence we cannot influence and that spiral out of control when the going gets tough.

I believe the issue today is that the police are causing violence against the people with little power in our political system. To those people the distinction you are making is without a difference.

I feel like you're taking my reply out of context. Specifically I was addressing this questions:

> Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine?

and explaining why replacing police with warlords is not progress.

Are some classes of people unable to influence the system? I readily agree with that. Are we making our society better by replacing police with warlords or anarchists? I argue not.

> This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced.

The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries. It has persisted across the country, under both progressive and conservative politicians, despite many, many attempts to eliminate it.

If the violent system we have has successfully resisted change and accountability for hundreds of years, how is this a regression?

Police are safer than cars, by an order of magnitude.

The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.

So, empirically, it seems like the violence is occasional except when you go asking for it and the protestors just have a problem with authority and society at large.

It’s why their complaints are big on individual sob stories but lacking statistics to back them up.

> Police are safer than cars,

For whom and per...what? Encounter? Mile traveled with them?

> The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.

That suggests to me that either your perception of provocation or of anomaly is skewed (or that “anomaly” is used in the software sense of “behavior out of line with spec” rather than the more general sense of “behavior out of line with what is normal”.)

> So, empirically,

You just recounted what is, by the terms used, your subjective impression, and termed your conclusion built on that (which go far beyond what is justified even if that impression was undisputed fact) “empirical”.

That’s...not what that word means.

Per arrest to one year of driving: you would have to be arrested ten times in a year for your risk from the police to match your risk driving a car that year.

Per arrest for violent crime (where most of the deaths occur), blacks are safer than whites.

I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops.

Show me any evidence that there’s an endemic problem of violence — because nothing I can find in either statistics about harm or footage from protests suggests there is.

That’s an empiric conclusion: studying the statistics about how often police harm people and comparing them to other sources of risk — which show they’re relatively minor.

The tech industry is trying to get rid of cars as we know it by inventing self-driving technology, so I'm not sure how germane they are to this conversation. Can we not work towards addressing multiple causes of death in society?

It doesn’t seem minor compared to other countries police forces. Why should being killed by the police be acceptable as long as the risk is lower than that from traffic?

Because we need laws and punishments to enforce those laws. What other countries have a population as diverse as the US and then let’s see some stats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Seems the problem is approximately 90 times worse (!) than the UK for example. The UK is somewhat less diverse, but what has a diverse population got to do with it? That might explain some of the killing, but it doesn't justify it.

What does this comparison have to do with anything though? Traffic deaths are themselves dwarfed by deaths from cancer and heart disease. So what?

> I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops.

That's funny, because the majority of the clips I've seen have unprovoked or inappropriate responses from the police. Seattle alone [0] has had numerous incidents. It's trivially easy to see this, to the point that one would have to ignore many incidents to say "every instance" was started by protestors.

I believe that you are not arguing in good faith.

[0]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...

Can you elaborate on which of those clips you find that the police initiated or acted inappropriately?

The first one is what we should want to happen — a misplaced knee was moved by a colleague. There’s no context to decide if police inappropriately started an altercation. There’s no extended period of a knee on someone’s neck.

The second is police responding to someone on the ground fighting them and physically resisting arrest.

The third is pepper spraying a crowd that was refusing to move and let the police form a line, after someone lunged at the police.

The fourth is completely context free, and while unfortunate that a child was there, it doesn’t give us context to judge.

Your source also is using selective clips, that remove context to focus on emotionally triggering scenes.

So because not every clip has the full context wrapped up in a pretty bow, they're impossible to evaluate? To meet your level of standards, every single person would have to be recording video 24/7 and attach a written summary to every video. People don't really record things until a situation arises, so while we should take caution to understand the preceding events, we can evaluate things with the current information presented.

Blindly chanting "there's no context" to every single video is problematic at best; it's a dog-whistle for cop apologists at worst.

We have videos of cops shooting projectiles at people on their own private property; cops approaching people who are walking away and just shoving them or beating them up for no reason; cops driving vehicles (or horses) into crowds or towards pedestrians; et cetera. One needs to be adamantly ignorant in order to believe that every single instance has been instigated by protestors.

Saying "protestors started every instance of violence" and now going "wait, we need the context to judge these videos" makes me believe you have zero intent of approaching this from a viewpoint other than one that vilifies protestors and glorifies cops.

> The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries.

I feel like these statements need to be qualified to be useful.

Has the level of police violence over the years gotten worse, gotten better, or stayed roughly the same?

How does the overall levels of violence compare to places without an organized police force?

> Has the level of police violence over the years gotten worse, gotten better, or stayed roughly the same?

I understand why some people’s initial instinct is to believe this is a new problem, but groups have been desperately trying to get people’s attention about police violence for decades.

Rodney King was nearly 30 years ago. And people were crying for help long before that.

I knew there was a problem before, but seeing things unfold the last week made it clear, this is a much more widespread and a significantly deeper issue than most people realized.

Even with all of that said, I think we would be silly to imply that abuse has to happen for a significant amount of time before it’s justifiable for someone to demand it stop.

You have avoided answering the question you have quoted. It’s an important question.

The point they're making is that the current level of police violence is still unacceptable, regardless of whether it may or may not have been better or worse in the past.

A question – is the problem with police, or is the problem with US police specifically? Do we have the same problem with police in other countries? Canadian police? UK police? Police in EU countries?

If the US police have this problem and other (wealthy democratic) countries don't – or even if comparable countries have the problem too, just not quite as bad as the US has it – what makes US police different?

Racism and racial inequality. Yes, that's very real, but don't think for a moment other countries don't have that problem too – they do. But yes, historically speaking, the US was very much an outlier of extreme racism – few other countries ever had anything comparable to "Jim Crow laws", and the most obvious comparators (apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany) are not what the US really wants to be compared to. On the other hand, my personal impression is that contemporary Americans are (on average) actually much more highly committed to anti-racism than people in most other countries are.

Could there be other relevant factors causing problems unique to US police? I think, everyone is (quite rightly) focused on the racial inequality issue, but could there be other causes which might be less deeply entrenched and quicker to fix? Easy short-term wins?

(My thought: US has more independent law enforcement agencies than any other country on earth – force all the smaller ones to merge – bigger police forces tend to have a more professional culture, and a smaller number of big police forces is easier for the media/NGOs/etc to hold to account than a larger number of small ones.)

I don’t know why you are getting down voted. I think your comments are asking genuine questions

In the US it is believed the opposite - more local power structures are easier to influence through local elections. It may not be a huge problem on the scale of Portugal, but as countries get larger things get worse. Imagine the entire EU having one police force - how do you go about changing anything? In the US you can run for mayor or City Council, much more direct connection.

More local power structures are easier to corrupt.

And I’m not suggesting the US should have one police force for whole country, or that EU should take over policing for its member states. In a federal system like the US, local policing is a state government responsibility. So I wouldn’t advocate going any further than merging local police into state police. And in bigger states, like California and Texas, even that is probably going too far-but one could at least merge city police forces into the county level.

As regards the Canadian police (especially, but not limited to the RCMP) they are no angels. Especially if you are indigenous/autochthonous. And that's because they are fulfilling the function for which they were created: taking land and living away from some people. A quick google on the history of the RCMP, their recent shoot-to-kill policies at indigenous roadblocks, the colonial/imperial origins will put Justin Trudeau's hypocritical taking a knee into perspective.

If you really want to feel sick read-up on the Highway of Tears and the systematic brutalization of indigenous women by Canadian society.

I know there are a lot of problems with how police in Australia treat indigenous Australians (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people), so it is totally unsurprising to hear that Canadian police have similar issues.

On that topic, how do US law enforcement treat Native Americans? In the present debate there seems to be very little attention to that question.

It’s bizarrely contradictory to use democracy to decrease the accountability of elected officials, because no matter how bad the supposedly democratic government is, you can always just say it’s the public’s fault for not voting good enough or hard enough.

On the contrary, I think if a government claims to be democratic, then they are accountable for aligning their policies and outcomes with what the public wants. A democratic government should be actually accountable to the public.

Because these people have claimed territory and held themselves out as challenging the sovereignty of the United States. So the implication is pretty clear, that the guns are there as a show of that sovereignty. Are they serious about using them? Who knows.

Challenging the authority of the police department is not anywhere close to "challenging the sovereignty of the United States". No new state is being proposed, no old state is being dissolved. The people (in whom the power of sovereignty resides in the United States) are merely promoting policy change. Do you think if the U.S. Army marched on the CHAZ that these people would fight them? Do you think there's any chance that they could win? Where is the challenge?

So to recap, these people know that if the US national guard (not the army) marched on them they’d lose, so then what is the purpose of the guns? Shoot civilians? Shoot protestors? Who is getting shot by these weapons? If nobody then why are they there? What law(s) give them the right to enforce the law on their own?

I spent a lot of time in combat zones with the Army, where everybody is required to carry a loaded weapon at all times, and actually, in terms of petty crime, squabbles and victimization, I’ve never felt safer. If there’s only a few people with guns, however, signs of emotional instability make me very nervous.

Summer street festivals often have a police presence.

> I've not before seen a summer street festival where armed militias wearing bulletproof vests patrol the streets.

In big European cities it’s pretty normal to see cops wearing body armor and carrying rifles around such events.

It is not common in the US. In parts of the middle east it’s a daily affair to see someone walking around with an AK or equivalent

This is the point of the Second Amendment: for when people feel safer with random dudes in bulletproof vests and AR-15s providing security than they do with the police.

I know those "summer festivals" from Europe.

Especially the "free spech"-debates and their "diversity" of opinion. I just imagine how it must feel living there for years and not being 100%-OK with your neighbourhood becoming a "summer street fair".

This section of town is normally the busiest part of the Seattle nightlife. They didn't just turn some random residential block into Coachella.

It's right by where the Capitol Hill block party is run, legally and with the city's blessing, every year. That's a major corporate event with _significantly_ more powerful sound systems.

I'm sorry for my sarcasm not coming through ;-)

I was referring to the "block party" feeling of European "autonomous zones", i.e. in variaous European cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Kopenhagen, Barcelona, …, where Antifa/Anarchists/Far-Left "took over" an area/building, with city-officials telling the police to back-off, which created "never ending block-parties".

Growing up there, seeing that it was always the same no matter which city or country, was the best vaccine against their school of thought.

This is going to come to either an immediate or tragic end when someone inside this zone needs the police to come save them. Either the police will tear down the fences and fight whoever they must to rescue this person, or the mayor will order them to stand down and an American is left to fend for himself so that a politician's agenda can be advanced.

There aren't any fences, and the police are currently operating in the CHAS like normal.

From https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/11/43892640/busines...: "And get this—the 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 “you wanna go to detox?” until medical professionals arrived. (Obviously, we should be funding social workers to take care of these kinds of problems instead of cops!)"

Do you have any critical things to say about the zone?

Seattle police chief said on TV [1] that "Rapes, robberies and all sorts of violent acts have been occurring in the area and we're not able to get to [them]."

Doesn’t sound very utopian

[1] https://twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1271291958296604675?s=2...

She said that, but is it actually true?

Besides, one of the long list of complaints is that police are often useless or worse at dealing with rapes; Minneapolis PD had a massive backlog of untested rape kits.

(edit: correctly gendered the police chief, hadn't bothered looking at the tweet)

> He said that

I'm quite sure she's a woman.

Yeah, rape is a particularly lousy excuse considering the poor record many police departments have in addressing rape cases.

In the past week SPD has lied about:

- "Incendiary devices" being thrown at officers: it was a candle - as can be seen by the sticker visible in SPD's own tweets

- Businesses being 'extorted': appears SPD leadership got a false report of this from a local alt-right personality and spread it in their press briefing.

- People checking IDs for entry: streamers have been trying to find anyone on the ground who can substantiate this claim and have been unable to. A small handful of people have been kicked out by being swarmed by a crowd and told to leave (and some more colorful language) without violence. These few instances have all either been counter-protestors or people trying to be senselessly destructive, as far as I've seen.

I'm skeptical of these most recent claims

Why can't people counter protest?

They can. Public officials spreading damaging falsehoods may violate the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments. I believe that is the issue being discussed.

> A small handful of people have been kicked out by being swarmed by a crowd and told to leave (and some more colorful language) without violence.

This sounds like at least an implicit threat of imminent violence, without disputing the rest of your description.

Chief later suggested building some sort of wall...

I would not expect the rate of rapes, robberies, and violent acts to drop to zero unless the area is completely depopulated. However, I think it is safe to assume that there are fewer instances occurring now that the police are excluded from the area.

With what logic is it “safe to assume that”?

Police presence ergo more rape?

Wasn't it the police who abandoned this area in the first place?

The impression I'm getting from this and other events from the past weeks is that the police would like us to believe that without them, society turns to chaos, but in practice, US police turns out to be a major source of chaos, and without them things often turn much more peaceful.

I'm not saying there should be no police at all, but that police should work with the community, instead of trying to dominate it.

The police left because they were told to leave not because they wanted to leave.

It is really not clear at this time why they left. Chief Best claims she did not order police to leave. SPD's organizational structure is such that the police report only to the police chief. However, it was clearly organized — police brought in a rented commercial truck and removed some belongings, and boarded up the outside.

It's somewhat telling that both the mayor and the police chief deny ordering the abandonment. Who the hell is running the city?

The open question is not about the city generally, but the police. "Who are the Seattle police accountable to?" And: good question. No one, apparently.

The question of why the Seattle police abandoned a precinct isn't really a question of who the police are accountable to. Clearly someone who feels that the police are a malign force ordered them to leave. Who had the power and did it?

My guess is the mayor and/or the forces that pull her strings.

> Clearly someone who feels that the police are a malign force ordered them to leave.

I don't think that's remotely clear. No one in SPD's chain of command feels that way and they definitely don't take orders from outsiders.

> My guess is the mayor and/or the forces that pull her strings.

Certainly Durkan doesn't feel that SPD are a "malign force" — she's a former prosecutor and has only been supportive of SPD. Including and especially during the last few weeks. She also doesn't have the authority to direct SPD, aside from appointing a police chief. So she has some sway over Chief Best, but she and Best are buddy-buddy. And Best has consistently claimed she (Best) did not order the withdrawal.

My best guess is it was a political / tactical retreat by a lower-level leader to end the violence and save face. That or union action by East Precinct officers — they just didn't want to be there anymore.

The whole area is only a few blocks. A society on that scale can be peaceful even without any organized police presence, but we knew that already: just look at how any small town or village is run. The problem with larger neighborhoods and cities is that often there is no real sense of community to speak of, so nothing for police to "work with" in the first place.

Maybe there's a valuable lesson in that too: foster a sense of community, instead of trying to control people by force.

My impression is also that many cases of police abuse in the US happen in situations where most of the police officers policing a community are not themselves members of that community, but outsiders looking down on that community.

> foster a sense of community, instead of trying to control people by force.

The institutions that are most effective at "fostering a sense of community" are voluntary ones like churches and cultural centres, not coercive ones like police. Social scientists have known for a long time about the critical importance of this sort of civic and community engagement, but it is often misunderstood and considered irrelevant at a political level, especially by more liberal or radical sorts of politics which often advocate for a mixture of extreme social individualism and a radical redefinition of social groups-- generally emphasizing a simplistic view of power relations over a broader sense of community.

which often advocate for a mixture of extreme social individualism and a radical redefinition of social groups

Additionally, they advocate mixing together people who have little in common, to obtain diversity. That's not conducive to sense of community either, as Robert Putnam's research showed[1].

[1] - https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....

Partly true. Yes, more emphasis in those cultural centres, churches, and other sources of community participation is absolutely necessary. But the police can contribute too. Netherland has neighbourhood cops that try to make sure they're known in the neighbourhood. They try to stay in touch with youths who hang out on the street. They try to make sure they know potential troublemakers and vice versa. They build relationships, which means they can talk, instead of just using force to solve every problem.

> police would like us to believe that without them, society turns to chaos

The police benefit from chaos during these protests, I'm sure the temptation to foster chaos and destruction is quite high for them right now. It puts the protesters in a bad light and reinforces the idea that police are needed.

There are multiple cases where police have been observed contributing to the chaos or just idling around while it happened nearby. Definitely not universal, but some departments are doing the opposite of their job.

You think the protestors also don't benefit from chaos? Neither side is innocent here.

Any time the police are pushed to the point where they use force on the protestors, mass media is then awash with out of context clips of the event, claiming police brutality, drumming up more support for the protestors and their cause. The more chaos, the better it is for the protester's message.

There's lots of peaceful protests every year that don't end in the police using force. In fact, the vast majority of them, before this. These protestors benefit politically if the police use force. So what's the difference here, why do these "protests" result in use of force? It's blatantly obvious to me ..

> You think the protestors also don't benefit from chaos? Neither side is innocent here.

I don't see how your point is relevant here.

Protestors aren't paid with tax dollars.

Cops are getting paid massive amounts of overtime to prevent looting and damage during this crisis and instead they are contributing to it.

From the mayor's public statements, it's clear that there's political pressure to not intervene - it doesn't seem to be solely a police decision.

Nah people who get hurt don’t benefit. One side is organized like a military with command stations and ranks like captain and lieutenant, while the other is just people marching because they feel like it.

Because they are protests against the police, and the police don't like that? Simplest answer I can see

Use of force by police in those protests results in more protests.

So the simplest answer is actually: protesters benefit from police using force. (because they'll get more protesters, more media coverage etc.)

> So the simplest answer is actually: protesters benefit from police using force.

I'm struggling to see the equivalency here. In one case you have cops, getting paid to protect people and property and ignoring that responsibility (or actually participating in mayhem) at no cost to themselves. Lots of incentive to act poorly, little personal consequence.

On the other hand you have protestors who might collectively benefit from police using force at the cost of taking a club to the head or pepper spray to the face.

Not seeing how the two are comparable.

The goal of the protesters is not to have more protests. I'm pretty sure they'd rather stay at home and do something fun. The goal of the protesters is to stop police violence. So the police using force is the exact opposite of what the protesters want.

People in large groups typically don't exhibit intelligent coordinated behavior taking advantage of second order effects without training and coordination. Soldiers in battle require training to maintain formation in violent circumstances even though that's in their advantage as a group. It sounds like you may have a blind spot based on a preconceived notion here.

Yes, I get that, but protests are rarely spontaneously created, they are organized by someone or some group of people.

Have you seen the looting videos where streets of NYC got ransacked ?

> Seattle police chief said on TV

And the media didn't post a non-biased account of what's going on?

It's become incredibly difficult to take what the PD says at face value anymore.

Whether or not the PD is biased is one thing, but it's kind of a joke if you're honestly suggesting that Seattle news media isn't also extremely biased and partisan.

While The Stranger is obviously pretty left-wing, KOMO, KIRO and MyNorthWest are pretty right-wing, actually. KOMO in particular did the Seattle is Dying[1] documentary that was ultimately pro law-enforcement (framing the homelessness debate largely as a problem with judges not sentencing detained criminals, leading to a reduction in arrests as police felt they were useless). Jason Rantz[2] gets a fair bit of publicity out here as well for his conservative coverage of this stuff.

Now I'd say your statement about "extremely biased and partisan" is accurate, but the implication was that it's exclusively in a pro-protestor sense, and that's really not the case.

I say this as someone who lives on the political fringes and generally disagrees with both sides of the partisanship.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw [2] https://mynorthwest.com/category/jason-rantz/?

and the media

How would she know?

How, after all the events of the last two weeks, is anyone still willing to take a police-person’s word as truth?

Because some people are still rational enough to treat individuals on an individual basis.

If that means people are taking the SPC's word as truth because they have priors she's generally truthful, that's sensible.

If people are taking the SPC's word as truth because they have priors that cops are truthful, that's an invalid prior based on how much general lying recent events have demonstrated cops do.

If people are taking SPC's word as truth because they have no priors, that's bias to authority and people should probably employ more skepticism.

Do we have any evidence that the Seattle police chief is generally truthful?

That is a much better question.

> Do we have any evidence that the Seattle police chief is generally truthful?

Chief Best has made multiple false statements of fact just this week, so, no.

And this particular individual has already had to walk back false statements: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...

> The Seattle Police Department walked back its claim, widely repeated in the news media, that denizens of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone are extorting businesses.

> "That has not happened affirmatively," Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the police department had based earlier claims on anecdotal reports, including in the news and on social media. "We haven't had any formal reports of this occurring."

> That contradicts earlier statements from the police.

That's an individual, correct.

My response, if you look, was to a post that posed the question:

> How, after all the events of the last two weeks, is anyone still willing to take a police-person’s word as truth?

That is not speaking of an individual, but of a group, and then asserting claims regarding all members of that group.

Government agency spokesperson says something => most people automatically give it higher credibility.

Of course technically that's a logical fallacy but in practice I don't think most people are used to questioning the truthfulness of official positions by the police.

In fact if we were to start questioning police truthfulness more, there'd be pretty big changes to how police testimony is treated in legal cases.

she also said they were extorting businesses and later when asked for clarification said she heard about it on social media

FYI the Seattle Police Department retracted previous claims yesterday:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...

This is not the first time Chief Best and the SPD made things up during these events, and in fact they have a long history of misbehavior:

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2011/...

Note that in your video Best is not being too explicit on where exactly those crime reports happened, she just says "in the area" while talking about their response times (CHAZ is a relatively important intersection of Capitol Hill and it is causing some traffic). Note also that this video was filmed in the East Precinct itself (i.e. inside CHAZ).

After everything that happened over the last few weeks it is now my belief that they are being dishonest, which is why two days ago I submitted my first FOIA request to learn more about some events connected to the Seattle Police Department.

By the way, I don't think many people here in Seattle believes this is an "utopia" nor anything close to that, in fact I think that CHAZ may be moving away attention from BLM.

Note that Andy Ngo himself, author of the tweet linked in the grandparent, helped spread the false claims that SPD has retracted: https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1270820367573999616

He was quoting the police chief in the video? Doesn't seem very malicious to me.

He refers to his "sources" right in this tweet, which predates the police statement.

Ah, I thought you were referring to the original tweet which has the source video in the tweet. So that separate claim of business extortion is what was retracted by SPD?

So far.

It was.

The Seattle Times [1]: This is a rather long mega thread kind of post, but if you do a ‘Find’ for the headline, it’ll take you there:

Headline to search: Police walk back report that Capitol Hill protesters extorted businesses

For the too lazy to click, here are some quotes:

> That has not happened affirmatively,” Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the police department had based earlier claims on anecdotal reports, including in the news and on social media. “We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring.”

> In a news conference Wednesday, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Deanna Nollette said police have heard from Capitol Hill community members that some protesters have asked business owners to pay a fee to operate in a roughly six-block area around the precinct. Best repeated the claim in a video address to officers Thursday morning.”

> The police narrative rang false to many in the Capitol Hill business community. Restaurant owners said they hadn’t heard any reports of extortion in the Autonomous Zone. On the contrary: Sales are strong and the increase in walk-up business is cutting down on delivery costs.

> “This protest has not hurt us at all,” said Bok a Bok Chicken co-owner Brian O’Connor...

> ” Apart from those sources, Christina Arrington, who heads the Capitol Hill branch of the Greater Seattle Business Association, said she has had “no other indications that this is taking place.” The GSBA “found no evidence of this occurring,” the group tweeted, based on conversations with area business.”

The Greater Seattle Business Association tweeted [2]:

> ” GSBA and Capitol Hill Business Alliance have also reached out to businesses in the area, and we have found no evidence of this occurring.”

Relevant Seattle area Reddit threads [3][4][5], at least one of which points out how the sinclair owned stations are still running with proven untruths. (For those who don’t remember, Sinclair is company who owns TV and newspapers all over the country and were forcing newscasters to read the same scripted pro-trump news in stations across the country.)

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...

[2] https://www.twitter.com/GSBA/status/1271132476329431040

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/h7ecp2/seattle_p...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/h7uf4l/komo_news...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/h78xn0/police_wa...

That's good to hear.

The reports of BLM leader avoiding answering any public questions about where funds are going [1] was already concerning. Having stories on top of it that some of these funds may also be coerced from non-protestors would be a bad look and I'm happy that isn't the case so far (assuming business owners aren't just staying quiet as the physical threats of speaking out still exists as long as the occupation continues).

I really hope focus goes back on positive police reform and avoids these internal distractions like the merits of a burning-man style street parties and silly attempts at building temporary urban gardens or bringing in dairy cows which take real care/time/investment vs focusing on tangible action and strong pressure towards police reform.

Unlike occupy this (the wider movement, not so much CHAZ) has the potential to result in real wins for once and already has a few. This deserves far more support from the supposedly libertarian-leaning right who despise many of these same police policies.

The vegan hippie utopia stuffs seems to be mostly a distraction from that and easy fodder for dismissal by the mainstream media.

[1] from BLM AMA on Reddit: https://preview.redd.it/3ebhf4rrei451.jpg?width=750&auto=web...

Ando Ngo has frequently posted information to intentionally muddy the situation and incite an anger against protestors. As a Seattle resident, my fear is that people are beginning to act on this disinformation from Andy Ngo and others.

Here, a multi-racial family was menaced by residents of Forks, WA. Residents actually cut down trees to block the road.

https://q13fox.com/2020/06/05/spokane-family-harassed-strand...

Here, a police offier's relative drove into the protests, shot a protestor, and ran to the police station.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/08/seattle-sho...

While these instances are not widespread, they are incredibly troubling.

Yeah, that is flat-out misinformation. The SPD has been lying left and right.

The only available public data[0] contradicts this statement by the police chief. The truth doesn't matter, of course; the linked video has been seen over one million times and will continue to be spread, on HN and elsewhere.

[0] https://twitter.com/spekulation/status/1271631384025554944

One of the things you should be learning from these protests is that the police lie all the time, and are never held accountable for it.

Look at how flagrantly the police lied to cover up what they did to Breonna Taylor, or Freddie Gray. This is their standard MO: Lie and cover-up.

The scale of misinformation reminds me a lot of the media coverage of the pre-tanks weeks of the tiannamon square protests, and that scares me.

Yep, I’ve been staying in Seattle with my girlfriend since quarantine began. We live about 9 blocks away up Madison and have been walking around the zone almost daily. Hard to believe how much fear-mongering, disinfo, and straight-up lying I see in every thread/post about the subject.

I'm up north about the same distance. Only bad days have been this Sun/Mon with all the gas/flash-bangs and the sheriff's plane flying loops over the city until the wee hours of the morning.

Since the police cleared out, everything has been much MUCH nicer around here.

As someone who has never been to Seattle, I am shocked by how bad your police department appears to be. Even the LAPD behaved ... well, less bad from what I’d heard.

Flash bangs? Those are for assaulting buildings, not crowd control.

I mean, it's par for the course across America during protests. It's important to remember "less than lethal" doesn't mean safe - I saw a photo of a dude who's eye was.. exploded by a tear gas canister. Forget where that was but it was not Seattle.

If anything's weird about the Seattle PD, it could be they remember the 1999 WTO protests and want to crush them this time. But overall they all seem to be around the same -- very low -- standard

The other issue I've noticed with the less-than-lethal ordnance use is that in order to be non-lethal, they need to be used according to manufacturer guidelines. I've used rubber coated bullets, bean-bag guns, and flashbangs. The police are not using them according to non-lethal guidelines. Example:

Rubber coated bullets have explicit instructions to be aimed at shin height or below. This is because everything below the knees doesn't have large masses of non-muscular soft tissue, reducing the chances of permanent injury. These rounds are designed to hit the ground first, lose some velocity, and skip into crowds, causing pain but not debilitating injuries. I haven't seen a SINGLE video of police using them like this. It's absolutely insane.

I imagine its because all their other training, all their range practice, is to shoot at center of mass three times in a burst. Hard to change in the heat of the riot.

That might explain misapplication during a riot, but it does not explain cases where police appear to deliberately target peaceful protestors or single out individuals like the press. In those scenarios they are either incompetent, deliberately aiming to wound, or too angry to think clearly. None of those are a good explanation.

I would say this is spot on from what I've heard. When emotions are this high ( look at the cops faces when they are exposed ) there's nothing but muscle memory.

I took a class on active shooter scenarios where they focused on that "be careful how you train" aspect with the illustration that a police officer ( no idea where ) once responded to a call where an armed man pointed a pistol right at the cop close range. The cop quickly disarmed the man, but then returned the firearm to the man, whereupon the man shot him dead.

In drilling the technique he used to disarm the man, police would practice in pairs, taking turns disarming each other from the draw. This meant that two officers would stand facing each other, pistols in holsters. One officer would draw, the other would disarm, hold the weapon pointed at the first officer for a beat, then return it to the first officer in order to draw his or her own weapon.

Then when you start to hear about corrections departments sending officers for crowd control... the animal instincts and things these guys are trained for is so volatile.

I think it’s worth asking why the cops are so angry at these protestors. We didn’t see this level of police anger and misconduct during the protests over the lock down, but during these protests the cops appear to be furious in a way I have never seen before.

is this a rhetorical question? the protestors are calling for anything from decreasing police department funding to abolishing it altogether. I'm sure there's a diversity of viewpoints within the movement, but to a cop it looks like a big crowd of people trying to eliminate their job. this certainly doesn't excuse their actions, but it's not hard to see why this would be upsetting.

My gut instinct is that the “abolish the police” crowd, however you define it, got much louder after the violent reprisals. My belief is that a lot of cops attacked when the protests were more about anger over police brutality in general and George Floyd’s murder in particular, which hints to an even darker motivation than keeping their jobs.

And if they thought brutal reprisals were a good plan to keep their jobs ... oh boy. They did not plan that out well. The level of sudden radicalization against the police has been breath taking.

> I would say this is spot on from what I've heard. When emotions are this high ( look at the cops faces when they are exposed ) there's nothing but muscle memory.

I think that's an understandable point of view but, frankly, one of the key points of training (military experience only, but I know police do similar) is to force people to learn how to think and act correctly in high stress situations. If you're in direct engagement with someone trying to hurt you, you do let the training take over. But if you're just scared, or nervous, or some kind of emotional, the point of high stress training is to teach how to remain calm, controlled, and analyze the situation. Civilians may not get that, having not gone through it, but that really is the point.

> I took a class on active shooter scenarios where they focused on that "be careful how you train" aspect with the illustration that a police officer ( no idea where ) once responded to a call where an armed man pointed a pistol right at the cop close range. The cop quickly disarmed the man, but then returned the firearm to the man, whereupon the man shot him dead.

To me, this screams of a notional anecdote to reinforce the idea to train properly, not of an actual occurrence.

That's fair, and understandable. But at the same time, I don't think it absolves them of misconduct. "I'm used to shooting at the body and the head, so I shot the protesters in the body and the head because I panicked" doesn't really hold up to any kind of scrutiny. I know in the military, that kind of excuse would be noted in the court martial paperwork, but not have any impact on judgement or sentencing.

If they choose to use these weapons and tactics, they are responsible for how they use them. In a situation where the officers are in danger of physical harm, they are fully within their rights to go against usage policies to protect themselves. But in the vast majority I've seen, these officers have been shooting at unarmed protesters, not rioting mobs. It's simply illegal, a violation of the Constitution, and a chargeable offense.

I don't know why we have these less than lethal rounds if they are proven time again to be so damaging. Paintball guns leave welts and bruises just fine and don't maim you in the process. Take 30 paintballs to the upper body and you will be begging for mercy.

The complaint from police, especially with tasers too, boils down to that this needs to be strong enough to stop someone on meth with hulk strength. Police already have much more effective tools for this: Horse cop and lasso.

I think over the past few decades, there's been a movement towards increasingly aggressive use of some police weapons. Using tear gas to disperse a crowd is also needlessly aggressive. When I was a kid, Dutch police used water for that. And only when it was an actual riot. I've seen videos of police tasering someone who wasn't the least bit violent, but simply uncooperative. That's not what tasers are for. But if someone is violent, they get shot immediately, rather than tasered.

Police have all these weapons, and they want to use them, instead of first trying more constructive, peaceful methods.

Tasers a great example of the problem of "less lethal" tools.

The theory is that tasers are a (edit: partial) replacement for firearms for cops. The reality is that approximately 0% of cops are willing to draw a taser if they suspect that someone else has a firearm; they go for their firearm too.

Instead tasers have replaced other methods of de-escalation and containment, which is very bad if you're not a cop. Combine this with cops being called out for people experiencing mental health crises, and this is a recipe for disaster.

A lot of less lethal crowd control is about imagery and perception. Water can’t be used on crowds in America because it was used against crowds in the civil rights era so comes with a historic connotation of racism even though in reality it’s safer and more reasonable than CS gas.

That’s a great point. I’m sure CS gas will soon become associated with this round of police violence and soon have similar issues.

High pressure water can cause injuries, especially eye injuries. I believe tear gas is relatively benign other than possibly for asthmatics. Fully agree with you on the tasers though. They should be just one step below using a gun, not “I’m lazy and don’t want to deal with this person.”

Police usage of CS gas killed a woman this week, she was young (22) with no history of asthma.

Tear gas is not benign, it is nasty stuff that has already killed people. Some preliminary research points to it potentially damaging the lungs of people who are exposed to it for a long time, possibly permanently.

I don't think OP said "high-pressure."

On tear gas, CDC has https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/riotcontrol/factsheet.asp :

  People exposed to riot control agents may experience some or all of the following symptoms
  immediately after exposure:
  
  * Eyes: excessive tearing, burning, blurred vision, redness
  * Nose: runny nose, burning, swelling
  * Mouth: burning, irritation, difficulty swallowing, drooling
  * Lungs: chest tightness, coughing, choking sensation, noisy breathing (wheezing),
    shortness of breath
  * Skin: burns, rash
  * Other: nausea and vomiting
  
  Long-lasting exposure or exposure to a large dose of riot control agent, especially
  in a closed setting, may cause severe effects such as the following:
  
  * Blindness
  * Glaucoma (a serious eye condition that can lead to blindness)
  * Immediate death due to severe chemical burns to the throat and lungs
  * Respiratory failure possibly resulting in death

Coughing and shortness of breath are especially nasty during the COVID pandemic. And none of blindness, glaucoma, immediate death, or respiratory failure sound especially fun.

Police used tear gas on my college campus after we were celebrating winning the national football championship. If the army did that, it would be a war crime.

I’m sure there is more to the story than “celebrating”.

LAPD was handling the protests extremely badly to begin with as well. They may have calmed down sooner than SPD did. As far as major west-coast city police departments, both LAPD and SPD have handle things somewhat better than the Portland Police Bureau (PPB).

> The media coverage of it is WILD

Yep. I live three blocks south of CHAZ and it's so overblown. Conservative family from the east-coast have told me they're very worried for me, and I check fox news and see images from "Seattle" of parking lots of cars on fire. Those images were from Minneapolis last month, not even from Seattle.

As another nearby commenter said, last week when the police were here gassing us, throwing loud bombs at protestors at 1am, and having 24/7 helicopters directly overhead, it was hard to sleep. We could feel the gas blocks away. Ever since the police vacated the precinct and "CHAZ" started, things have been so peaceful and safe in this community.

On the right, I am seeing:

- It's called Antifastan

- Warlord Raz is prone to violent outbursts, and is an AirBnb Superhost.

- There are open carries with automatic rifles. They get the most respect.

- Laughing out loud at an attempt to create a vegetable garden. Didn't appear promising.

- Laughing harder at a cry for 'please send vegan meats and soy products, the homeless took all the food!'

My thinking is, the truth is much more clearly painted in this forum than on either side of the mainstream media. I do consider them the enemy of the people for dividing us, pitting us against each other, and creating an oppression of fear. So they can sell more clicks.

> either side of the mainstream media

The “mainstream media” has exactly one side: whatever generates the most money.

Thus: wall to wall coverage of a couple of peaceful blocks without police and almost no mention of the $500 Billion that their advertisers recently looted from the American public.

To see this in action, check out this crappy prototype I built: https://spin.report/

Makes it easy to see how different outlets are doing their best to earn those ad dollars with different strategies (horizontal rows) and to see how their strategies are evolving over time (columns).

Cool site. Thanks for making/sharing.

It would be cool to see your timeline with a site like https://freespoke.com/?q=Capitol%20Hill%20Autonomous%20Zone&...

Those are not automatic rifles, they're very likely all semi-automatic. Semi-automatic rifles can look the same as automatic rifles, visual appearance doesn't mean much. Automatic rifles in the US are much, much more difficult and expensive to acquire than one would think--tens of thousands of dollars usually vs ~$500 for a semi-automatic variant.

Sorry if that seems pedantic, but the media uses the understandably easy confusion between the two to misrepresent issues around gun rights a lot.

The whole 'fully automatic rifle' is such a nothing burger anyway. M4s and M16s aren't controllable on fully automatic at anything over 10m. Watch modern combat footage of any trained unit, and I guarantee you'll see them using semi auto.

My point? Semi auto AR-15s are every bit as effective and deadly as their fully automatic military counterparts. Whether civilians should have such weapons is another discussion.

To add to this, having had quite of bit of firearms experience both semi and auto, the real limiting factors are, as mentioned, controllability and ammo.

With a 30 round mag and a cyclic rate of 700 rounds per minute (AR-15 mods run 700-1000 RPM), you get a little over 2 seconds of trigger time. That assumes you don't experience a jam, which is very likely with an AR-15 variant modified for automatic fire, and because of the weight distribution and recoil deflection, you won't hit anything you aim at after the second round leaves the chamber. So, if they are packing fully auto AR-15 mods, I'd be wayyyyy less concerned than if they were using semi automatic.

> I'd be wayyyyy less concerned than if they were using semi automatic.

In general, yes. To play devil's advocate though, accuracy/controllability is not really needed if your goal is just to spray as much lead as possible into a densely crowded area from, say, a hotel room above.

Such domestic terrorist events are extremely rare, but I would guess in these specific cases where the goal is to spray as many bullets per second as possible into a crowd, full auto + large magazine is going to kill more people than semi auto.

Semi auto fires as fast as you can tap the trigger, they still fire plenty fast. Test out how long it takes you to get through 30 clicks on your mouse. Now keep in mind with the automatic, by your third or fourth shot your aim might be 10 feet higher than where you set off aiming at the start of the burst, and you can see how even in crowds a semi automatic weapon would be far more dangerous as you could control where the rifle is pointed.

Late reply, sorry. I'd say that in the domestic terrorism situation you describe, even someone completely untrained would still be more deadly taking aimed shots than with full auto or auto bursts. With auto, most of those 30 rounds would impact the ground unless they were shooting into a really, really dense mass of people, and even then you'd have many shots that would be grazing or non lethal hits. And by the time the second magazine went in, people would be clearing out fast.

With a large magazine it would be a different story though, you are right about that. This is why I think that it's good to have fully auto by design weapons be illegal (think the SAW, or the M240), along with magazines above 30 rounds.

Regardless, full auto is misleadingly portrayed in media as being orders of magnitude more deadly than semi auto, hard to change that (for example[0]). Nevermind handguns kill more than all other gun types combined, it's the "military" style ones that politicians and media focus on because they look scary (again, also disregarding the fact that a functionally equivalent semi-auto hunting rifle has exactly the same destructive power).

[0] https://youtu.be/VYOjWnS4cMY?t=113

>a functionally equivalent semi-auto hunting rifle has exactly the same destructive power).

I'd strongly argue against this point. Most hunting rifles have 5 round mags (legal limit for hunting in a lot of places). They won't accept 30 round mags. They're also chambered in more powerful calibers which have much more recoil.

An active shooter with his dad's hunting rifle is much less dangerous than the same shooter with an AR-15 with 30 round mags.

The Texas Tower sniper killed 14 with a Remington 700, at up to 500 yards, though he had an M1 too.

> They won't accept 30 round mags.

Why not? Seems like as long as the magazine can protrude from the bottom, you can have any capacity magazine you want.

Have you ever trained with a firearm? Magazine capacity is a useless metric, because you can change a magazine in seconds.

Gew98 was the Nazi’s frontline infantry rifle. 8mm Mauser, .30-06, 7.62mm NATO, those are/were proper military rifle cartridges, just obsolete.

It’s not like WWII rifles had wooden furnitures as luxury items.

Yeah you say that but in a tight crowd with nowhere to go, and enough ammunition, you can do a lot of damage. E.g., the Vegas shooting at a music festival with pseudo-automatic bump stocks.

Each bullet does the same amount of damage, regardless of whether they are fired 0.1 seconds apart or 0.3 seconds apart. (Made up numbers, but a semiautomatic can be fired very quickly if you aren't taking time to aim.)

This pedantic distinction ignores reality. Police response to a shooter is measured in some finite number of seconds. N / 0.3 is smaller than N / 0.1. Slower fire rate matters.

Yea one of my best friends has two fully automatics. He needed to get permits signed by the local sheriff and both of them cost more than his truck. He's a collector and likes shooting WWI and WWII era guns.

But yea, legal fully automatic weapons are not cheap.

> Semi-automatic rifles can look the same as automatic rifles

And the people who confuse the two often talk about banning semi-automatic firearms (which ends up being just about all of them).

> Automatic rifles in the US are much, much more difficult and expensive to acquire than one would think--tens of thousands of dollars usually

Clarification: to acquire legally. It is not nearly that expensive black market.

Yeah that's fair. One could also just make one pretty easily, it doesn't require too much knowledge to modify an existing semi-automatic.

> One could also just make one pretty easily, it doesn't require too much knowledge to modify an existing semi-automatic.

Sure, you can make an unreliable automatic from a semi-auto easily. But it's a far cry from a commercial/military product.

I would check your sources on that. As one example, there are plenty of registered legal “Lightning Links” in the US. They are drop-in fully automatic on many (otherwise) unmodified AR-15 variants. With small exception, they shoot and cycle just fine. They’re literally just one small piece of steel.

One could make [1] their own in 2020 illegally with the hand tools you find at an Ace Hardware Store.

[1] - http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/pdf/fast_bunny.pdf

Yeah, not that expensive to get illegally if you're fine with the ATF shooting your wife and dog.

For sure there are negative externalities; I wouldn't recommend it! I also wouldn't recommend dumping new car money into a legal automatic weapon.

Just think of the ammo costs!

I hate the laughter at the vegetable garden. Oh lets mock people for planting what could be food where it used to a a useless piece of turf. We shouldn't be mocking them we should be following their example across the country.

It wasn't a useless piece of turf, it was a park that the residents of the neighborhood, myself included, used to be able to enjoy. Now we can't, because hundreds are camping on the area.

I am all for their cause, but I feel like the methodology of 'camping in a park' is not the right way to enact civic change at a policy level.

So if the whataboutism of sleeping in the park were removed we could have a discussion about sharing the use of the park?

You can't go to the park, because it's too crowded, because people are gathering there to enact change.

I'm sorry, I simply disagree as to the role of public space in a free society -- them occupying the park is the LEAST objectionable thing about this.

How is occupying the park enacting change?

I thought the meetings with the mayor were excellent, but via this avenue, all they are doing is changing the park.

There's a whole city out there where cops still operate under the same laws they have for many years. Protesters should try and change _that_, imho.

That's exactly what the protesters are fighting for. Protests are almost by definition inconvenient to some people.

Finally! An actual resident speaks up.

Interesting how divergent the actual residents feel vs everyone else

Clearly this is a "fantastic idea" and "summer carnival feel" until they do it right on your back yard

How about these occupiers propise taking it to the area or zone they actually live in?

We mocked them because they didn't dig up the turf first before dumping the potting soil on top and planting things that are going to wash away into the nearest storm drain in the first heavy downpour.

Look up sheet mulching. They did that poorly rather than doing the wrong thing in an absolute sense as you suggest.

> - Warlord Raz is prone to violent outbursts, and is an AirBnb Superhost

That sounds like a phrase from a novelty D&D campaign or some form of parody. What an odd year it's been.

I live less than half an hour’s journey away but seemingly most of the people on my neighborhood facebook pages believe Fox News’ reporting more than their own neighbors photographs and videos. They refuse to even drive over there to see what is going on, so certain they are that they are right.

What you're saying is fair, but also imagine that's how conservatives felt for years. The left-leaning media outlets appear to be wildly exaggerating things they want to exaggerate, just as Fox News does on their side. Not sure if examples are needed.

I think the media has been playing this up like crazy to try and get the alt-right to react. The alt-right consensus, at least on 4chan, is the absolute best thing for the alt-right to do to get the Democratic party to look stupid and inept and invite a voter backlash is to do nothing.

This jibes with what I'm seeing. Fox News is trying their damndest to get people worked up and generate support for intervention. Amongst my friends (many right-leaning), there is a strong consensus that this is a trap laid for Trump and that the best thing to do for everybody involved is to ignore it and leave it to the Seattle government. If it really is as chill as folks say here, it settles down and is out of the news cycle in a week. If it gets truly bad, the egg is on the face of the mayor and governor for not dealing with it sooner.

If CHAZ is successful, it'll be a template for other protests.. protestors will realize they can push for "autonomous zones" and it can actually happen.. if protests are battles, now land can be won, at least for a while.

I think that has conservatives (and probably neoliberals) pretty freaked, so they want to hit it like Waco, to snuff out the idea.

The issue that I think a lot of people are missing is that CHAZ paints a picture of " protests are battles, now land can be won" The American people have proven they are willing to turn a blind eye to nasty(evil) shit being done in their name during war. If CHAZ spreads it makes it easier for the right to paint them as terrorist or a armed rebellion. Its nearly asking for a false flag.

CHAZ seems to be a response to a pretty extreme situation. If you don't want these sort of autonomous zones, just don't create those sort of extreme situations. And I think that's ultimately what everybody wants: for police not to use unreasonable violence to crack down on peaceful protesters and harmless citizens.

I agree to some degree here.

Fox, like every other network CNN MSNBC etc most of the left, is simply looking for eyeballs. Thats not new.

What is new is this sort of thing starting.

While it is great to hear from people near, no one is really reporting the residents / property owners INSIDE the zone.

Are they safe? Are they been harrassed? Are business owners being able to freely go about their business? Are customers able to go to them if protesters are barricaded?

You thinking 4chan is "alt-right" and they have a consensus is just as ridiculous as facebook boomer/media reactions to CHAZ and it being Mad Max style postapocalyptic.

4chan sort of has a consensus in that it is contrarian by default. If the right was in power (Congress, media, and so forth), they would be left. The contrarian stance extends within itself in a fractal manner, so of course you have people inside objecting to that.

However, the image I cannot stop smiling at is an elongated figure with an FBI cap, glowing green and using a stick to poke at a small ball with the 4chan logo, with the speech bubble "C'mon, do domestic terrorism."

People often mistake "having their own opinion" and "free thinking" with "being in opposition to the mainstream".

A strict contrarian viewpoint is just as conformist as a strict mainstream opinion, it allows someone else to define your opinion.

So I don't think it's as fractal as you imagine. I think what you might be seeing are those with general principles rejecting the contrarian view because the contrarian view is counter to their principles.

Let's say I like chocolate. But the mainstream opinion is chocolate sucks. Currently, I'm a contrarian. I'm against the mainstream opinion. I get on certain boards and rail against how chocolate is disliked by the masses and how they're missing out. Then, the tide shifts and chocolate becomes popular. A portion of my compatriots who claimed to like chocolate, now say it sucks. Because that's the contrarian opinion now. And I say they're missing out because I still like chocolate. Because I like it for reasons other than mainstream opinion of it. So, while not changing my stance at all, I've gone from contrarian, to mainstream, to complaining about the contrarian stance.

> If the right was in power (Congress, media, and so forth), they would be left.

How much power does the right need before they're considered "in power"? They controlled both branches of congress and the presidency until 2018, and have a majority on the supreme court. Fox news is the most popular media platform, and have tremendous (but not full) control over the mainstream narrative.

This as "in control" as a single party gets in the US.

You have left out a word perhaps I should have included in all caps: MEDIA.

Whose media is the question. A bit under half of the votes went to Donald Trump 2016, and I bet few in this demographic are listening to NPR just like few who voted for Clinton are watching Hannity. There is this narrative among the right that the vast majority of media is left leaning, but given the numbers and viewership of conservative voices on cable news, talk radio, the internet, and the fact that nearly half the voting block of this country consumes this media and votes R, I don't buy the argument. A lot of the supposedly leftist major media articles I encounter read as firmly centrist or even center right to me at least.

On the other hand, you've got CNN's Donna Brazile leaking debate questions and topics to Clinton's staff ahead of the debate. I'm at work so I don't have it on hand, but someone made a really amazing chart of the various relationships between Obama's staff and CNN's staff. I would have thought it was the work of a kook until I began to look up randomly selected relationships to verify them.

Aside from the LPFM repeater stations, largely used for religious broadcasting, I would say that the radio market has been completely captured by the left.

When it comes to the right, they have Fox for television networks and that's all.

> Aside from the LPFM repeater stations, largely used for religious broadcasting, I would say that the radio market has been completely captured by the left.

That's true for the lower half of the FM dial (aka the public good section that naturally aligns with left leaning ideals), but not the top half or AM.

From https://www.foxnews.com/media/highest-viewership-network-his...

"[Fox News] has been celebrating a 44-month consecutive streak as the most-watched network on basic cable and a 218-month streak as the most-watched cable news network, averaging 3.5 million primetime viewers and 2 million total-day viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research."

For terrestrial broadcast television in the US, the pro-Trump Sinclair-owned stations possesses 294 stations for around 75% penetration of total US households.

Also, news-talk stations are right-wing with the exception of NPR and sports.

Therefore, one can conclude the right-controlled media is mainstream media.

I mentioned the media. Fox News has tremendous influence on the mainstream conversations/narrative. Not full control, but I don't think that's a requirement for being "in power"

4chan certainly doesn't have a consensus, but it sure does have some reliable patterns

>>I think the media has been playing this up like crazy to try and get the alt-right to react.

The media already tried this tactic once and failed: with the release of the "Joker" film. Remember all the hysteria about angry white incels? It was as if the mainstream media WANTED a theater to become a bloodbath. But in a lot of the YT comment sections I read the atmosphere was "We're on to these scumbags, everybody just be chill, don't prove them correct."

Yeah, they don't need a ton of help there. Biden's response is to shoot them in the legs, not the chest! The entire Democratic establishment seems completely unable of taking a moral stance for fear it would offend somebody.

Not sure anyone is "convinced", but yes, there are stories of uncertain believeability suggesting that there are people with guns at the "border" demanding ID to enter. Sounds dubious.

Also, that the Antifas are asking for protection money from businesses within the zone. Again, dubious.

But, if either of those things are happening, I'm pretty okay with putting an end to them, by whatever means necessary. Threatening Joe and Jane citizen with violence is not cool.

Did you hear about the ice cream man who goes around town serving rancid rat milk sundaes to kids?

Of course, he doesn't exist, but, if he did, I'm taking a strong stance against him being taken down, by whatever means necessary. Threatening to serve dubious sundaes to kids is not cool.

They don't exist? Why are there photos of them then?

https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/conte...

https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1271196018554494977...

The claims that these militias are extorting businesses doesn't come from "the right", it comes from claims by the local police chief.

Addressing the takeover of the area surrounding the Seattle Police Department’s abandoned East Precinct building, Chief Carmen Best said ... using air quotes, that police had heard reports of armed people “patrolling” the area, which she said was “very concerning.” “Especially because we don’t know who these people are,” she added. And she hinted that they may even be extorting local business owners and demanding local residents show identification.

Chief Carmen Best may be totally wrong or making that up. But knowing these sorts of things is part of her job, so to dismiss it would take something stronger than some mocking denial. Especially because this is exactly what always happens when police vacate an area. The result is not "no police", the result is that militias and mafias step in to do it themselves. But worse.

    Chief Carmen Best may be totally wrong or making that up.

https://www.businessinsider.com/seattle-police-retract-claim...

As it turns out she was, in fact, wrong or making it up.

> "We've heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area."

I dunno. She 'walked back' the statement. Maybe people were making that up to try to get the cops to retake the area? It could have also been absolutely true. Having lived in that area, I wouldn't put it past them.

Honestly, it's impossible to know at this point.

The SPD was probably watching foxnews, reported what they were hearing on fox, which FoxNews then took as evidence that their reporting was accurate. There is a reason they call it an “echo chamber.”

> Honestly, it's impossible to know at this point.

What is possible to know is that she knew damned well that any statement like that would be repeated 10 times more than any later, retraction of those statements.

> Police chief Carmen Best walked back prior statements made by her own department, which have since circulated widely and attracted condemnation from conservative critics of the protesters.

Those same critics have almost certainly not retracted their comments based on her statements. She clearly understands how to effectively feed her biggest fans.

The SPD walked back those statements when they admitted there weren’t actually any reports of such things occurring. Really, I think the SPD was just listening to right wing news sources, who then used the SPD’s acknowledgement of their speculation as evidence in a circular way.

https://www.seattletimes.com/subscribe/signup-offers/?pw=red...

> But knowing these sorts of things is part of her job, so to dismiss it would take something stronger than some mocking denial.

On the contrary, if it comes from Seattle PD it's better to just assume it's not true.

Or the governor, apparently.

> these militias

It's one dude, every single post about the militias shows this exact dude in these exact clothes. One dude is not a militia. There are a bunch of stories about this guy apparently he's guarding all the entrances and still has time to extort local businesses. No wonder he doesn't have time to change clothes, he's one busy dude.

> But knowing these sorts of things is part of her job

Knowing that she has a massive vested interest in demonstrating that police are needed in the zone, I take everything she says with a massive grain of salt.

Notice how none of these stories are ever “this happened to me” from someone credible who provably lives there? It’s always “a friend said...”

> the Antifas are asking for protection money from businesses within the zone

That's one of the most hilarious and absurd things I've ever heard. All of my antifa friends are the most wonderful, gentle nerds. They're gardeners, organizers, history buffs, parents, writers, table-top gamers. It's so bizarre (and shitty) that the public conception of "antifa" became twisted into this nonsensical cartoon of looters and pillagers (and mafiosi now, apparently).

I don't know if they're shaking people for money, but I have seen plenty of videos of alleged antifas sucker-punching people that they think are fascists. There's videos of them throwing rocks at the police, too. There are stories of them setting fires during protests (before the current ones). There are also stories of violent street fights with neonazi groups. To me, it's just as hilarious and naive to think they are all pacifists.

You should watch some of the riot videos. In one, I saw an Antifa kick an unconscious man in the head. My mother, who lived through Nazi Germany, would have understood these people as brownshirts.

Going Godwin? You are the first; something to mull over, I suppose. (I separate your "Nazi" from the "neonazi" used in an adjacent post).

However, as Antifa is decidedly Anti-Fascist and without the paramilitary aspect of the brownshirts, perhaps they would be more closely identified with the Rotfrontkämpferbund.

> Antifa is decidedly Anti-Fascist

I have not noticed this. They seem like a hateful mob to me. Or worse. I'll be happy enough if the Feds just roll them up.

then you really havent been paying attention. most of their activities are doxxing white supremacists.

Seattle is a special snowflake because their PD is actively white supremacist and they regularly have out of town white supremacists harassing the local populace.

I'm happy their doing their thing when government fails so hard at its job.

I suppose the police chief is a white supremacist in black face, as a black female.

> I'm pretty okay with putting an end to them, by whatever means necessary

I don't know you, nor do I know your views on capital punishment. That said, I suspect you don't intend to promote that these crimes justify summary executions.

Consider the realistic logical endpoint of the statement. It ultimately means that it's acceptable for the police to storm the space, guns blazing, shooting (and reasonable probability of killing) anyone who doesn't immediately surrender.

Summary executions are never necessary, so this seems moot.

> The media coverage of it is WILD > People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival campground

This seems like propaganda in its own right. With the exception of Fox and Sky, most news coverage I see on YouTube is neutral or positive:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=capitol+hill+au...

Most mainstream coverage of protests in general seems to be totally biased in favor of the protestors and against the police. The only big channels that show anything going in the other direction are, again, Fox and Sky.

It's wild that the first time I saw this on the NYT was an article talking about Trump's tweat about it. I don't quite understand why they didn't think it was newsworthy

> I don't quite understand why they didn't think it was newsworthy

It's pretty obvious that they do not want to go into detail on anything that would paint the actions of the past two weeks in any negative light. There's no positive way to spin losing control of multiple city blocks, including a police station.

Bias does not have to be a slant in an articles content or writing style, though that happens as well, e.g. including phrases like "mostly peaceful protests" in articles describing looting. It can also be as simple as not reporting things you do not want to publicize.

Fox is by far the most popular news channel in the US and pretty close to bigger than the rest combined.

More details on the numbers. https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...

I was all set to post a comment about how I dream of an honestly fair and balanced news channel, unlike Fox, CNN or MSNBC. I was going to post some outrageous headlines from each site right now. Surprisingly, the front page of foxnews.com was pretty sane and sober, remarkably so — and by far better than cnn.com or msnbc.com.

I am honestly stunned. I really expected Fox News to be as much of a dumpster fire as CNN or MSNBC. Certainly their video coverage, every time I have walked in front of a TV playing them, has been horrible. And I could swear that maybe six or seven months ago I walked by someone with a browser open to the Fox News site, and it was just execrable.

Maybe they are trying to turn over a new leaf?

That said, I still dream of truly fair news channel. Not opinion masquerading as news: actual, trying-to-be-objective news.

Are we seeing the same front page of foxnews.com? The top story is about the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, and the biggest text on the page says "Clueless in Seattle".

No, I do not see that anywhere on the page. I do see '"YOU HAVE HIJACKED THIS" Black community activists clash with Seattle anarchists over BLM message, seized district' and other stuff like 'Washington restaurant apologizes after police officer finds derogatory acronym on receipt' and 'Seattle mayor, police chief deny making call to abandon police precinct.' It's mostly sane news.

I wonder if it shows different things to folks without ad blockers, JavaScript blocking &c.?

Agreed, though: 'Clueless in Seattle' has no place on a news site.

I took too long writing my other comment, but it's all the more relevant given the fact that you were misled by the very article headline that I chose to single out.

No ad blocker, on mobile from Asia, and I see what you see.

Just checked back, it seems they've changed the headline.

Fox News often changes headlines. The original is usually the best/most informative. Throughout the day the headlines seem to get more and more click-bait.

You'll never see a fully "fair" news channel, for two reasons:

- Humans will bring their implicit biases to any reporting they do; I feel like it's better for the reader to make implicit biases explicit, and call out where the writer feels uncomfortable.

- If you try to cut humans out of the loop and replace them with algorithms, you're creating two problems: algorithms will have implicit biases from their creators, and there will be attempts to game and dupe the algorithms.

You can make a fair news channel if you give a news channel the right incentives. You need to create a news outlet where biased reporting is an actual scandal.

The problem in the US is that news outlets are expected to be biased and so they take full advantage of that to make their news more entertaining.

These news channels are driven by add revenue. And divisive, incendiary reporting is the best way to get people to keep watching.

What about wire services? AP and reuters reports are so brief and to the point they read like the wikipedia paragraph that will shortly plagiarize them.

Apart from that, you are perhaps asking for data devoid of biased analysis. You can keep up with current events like this on your own. There is plenty of public data on anything that you can analyze yourself and draw your own conclusions. Instead of reading business news, read SEC filings. Instead of reading about coronavirus, graph the raw data and make your own models. Skip the sensationalist science and health articles, and go right for the peer reviewed article. Open that layer on GIS yourself. Ignore medium blogs and read the actual documentation. Become your own data scientist.

This all takes a lot of mental effort and time, which few people have, so most people actually prefer to read summary articles from biased sources that reinforce their existing world view.

Fox News has definitely not turned over a new leaf. Here's an example from the Fox homepage that impressed you so much. It's about the latest developments from the CHAZ:

"Black Lives Matter protestors say Seattle's autonomous zone has hijacked message" https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-protesters-sea...

This seems like a straightforward and believable article. There's infighting at the Zone because a bunch of anarchists have diverted from the core message about police brutality targeting blacks and other minorities, and now the BLM camp is pissed off. Right?

But wait, even though the title unambiguously states that BLM protestors are blaming the autonomous zone for hijacking the core BLM message, the article instead explains that the quote about "hijacking the message" actually comes from a woman who is speaking on behalf of the African American Community Advisory Council, and she's the one being booed and heckled by protestors.

So what's the African American Community Advisory Council? Probably some BLM-related thing, right? After all, if the title of the article states that "Black Lives Matter protestors" are accusing the CHAZ of "hijacking the message" while the actual quote came out of the mouth of someone from the African American Community Advisory Council, then surely Black Lives Matter == African American Community Advisory Council.

Right?

I mean sure, technically they must be two separate things because they have two separate names, but surely they're closely connected. Just to be positive, let's find out. Type that name into a search engine and click on the first result:

https://www.seattle.gov/police/community-policing/demographi...

Wait, the African American Community Advisory Council is actually a department of the Seattle city government. And they "work collaboratively with the police."

So Fox News saw a story about a city government employee scolding protestors. This employee works in a department that is closely aligned with the police and sides with the police, but because the department has a name that evokes blackness, that was enough leeway for them to write a false headline that intentionally confuses the reader into thinking that this is a story about internal conflict and infighting among the protestors.

Sure enough, the bovine reader comments at the bottom of the page confirm the success of this tactic:

"Even the idiots can't agree. What will they do now??"

"I guess nobody told BLM that you can't negotiate with terrorists."

"Leftists arguing over whose riot it is???"

"Eating their own"

Fox News knows that they can trust Fox News readers to glance at the headline, skip the article, feel confirmation of their biases and preconceptions, and tuck another false anecdote in their pocket to use as ammunition in case they get in an argument with a family member, coworker, or person online.

Here's a reminder that we should never be passive consumers of of a biased narrative!

I didn’t catch this when I looked yesterday, but apparently they photoshopped an image of a person holding a gun into an image of the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone [0]. “Fair and balanced” indeed.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-...

I've heard this explained by a comparison. If you have a block with four burger joints and one taco joint, you'd expect the taco joint to be the most popular.

Not saying this is correct, but I thought it was an interesting analogy.

So one might expect the taco joint to be the most popular.

But explicitly the parent is saying that the taco joint is more popular than all of the burger joints _combined_. Which is not what I would have guessed.

If we are talking cable, I believe it. I haven’t had cable for the last couple of decades, I would venture that not many liberals, who tend to be younger, have cable. If you were going to start a cable channel now, who would you pander to: the audience that doesn’t have that much cable (liberals) or the audience that does (conservatives).

Median age (2017)[1]: CNN 60 Fox News 65 MSNBC 65

From my peer group (around forty), rather than liberal vs. conservative breakdown, I'd say those who reluctantly subscribe to cable are sports fans.

[1]https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/heres-the-median-age-of-the-...

That is only measuring people who still have cable. It doesn’t tell you anything about those that don’t watch cable news at all. All we can tell is that the 60+ group prefers Fox.

I did say liberals tend to watch less cable because they tend to be younger, it doesn’t mean that liberals in general have a propensity for cutting the cord.

Would you have guessed it if there were equal numbers of burger-lovers and taco-lovers?

'Cause despite what it looks like online, the US is about equally split between liberal and conservative.

If CNN was as partisan as MSNBC, maybe.

They’re pretty close, especially in regard to Trump himself. For whatever reason his existence turned up partisanship to 11, on both sides.

...it was nicknamed the Clinton News Network in 2016 because of how partisan it gets.

By Limbaugh?

By anyone. Any "news" network that's on TV is rubbish. It's not like there's a certification or anything.

Anyone who mocks Fox news and then turns around and watches cnn, msnbc, etc, is a fool.

Rush Limbaugh coined that term in 1993 in his book (or perhaps earlier), it wasn't a 2016 invention.

Most people don't get their news from cable news. Fox has a near monopoly on conservatives, and even they they capture a relatively small audience.

fox's highest rated show is 4.8 million viewers.

ABC and NBC each get 10 million viewers for nightly news, cbs gets 6 million viewers. CNN and MSNBC have lower ratings, but there are a alot of mainstream-to-liberal sources of news to choose from. Liberals tend to like John Oliver and the Daily Show over fox news.

And the 11 O'clock local news still tends to get a lot of views, I think more than all of those others put together.

It's an entertainment channel with two hours of daily news.

I'm somewhat confused about the TV media landscape, as there are cable news channels, Fox / CNN / MSNBC, but there are also the big 3 networks, ABC / CBS / NBC, which also air news and are also available on cable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cable_news

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_television_networks

My friend in Seattle told me they put up a wall, armed thugs are shaking down businesses inside and ICE agents were controlling admission. I'm glad to know it's just a mural.

Has your friend gone to witness it themselves? I had gone to the local protest in our city. My next door neighbor, unaware that I had marched, told me that it was a violent mob. She didn't believe me when I contradicted her until I showed her video footage I took with my phone. She didn't have a good answer when I questioned who told her it was violent; I'm assuming it's just wrong information passed along in social media.

Actually no, I called him out about it but he's not that interested about going the 8 blocks East to check it out in person.

Portraying it as some mad max wasteland is absurd, but so is referring to it as even pseudo utopian.

It's not sustainable in any way and there wasn't exactly a democratic process by which the residents of Seattle agreed to having a section of their city turned into an autonomous zone. Though it could be an interesting experiment to do this somewhere, I think it'd have to go through a vote.

> Portraying it as some mad max wasteland is absurd, but so is referring to it as anything remotely utopian.

Why couldn't it be positive? I think it's fair to say that these are early days and there is a general lack of data about what's going on, but most of what I've seen has been pretty positive.

Here's a video I watched from inside: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=610393902995230

I don’t think parent meant to imply it couldn’t be positive, just that the general process of declaring an autonomous zone as was done here has a few warts when you consider property rights and the context within which it has occurred.

I think parent mostly meant mad max wasteland and utopian are both two extremes.

burning man?

Basically. Between covid masks and the music, nice weather, art, co-op style stuff it looks and feels very Burning Man. Which is a popular event for folks here anyway so perhaps unsurprising.

>there wasn't exactly a democratic process by which the residents of Seattle agreed to having a section of their city turned into an autonomous zone

it is still a protest, right? this is why peaceful protest is so hard, because as soon as it stops being violent people find some way to dismiss it. when stuff is being set on fire, the argument is "why can't they protest peacefully", but when the protest is actually peaceful we get critiques like this one.

Protest has to be inconvenient or else it can be ignored. People really don't understand how angry others must be to riot until they've _been that angry themselves_.

Are media being allowed in? If independent journalists were there then maybe more people would know the "truth".

It’s a public space. You can walk in. No one mans the gates.

Then why are they building walls? Why are there armed guards?

There are no armed guards. Some nut jobs did go there with guns but they didn't do anything. The current state of it...think of it like kids hanging out at the mall - skateboarding, socializing, eating and then they go home at night.

It’s awfully hard to tell whether this is parody or not, but yes, media are “allowed” in. In fact, far as I can see on the various vids, anyone can just walk in

This guy certainly isn't welcome.

https://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1271224115576180737

probably they claim hes a white supremacist. i suspect he is probably know by the locals as being associated with proud boys or some shit.

notice how they are peacefully escorting him from the area? its fine.

Seattle has 600,000 people. In a given year there are 30 murders and 300 rapes. One can collect 175,200,000 amateur camera footage of 'an hour in the life of the average Seattle-ite' until one encounters an hour with a murder, or 17,520,0000 such peaceful one hour videos until one captures a rape on camera.

Does the presence of overwhelmingly peaceful footage of average people going by their average days make Seattle at large an Utopia with no crime? Is that footage in itself sufficient evidence to abolish the police and the court system, because, look, there are 17,520,000 hours of peaceful footage before something terrible happens to someone?

It is incredibly difficult to build an accurate image of a large scale group of people judging by a few hours of direct experience. 1000 harder if through footage selected by people with their own agendas. Media coverage, especially audio-visual coverage, is wild because media coverage is simply an inappropriate way to depict such phenomena.

Isn't it also possible that your friend is experiencing confirmation bias because they agree with CHAZ? It wasn't reported until much later but during the Occupy movement, rapes skyrocketed around and among the encampments. I have little doubt that there are a lot of things that are going unreported at the moment which will eventually come to light when people don't feel coerced or intimidated by the community (and they probably will barely make the news, unfortunately.) I've seen enough videos from inside the encampment to know that your post isn't the entire story. Group think is a very strange thing, and sometimes it takes a while of removing yourself from the group to realize some of the wrongs (look at cults/extremist groups.) Again, people said the same things about Occupy, I walked the grounds myself and it looked fine...but under the surface, women especially, were being taken advantage of/raped at a high rate.

Assuming you can believe the SPD, the rape calls are already coming in.

They’ve already retracted that statement.

Source for either of these two statements?

One of my friends that lives in Seattle gave me a very similar description and also mentioned how differently it is being portrayed in the media than it is in reality.

I lived in Seattle Capitol Hill (Harvard Ave by SCCC) area for 10 years and left the state in 2010. I went back a few years ago for a visit and it looked like the homeless population had doubled in the time since. All of King and Pierce counties are completely overrun by homelessness and drug addiction. I remember it was a big deal when they would go sweep out "The Jungle" tent city under I-5 at Beacon Hill. Now they're building tent cities right in the middle of residential neighborhoods.

Seattle and the Puget Sound is a beautiful place but horrible place to live. They have an absolutely useless government that has no idea how to solve any of their problems. So they end up with stuff like this.

Recent events cast doubt on your judgment of the government there. Unlike e.g. New York they have dealt somewhat effectively with the pandemic. Seattle was hit first yet seems to have brought the situation under control with fewer deaths than other American cities. At the very least, they didn't force covid-positive patients into old folks' homes.

There's a pretty big difference between Seattle and NYC in terms of size and population density. Like many orders of magnitude difference. But you're right that NYC didn't handle the outbreak very well.

MSA population: 19M/4M -> less than one order of magnitude

City population: 8.3M/750k -> one order of magnitude

City density: 28k/8400 -> less than one order of magnitude

This is not what one imagines when one encounters the sentence fragment "Like many orders of magnitude difference."

[EDIT:] Normally technical correctness is appreciated? If anyone here really thinks that New York has done a better job dealing with the pandemic than Washington State, I would love to see the reasoning. ISTM this argument from population proves too much; why can't it be invoked anytime New York's performance lags other states?

you see there's a pretty big difference though

They are not the same city, but no two cities are. Lots of denser and more populous cities in other nations have done better. Most of the most serious mistakes in New York were made at the state level; Washington State exhibited better governance. New York at least had some warning that the pandemic was coming. Washington had the USA patient zero.

I figured by "one order of magnitude" you were trying to stress how different they were, but then I noticed you were the author of the post that was being refuted.

Beyond an order of magnitude in population, you have the cultural differences: Low usage of public transportation (compared to NYC), strict observation of social norms, comparatively high number of folks who can work from home, etc.

There was a recent study that discussed the Washington response being so effective because it was based on an assumption that seems to have been wrong: that there was widespread, undetected transmission of the disease starting from the first case in the state on January 15.

The study results show that there was probably another case (or multiple) introduced around February 13, meaning that there had only been about two weeks of community transmission instead of the six that officials thought. But because they thought it had been spreading undetected for six weeks, they reacted very strongly and put in strict measures quickly.

So it was probably technically an "overreaction", but that's what made it so effective and kept the situation from getting as bad there as NYC and other places.

Here's an Ars Technica article about it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/washingtons-covid-19...

And here's the actual study, which also includes a similar situation in early Europe cases: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.109322v1

Well in Seattle, the major outbreak was in Kirkland at that senior center. We know now even in NYC, the vast majority of fatalities happened in senior and assisted living centers. Over 70% of fatalities in Canada, Ohio and other places have been elderly care centers[0].

It's pretty clear this disease wasn't anywhere near as bad as everyone was predicting, and I expect the 100k US fatality number to drop once a year has past and we can put some real data analysis on it. A lot of people have died due to not being able to get medical care too, and those 2nd order effects of these lockdowns will also be significant.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=70%25+fatalities+senior+centers+co...

what other singular event has killed 100k people in the US in less than 6 months outside of a couple wars?

not as bad as everyone was predicting...... are you fucking kidding me? and this number is after the major cities impacted literally fucking shut themselves down to help prevent the spread.

100k is a rough estimate. It might be higher, but will most likely be lower. The data will need to be pruned and carefully looked at. There are incentives for people to misclassify deaths at COVID19[0]. It will likely not get much higher than 100k as exponential growth doesn't continue indefinitely[1]. It's practically gone in Italy right now.

600k die every year from hearth disease. 700k died globally from mosquito transmitted illness[2]. There are tons of secondary effects. People in America have died of Malaria. Many have committed suicide (Including my best friend's flatmate). Many were told not to come to hospitals. Many hearth attacks were wrongly attributed to COVID if a patient tested positive for it.

We've seen massive amounts of people at beaches in Florida, Texas and other places, as well as these protests and riots, and there are no massive spikes in fatalities 2~4 weeks after those events. The WHO said asymptomatic spread was rare, then waked it back (probably because of political pressure from Dr Fauchi), even though it was known asymptomatic spread was probably not a major transmission in February[3]!

This entire thing has been one massive media manipulation, and in less than two days, the entire thing flipped from one global narrative to another, like a switch!

[0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/#incen...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

[2]: https://www.isglobal.org/en_GB/-/mosquito-el-animal-mas-leta...

[3]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...

100k is a rough estimate. It might be higher, but will most likely be lower.

How is this going to happen? We haven't controlled the disease even by shutting lots of stuff down, and the political will does not exist to keep that stuff shut down. After everything reopens the disease will certainly kill more people. There won't be an effective vaccine until a great deal more research is done; that's a decade away at least. Effective treatments such as antibodies will not be scalable for many months. We'll be lucky if we hold USA covid deaths this year to 200k.

You are correct that Seattle has a tremendous amount of homelessness. The rest of your comment doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sweeps - which you seem to be advocating - do nothing to solve the problem; meanwhile you ironically criticize tent cities in residential neighborhoods without seeming to understand that a tent city is a residential neighborhood and it is precisely the periodic shutdowns and relocations of tent cities and similar instabilities that exacerbate the homeless problem by blowing folks from place to place.

I wouldn't call Seattle's government "useless", but their effectiveness is certainly diminished by reactionary voters whose moral/punitive emotions get weighed more than evidence-based science on homelessness.

I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just offering an observation as someone that lived there for a decade and loves the area, but now has somewhat of an outsider perspective. Seattle has very deep, fundamental problems that it has no idea how to solve. Homeless tent cities scattered throughout the county are not normal in nearly any other American city. Especially not the ones as wealthy as Seattle. And maybe that is a source of the problem. But it also seems the political leanings of the voters are at odds with the lifestyle they enjoy in the area.

Seattle also added a massive amount of people and housing went up 2.3x. those economic factors likely outweighed anything the government did by far.

When I moved here in 2010 the cola was 30% more than St Louis. It's now over 3x.

Just wanted to say I agree with you. I first came to Seattle in 2011, and left the area in 2015 (lived in Tacoma for 2 years in that time as well), returned in 2018. I'm originally from the Midwest and I just don't understand why people here seem to look at the San Francisco checklist of "how to make your city unlivable" and decided to go step by step.

West coast boom cities have very similar problems and evolutions (see Portland and compare to Seattle, heck, see Vancouver BC...). No one is copying SF, they are just subject to similar forces

What is your example of a "useful" government in the US?

> Completely overrun by homelessness and drug addiction

I lived in capitol hill for a decade, 3 blocks from CHAZ, and recently moved a mile away. The city is not even remotely overrun with homelessness.

Sure, there are people without homes. Do they seriously impact the lifestyle of others? Hardly at all.

This characterization of the Puget Sound feels way out of touch to me. It's a wonderful place to live.

I lived there in 2016, next to the Rite Aid outside (or maybe inside?) the CHAZ. The homeless situation was absolutely terrible for an American city. Sure it's not as bad as shanty towns I've seen in India or Malaysia, but it wasn't good. Housing was/is insane with shared rooms anywhere near the city being $700 and a 1 bedroom to yourself going for ~$2k. Not as bad as SF/The Bay, but still not good by any means.

Sure it's not "overrun," but there are a lot of them, and not enough jobs or affordable housing.

People complained about homeless people coming into the city for the benefits and I thought that was just a myth the Amazon employees would spew, but I talked to a social worker who told me that's true and that her office dealt with a lot of people who came to Seattle because of their programs and benefits.

I lived 1 block from there, by Lindas until a year ago. What kind of interactions with homeless people did you have to say it is absolutely terrible?

I occasionally saw a homeless person, but that was about the worst of it. And I was out on the town a lot. Oh my car got broken into once as well. Once in 11 years.

I just saw so many of them .. more than I have in any other city in the developed world (and I've lived a lot of places).

I never had any bad interactions with them I guess, but I broke my heart to see that many of them, especially in the downtown areas and further out towards the Interstate and underpasses.

I dunno, maybe I'm too sensitive, but it broke my heart. It's one of the many reasons I left Seattle.

Homeless people exist everywhere. In my Wisconsin city they were out of sight because cold kills. In my Missouri city they were out of sight because we’d just arrest them if they didn’t stick to a few block radius.

Consider: if you don’t see homeless people, it might not be because there’s less homelessness. It might just be that they were driven out.

I've lived in Capitol Hill for 9 years. I've been attacked twice by crazy people. One time it was a physical attack, the other time it was a man singling me and my family out and approaching within a few feet while screaming very aggressively (my family was visiting me at the time).

I'm a large man. It's worse for people who are not physically imposing. A woman I knew worked an early shift job (leave at 3:45am to open up). She was regularly followed and harassed while walking to work sometimes by gangs of men, she left the city in less than a year.

These problems are getting worse because there's literally hundreds of thousands of citizens (you can see them in this comment chain) who will rush to disagree with anyone who raises these problems. I'm well-equipped to buy a house here, but we decided several days ago to stop looking for one. We decided we're going to leave the Puget Sound area to get away from this.

They need a political win on something in the next few days. Otherwise this thing fizzles out, is crushed, or turns into a joke like the 2016 bird sanctuary occupation. Some of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" apply.

⬤ "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

⬤ "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."

That's the problem with "defund the police". "We'd all love to see the plan", as John Lennon once put it.

Camden NJ did do this. They fired their entire police department and started over. Sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes you just need to fire the bottom 1-10%. Maybe give randomly-chosen civil grand juries the power to fire cops. Not just for criminal offenses, just for being subpar at being a cop.

There have been lots of mid-sized political wins for these protests. Breanna's law, Minneapolis defunding it's police, etc. It's sustained distributed action, and some of it is not real (the NYC chokehold ban), but there's still real stuff happening.

None of that is a result of CHAZ.

seattle schools has disaffiliated with SPD in large part due to the protests that led up to CHAZ

how do you know / make that claim?

i guess i might be in a minority but the large scale protests led to these outcomes.

most politicians don’t give a flying forest for an isolated protest that happens all the way across the country. now if this happens in your backyard you pay attention.

so i would say that the protests in Seattle and the emergence of CHAZ did contribute to some of the outcomes (present and future ones). it’s really easy to be cynic and write off the efforts of people that are, in a sense, helping to write history.

I'm confused at your comment. These two sentences seem directly contradictory:

> i guess i might be in a minority but the large scale protests led to these outcomes.

> most politicians don’t give a flying forest for an isolated protest that happens all the way across the country. now if this happens in your backyard you pay attention.

Could you clear that up?

___

I'm not saying protests in other cities didn't contribute to governments in different cities taking action. I do think the nation-wide aspect of the protests helped move things along in Minneapolis/Lousiville/etc. I do think it's mostly indirect, though: I think protests across the country _indirectly_ increased the confidence and voices of protestors in other cities.

You seem to be conflating CHAZ–a very unique form of protest–with all protests. I think without CHAZ, the outcomes in the cities mentioned above would be the same.

Can you cite anyone in a position of power, or even a prominent voice leading the protests, in KY, MN, etc. that directly cite CHAZ?

I wouldn't say a chokehold ban is not real. The jury is still out, but it seems restricting use of force can help: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21280402/8-cant-wait-explained-...

My understanding is that chokeholds were already banned by department policy. So officers should have, but didn't, fave consequences for them.

Theres relatively little reason to think that the law will change that. Other stuff might, but in isolation, officers could continue to ignore the law.

>Camden NJ did do this. They fired their entire police department and started over.

Except that's not really what happened. They fired the existing police force at the time but most were hired back (155 of the 220 that reapplied), and then they expanded to a complement of 401 officers (it was 370 before). Then they built a gigantic surveillance apparatus that tracks pretty much everything. So, more police, more surveillance.

Homicides have apparently declined 63% since they did this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_County_Police_Departmen...

220 reapplied; 155 were hired. Effectively, they fired 65 officers, or 25% of the force, with the stroke of a pen, which is a hell of a bit of housecleaning.

Camden made all members apply for jobs as if coming from another police department, but they had the files of the old department and could look directly at an applicant's job history and see how many complaints of excessive force were present, etc. They purged the worst 25% in starting over and that seemed to make a very large difference.

I’m not claiming what they did wasn’t successful- far from it. I’m pointing out what actually happened because it stands in stark contrast to how the case of the Camden Police Department usually gets cited. I doubt “hire more police, add constant surveillance” is on any of the lists of demands from activists.

depends on how those people are used.

'hiring more police' well that can be argued as exactly what the activists want. if you define police as individuals who help the community with their issues without violence. making sure homeless people get food/shelter, mental health issues are resolved non violently etc.

I'd be all for hiring more of those 'police'.

As for surveillance, depends on the kind. I'd be all for surveillance used for detecting gunshots throughout a region. less okay for audio/video surveillance on every street corner.

>'hiring more police' well that can be argued as exactly what the activists want.

Have you actually gone out and talked to these people?

Yes, I've been protesting with them.

If you're gonna cite Wikipedia, you need to add this:

>Thomson announced that officers would no longer be judged on how many tickets they wrote or arrests they made but on relationships they developed in the community and whether citizens felt safe enough to sit on their front steps or allow their children to ride their bikes in the street. Thomson told the New York Times in 2017 that "aggressive ticket writing" was a sign that officers weren't understanding the new department, saying "handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year can be life altering." On new recruits' first day, they knock on doors in the neighborhood they're assigned to and introduce themselves.

Yeah, sounds like a great idea! I'm glad they did it.

If police "reform" amounts to a prohibition on juicing the stats a la The Wire, increasing the size of the force by 25-30%, and adding a measured and deeply considered surveillance regime then great.

Haven't seen any of the activists ask for that though.

Seattle police vacated the east precinct, fully expecting protesters to burn it down. Instead, the protesters set up an open zone, compiled a set of demands, and from all accounts set up something cool and unique.

Here's hoping it sustains itself for a while.

No, not even remotely "by all accounts". There are plenty of accounts that isn't "cool and unique" but is just another place ruled by violent thugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...

I'm not passing judgment yet since the days are young and the political bias on the ground is thick in both directions. But it is definitely not "by all accounts".

But my personal bias on the table is that yeah, trading police that were imperfectly constrained by the system for new police utterly and entirely unconstrained by the system is probably not going to go well. The real "fun" will start when Raz's faction pisses off enough people to form a violent counterfaction and you get a gang war, so give it a bit. It takes time for these things to develop. Let the honeymoon wear off and have this place showing a functioning system for, oh, say, at least a month before declaring victory. Not that you declared victory, I'm just saying, I recommend against getting too invested in this.

It's not as if "a place that has no police" is some shocking new experiment that has never been run before; you've got plenty of places you can look out in the world to see what happens next. It's not a difficult-to-predict progression.

I watched that video, I saw someone coming in and defacing peoples homes. The people filming asked if they had permission, then asked the person to stop. The person refused to stop painting and pushed the group of folks and there was a scuffle that ended with the tagger walking away.

Aside, intentionally or unintentionally, calling a group of predominantly black people "thugs" is a common dog whistle.

>and there was a scuffle that ended with the tagger walking away.

That was just the beginning of the confrontation. If you watch the full video the group then followed and hassled the tagger for several minutes before the tagger was hit in the face and had their glasses broken (and their smartphone was stolen from them). Someone also threatened to blow the taggers brains out.

A handful of incidents like these are being distorted and blown up by media that treats cop lies uncritically. In comparison, just a few nights ago, cops were beating people and filling the area with tear gas (banned under geneva convention) and it was seeping into residential homes so badly that even nextdoor is anti-police in that area now.

More relevantly, they were specifically ordered by their city council not to use tear gas and then went ahead and did it anyways, all over the city.

I'd like to think, regardless of anyone's politics, we could all agree that the elected government should have authority over the police.

Can you clarify the timeline? AFAIK the police used tear-gas, then they were ordered to stop by the mayor, then they stopped and switched to other means like mace. Do you know differently?

that's correct, although the mayor (who has been very supportive of them forever, incidentally had Amazon campaign donation $350k) built various loopholes into the initial ban (namely, that the police chief could allow them to start re-using it). so, yeah, not much of a ban in the first place by the mayor.

The Mayor ordered them to stop using one specific type of tear gas -- CS gas -- last Friday. For one day, the police used alternatives including mace, pepper balls, steel cored rubber bullets, flashbangs, and smoke with irritating agents.

However, by Sunday (or maybe early, early Monday morning), the police were using CS gas again at the order of the police chief, Carmen Best.

>However, by Sunday (or maybe early, early Monday morning), the police were using CS gas again at the order of the police chief, Carmen Best.

I did not know that. Do you have a reference to back this up?

Chief Best said so herself at the June 11 press conference[1].

18:22: Reporter: "So, Chief Best, you stood here on Friday and you said it was going to be your decision and your decision alone to use tear gas. Tear gas was deployed on Sunday. You released a video today to say that it was not your decision to close the East Precinct. So who is making tactical decisions right now, for the Seattle Police Department?"

18:51: Best: "So for the tear gas, it was my decision. ... We suspended the use for 30 days unless it was a 'life safety situation.' And that was the exemption. ... The officers felt like it was a 'life safety situation' ... and I concurred."

19:27: Best: "I own that decision. I made that decision."

Here's a press conference transcript from June 7 where they claimed they would stop using CS gas[2].

Here's a secondary source reporting on the June 11 press conference[3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rE4VMjClqI

[2]: https://durkan.seattle.gov/2020/06/transcript-mayor-durkans-...

[3]: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/11/43893335/durkan-...

Thank you.

> media that treats cop lies uncritically

Which media is that?

cable news, evening news, most news on TV. Its a weirdly common viewpoint, at least after the past 2 weeks, that law enforcement officers do not lie.

Oh, weird. I don't watch much TV news, and the online media is playing the opposite game.

that's always been common. the "better" (not really) approach is to simply report "police reported that x, y, z happened" without any sort of critical perspective or fact check at all.

There is a very strong correlation between: local news stations with sizeable real estate interests (i.e., aligned with the interests of property owners, speculative real estate investors, and yuppies interested in moving to "safe, updated neighborhoods" that have been recently cleared out of the poors) and local news stations that print police press releases almost verbatim with absolutely no journalism actually being performed.

For more info: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-54-local-crime-re...

I find it hard to take comments seriously when they make statements that just don't accord with reality.

The media treats cops according to what's best for the story. Lately, that involves being extremely critical of them. In other times when we aren't in the midst of a pandemic, mass unemployment and then nationwide protests, and the story is that the cops shot a criminal suspect, they use euphemisms like "officer-involved shooting." The media narrative today is extremely hostile to police.

So when I see "only a handful of incidents," I feel there might be a bit of an agenda behind that. Knocking down the World Trade Center twin towers and a side of the Pentagon were only a "handful of incidents," too. Not to mention the number of unarmed black people shot by police last year (nine total). All of those are a disgrace, but the sheer number of atrocities that happen are irrelevant to how unjust or outrageous the atrocities might be.

Viewing the media's relationship to police as being simply for or against them based on swings of public opinion is incorrect, it is maybe partially true but there is a strong and consistent bias towards law and order by corporate (private for profit) media. There are numerous reporters in Seattle still uncritically reporting police lies. There are a handful who are being more critical. Guess who has more resources and broader reach?

The "new police" are constrained by a different system than the officers. Namely, they weren't police-trained.

Whether that's going to be a positive or a negative remains to be seen, but that's one of the key notions in these protests.

I'm dubious that the old police were "police-trained."

Trained to be warriors: https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrio...

Worth keeping in mind as well that situations like that likely happened before, but a group protecting territory and chasing someone while police is not around wasn't newsworthy.

> it is definitely not "by all accounts"

By all honest, first person accounts then?

Two stories down in the link you sent, theres a picture of a bunch of people calmly watching a movie in a makeshift outdoor theater.

It sure doesn’t look like the tear-gassed, rubber bullet fests we’ve been seeing around the rest of the country.

Here is an update: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h7f01r/i_was_wrong...

My friends that have walked through the area can confirm.

Why predict defeat?

Why not appreciate the experiment as an alternative to our broken system?

Yeah, it'll eventually go away.

But maybe change will be secured, and there are some ideas that do make sense and will spread or stick around.

Is the worst that could happen worse than the status quo?

You sound like one of the commenters on Drew Houston's Ask HN telling him no-one will pay for rsync.

I think it's going to be difficult to sustain without either strong leadership or strong collective decision making ; my gut tells me it's going to go the way of Zuccoti Park rather Christiana.

It would be nice if it could sustain itself, but it will likely creak under its own weight in a month or so.

Yeah, I expect it'll be an eddy in the river of history and expend its energy pretty quickly. But it has some folks involved that have leadership experience, so it'll be interesting to watch.

One person did try to burn it down on June 12 and got pretty close: https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/06/12/detectives-need-pu...

It will be fun to watch how they eat each other alive.

I would have believed it plausible had they gone outside the city to some secluded area to create their utopia, but it's being done on existing buildings they did not build, and property that is not theirs but I guess their "revolution" is to not give two shits about anything.

I give them at most one more week.

The first (of several) demands reads:

https://capitolhillautonomous.zone/demands.html

This is a fascinating experiment that seems to channel a number of forces bubbling just below the surface for decades. The futile, never-ending war on drugs. Police violence. Lack of police accountability. Institutional racism.

What will be more fascinating is what new political parties develop. These demands are well outside the mainstream, but given recent events, not impossible to see being implemented to one degree or another.

But neither party has the alignment of interests for this kind of reform.

Without a political party, it's hard to imagine how anything changes after the banners and barricades come down.

As someone with close ties to an existing third party, they shouldn't put much hope on forming one and seeing it succeed. The American electoral system makes it nearly impossible for third parties to gain traction. And that's before you take into account that the people most likely to join third parties are also the most likely to be fringe personalities with little mainstream appeal and a penchant for causing internal strife.

> The American electoral system makes it nearly impossible for third parties to gain traction.

That's true, under the existing system. And that makes it attractive to reform the system, to make it easier for third parties to grow.

For example, approval voting was passed in Fargo recently: https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval...

tl;dr -- third parties can't grow as long as "splitting the vote" is a thing. But some voting systems have that and others don't.

I love approval voting. It's so simple, but for some reason ranked choice always seems to be pushed harder when talking about alternative voting systems.

A political party won't do much to change the fact that their ideas are opposed by an overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens.

It is entirely possible that the national parties will never back these reforms, but that local party candidates for city government could see success backing some or all of them.

I wonder if it's bigger than Sealand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

When I look at the list of demands I'm pretty quick to dismiss it. Then I remember how I dismissed the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle too, and how many of the fears those protesters had were realized over the next two decades. I might be too hopeful, but I really think the city leadership should talk to them and hear them out, instead of just trying to push them over.

The city is already cooperating and providing portable toilets and tried to replace the barricades with nice planters. It’s a national conversation now.

The list of demands came from an open mic discussion. They let anyone come up and suggest a demand.

Someonen transcribed those demands and then posted them.

I think it would be better to view those demands as the union of demands of each person willing to speak to a crowd. Which is why you see inconsistency in then, why it's such a long list, etc.

I just think that list of demands is better understood in that context.

Its not a list of demands if it's ridiculous and can't be realistically filled. At that point its just a list of wishes.

Rather reminds me of the demands that used to come out when students would occupy a university building back in the 60s, where they'd demand that the president of Cowtown College get the US out of Vietnam immediately

Okay. You can semantically call it whatever you want!

I'm just trying to give some additional context to how this list of (demands|wishes) came about.

If you view it as a single list of (demands|wishes) it doesn't make as much sense. If you view it as the (demands|wishes) from a wide variety of people, that were made on an open mic at a protest that was transcribed, then categorized, then posted to the internet, it's easier to understand what it is.

There are organized protest leaders that have curated their list of demands and put it out. This very much isn't that! This is basically the raw list of demands from a wide variety of different speakers. The only editing was in the transcription and the categorization of those demands.

Maybe those protesters are all sales guys or product managers.

Actually, it feels very democratic. Everyone has their say, but not everyone is going to be fulfilled.

The list of demands is extremely tame for a fricking anarchist commune. Look at the list of "economic demands." The biggest ask is de-gentrification and rent control.

Those asks seem pretty incompatible with property law and the legislative process. You can't just unilaterally demand something like rent control and de-gentrification measures. The city government shouldn't even have (and probably doesn't have) the power to meet such demands.

Degentrification could trivially be achieved by eminent domain, condemning existing residential property for public housing for which eligibility would be governed on rules which are incompatible with gentrification. It might be expensive, even prohibitively so, to do on a broad scale, but in terms of legal authority it's well within the scope of powers that local governments usually have.

Note that rent control, even if the city doesn't have the power to establish it for private rentals, can effectively be achieved by the same means.

There is legal precedent to use imminent domain to transfer wealth from one individual to another. Usually it’s stealing from the poor, and giving to real estate developers.

There’d be a certain amount of deferred justice in doing that, but I’d rather the practice simply be banned.

IANAL but I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to use eminent domain to confiscate the homes of citizens based on their race. The law doesn’t make provisions for unpopular races as far as I know.

Further, any use of eminent domain must be bundled with fair market value compensation for the value of the property being acquired.

> IANAL but I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to use eminent domain to confiscate the homes of citizens based on their race

Good thing I never suggested that. Gentrification has a racial dimension because race correlates with economics, but it simply is the rich displacing the poor in a particular region; if you take housing units by eminent domain and establish a process for renting them out as public housing that doesn't distribute them to the highest bidder, you prevent gentrification. You neither have to acquire nor distribute based on race.

I figured you would take that tack. In my defense, the term often does refer to whites specifically. In either case, however, I'm of the impression that a law may not disproportionately target one race or another (it's insufficient to show that a law doesn't explicitly target one race; it must also be shown that it doesn't cause disproportionate harm to one race), but again, IANAL and would be very interested in hearing from an expert (even suggestions on search criteria would be helpful).

> I'm of the impression that a law may not disproportionately target one race or another (it's insufficient to show that a law doesn't explicitly target one race; it must also be shown that it doesn't cause disproportionate harm to one race),

You are incorrect. Laws may both explicitly (or otherwise intentionally) target race and may disproportionately impact race without explicit targeting.

Laws doing the former are subject to “strict scrutiny”: the discrimination must be the least invasive means of achieving a compelling government interest. The latter isn't prohibited at all, though it can be evidence of discriminatory intent. (You may be thinking of employment law, where disparate impact is generally prohibited discrimination, unless closely tailored to a specific legitimate non-discriminatory business need.)

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause for a discussion, especially the section under “tiered scrutiny” and “disparate impact”.

Interesting and disappointing. Thanks for the correction.

> establish a process for renting them out as public housing

and the process for renting them as public housing will be fairer how? You're just switching out one filtering system (price) for another based on arbitrary rules proposed by petty bureaucrats and politicians. At the end of the day you're still discriminating. The only difference that in your system, you're hoping that you or someone with your sensibilities has the power to do the discriminating.

But they should try something. Maybe degentrification could include a city requirement not to displace people when building new housing. The developer puts the previous occupant up and then guarantees them their same rent for, say, a decade going forward

The problem with imposing restrictions on real estate developers is that it reduces the amount of housing, which increases the cost. (Look at California, for example.)

I’d rather they force commercial developers to put in two bedrooms worth of housing for each full time employee worth of office space they add.

If the developers are short-sighted and only add high end McMansions and condos, that’s fine.

The housing market will eventually oversaturate, and those properties will end up selling at a loss to people that couldn’t afford them at the original price.

The Microsofts and Amazons of the world will end up paying eye watering premiums for open space floor plans, or luxury real estate developers will take a bath. Either way, not a tear will be shed.

Your proposal is merely a preference for housing over commercial space. Presumably you have your reasons, but if covid sticks around a few more months (which it is certain to do) commercial space might be rented like crude oil: landlords paying tenants! We'll soon see office/retail space converted to expensive housing even without this aggressive intervention. Everyone is working from home now.

That's fair. I'd be ok with forcing two bedrooms of housing for each worker space added.

I don't think all the McMansions and condos are good however. I'd rather you force people to add space for lots of people. Otherwise there'll be a period where you drive a lot of poorer folks away. Artists and retail workers and mechanics. People who don't work tech or finance or real estate. I don't know that cities can readily recover from it.

It's why I left San Jose. If it continues too long, it'll be why I leave Seattle. Give people reasonable rents, please. I want to live with artists and civil servants and retail workers and chefs and vets and all these people. It makes life so much more interesting

No one owns any property. They are rented property by the society and a functioning government.

As such, it's totally right to take and redistribute things that doesn't belong to rich people only.

defunding police pensions is a bit much.

True, but we can start using them for court settlements instead of taxpayer money.

Don't you think qualified immunity is a bit much? Take the pensions and subtract the money that would have been awarded in lawsuits and it probably evens out to $0.

Retroactively taking retirement funds from people that were expecting them is wrong. Even if 99% of the police deserved it, it would still be wrong.

Ah, so maybe teargassing the 1 "innocent" person in a crowd of 99 "rowdy" protesters is wrong?

Police believe in collective punishment. So deliver it to them.

I’d rather see a blanket ban on defunding any pensions (public or private).

many of the fears those protesters had were realized over the next two decades

Is there a list of these fears somewhere? Ideally as presented at the time.

It’s hard to enumerate the list as if it were some soviet collective document because one of the interesting parts of the wto protests were how decentralized they were. In that they were thoroughly modern.

But 2 issues that stand out as prescient are the environmental impact of an ascendant China and the changes to the US middle class globalization would render.

well, globalization on neoliberal terms has continued to hollow out living standards in advanced countries while turning neocolonial countries into large sweatshops. the life expectancy in the US has fallen for 2 or 3 years in a row now largely as a downstream result of this. that is my understanding of one major concern from that.

What does “neoliberal” mean in this context?

I think of neoliberalism and neoconservativism as offshoots of corporatism, which is the idea that government can most efficiently serve the people by protecting the interests of corporations above all else.

This leads to the idea that regulatory capture is economically efficient (“Who is better qualified to regulate industry than successful industrialists?”)

It also leads to things like banning class action law suits, allowing binding arbitration, and allowing individuals to sign away arbitrary rights by implicitly accepting non-negotiated contracts they haven’t even seen.

Oakland has commercial enforcement zones, where private police enforce the law. The idea is that business owners weren’t getting a good deal by paying taxes to fund the police, because it was subsidizing law enforcement in residential areas. Instead, the merchants hire their own police, and pay less taxes. Oakland’s (mostly poor, black) residents fund the police that protect them out of their own taxes.

Anyway, you get the idea. Back to your question:

Neoconservatives generally think corporatism is best achieved by dismantling the government (“repeal Obamacare”).

Neoliberals think it is best achieved by restructuring it (mandate health insurance for all).

(Contrast that with the populists in that debate. They want to dismantle the health insurance industry and replace it with medicare.)

Usually, when people talk about moderates in the US, they mean corporatists. The MAGA crowd are mostly “right wing” populists (xenophobic, “America first”, bring back factory jobs), the BLM types tend to be “left wing” populists.

If you look up corporatism, you’ll see it is a shortened form of “corporate fascism”. I don’t think that term is particularly constructive, though it is accurate: the MAGA and BLM movements both accuse the establishment of being fascist.

One side targets neoliberals, the other, neocons. As General Mattis pointed out last week, divided we fall.

Please don't quote that reptile. Of all the reasons to resign from the currently-reigning administration, he chose the fact that Trump had decided to stop killing Syrian children. Not a good look. If the war media is refocusing its attention on him, we can expect he'll be pimping more atrocities real soon. After all the public must be distracted from its current concerns, otherwise we might spend some money on something besides armaments and prisons.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/politics/james-mattis-resigna...

I’m mot a huge fan of him, and am extremely anti-war.

However, the US’s withdrawal from Syria is a continuing humanitarian disaster that has spread into neighboring countries.

We don't destroy nations by leaving them (which we haven't done in Syria's case; there are still USA troops fighting there [0]), we destroy them by occupying and slaughtering in the first place. Keep in mind that the "gas attacks" were staged false-flag this-is-how-all-our-wars-start bullshit, which overruled-from-top OPCW investigations made clear. [1] Calling oneself "extremely anti-war" while parroting military-industrial complex submarine interventionist propaganda is fairly ridiculous. Killing more children in Syria wouldn't have saved the lives of Syrian children.

[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/07/max-blumenthal-on-baghdad...

[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-ch...

The label neoconservative primarily concerns a niche political movement in foreign affairs and defense. It was largely a small group of highly influential Washington insiders who spent most of their careers at the Defense Department, State Department, and CIA. Ideologically they were realists, but mostly in the context of foreign affairs. In terms of domestic policy they were all over the board, though they were often typically described as socially liberal (i.e. no anti-abortion activists). Discussing their domestic policy preferences is a little non-sensical because they didn't really care about domestic policy. Most of them were Republican, many of their financial backers were Democratic, but the party affiliations were mostly irrelevant except that in terms of appointments their power flowed primarily through Republican administrations.

Well known neoconservatives include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jim Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others. Outside of government, almost to a person they all circulated among a small group of think tanks and lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, one of which I used to work at while in college, and I watched every one of the aforementioned, and many more, come in and out of the office at various times.

I also think discussing the domestic policy principles of neoliberals is a little non-sensical. Neoliberalism, IMO, is best described as a manifest consequence of the rightward shift in Western politics from the late 1970s to the present time. After Margaret Thatcher's win in the U.K., liberals became increasingly disfavored by the electorate across the West. Neoliberals are politicians who recognized that conservatives controlled the narrative--small government, fewer regulations, pro-business, etc--and ran on political platforms that reflected that shift.[1] Ideologically they almost all supported traditional liberal policies--social, economic, etc--but understood you couldn't actually win national elections on those same platforms any longer. IOW, neoliberalism isn't an ideology, it's natural selection.

Liberals today love to sh_t on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for rolling back the social safety net, increasing police enforcement, etc. But they have amnesia.[1] The alternatives to Clinton and Blair weren't more liberal policies, they were continuing conservative electoral wins. People forget that two years into Clinton's presidency the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in ~50 years, and that Clinton lost to Bush not because the electorate was more liberal, but because Bush wasn't conservative enough.

It's amazing that even after Trump's election and even after Brexit liberals are still under the delusion that more liberal policies can win elections. It doesn't matter that individual voters' particular preferences skew liberal; when you package them all up into a platform the controlling political narrative is that they represent big government, and big government is bad. Full stop. And what's the alternative to big government? Whatever it is, it will tend to benefit large corporations because the collective action problem doesn't go away, and the next largest organizations that are capable of marshaling a huge amount of human and monetary resources will fill in the vacuum left by a receding government.

Going forward I don't know what will happen. With the rise of populism any kind of coherent platform, principled or opportunistic, seems unnecessary and irrelevant. We do seem to be at an inflection point, but only time will tell.

[1] I'm sure younger people today might say, "how could you possibly support anything other than smaller government, ceteris paribus." I'm not so old as to be able to tell you first-hand how older generations thought, but as I understand it, it wasn't that you preferred bigger government, it's just that you didn't concern yourself much with where a policy sat on the big government/small government axis. Issues were contextualized differently. Conservatives took control of the narrative by recontextualizing the issues and changing the metrics by which people judged the appropriateness and viability of policies. They were so successful that most people today across the political spectrum have completely internalized that shift. Not just in the U.S., but globally. How did they do it globally? Because their recontextualization didn't happen in a vacuum. Few would call Deng Xiaoping a neoliberal (or Mahathir Mohamad, or many others Asian leaders through the succeeding decades), but clearly an appreciation for market-based policies was an emerging global phenomenon. But it was U.K. and U.S. conservatives in particular (though not necessarily exclusively) who built a political narrative around that shift and provided examples of how to leverage it in democratic societies so that popular support for, e.g., privatization gathered momentum independent of the actual benefits, promoting the disintegration of institutions that didn't benefit from a diminished governmental role.

Liberalism was originally the abolition of feudal restrictions on free trade and wage labor. Neoliberalism is the removal of various newer restrictions on that, including: social-democratic laws that protect workers and raise the standard of living, and protective trade laws that protect countries' local industries (large industry in poor manufacturing countries, for instance, or small farmers like in Mexico, who have been wiped out by US agriculture).

China and the US have recently taken an anti-neoliberal turn, in fact the neoliberal era is beginning to end. Both Trump and Jinping have been pretty protectionist.

Globalization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in China.

Because they're the only ones really not playing by the neoliberal rules.

I mean look, whatever people in capitalist circles want to believe, China never really gave up on communism. They repurposed capitalism's weighing machine, and with that, there were people who got rich, which makes it look like Western-style capitalism. But the whole point of the "shadow banking system" and "state-owned enterprise" was to encapsulate a party-run state-driven "communist" system, to ensure reasonably ample work for the workers, and, to ensure a backstop to private enterprise. Maybe it's somewhat like the way Apple has baseline apps that are good enough, and then an app store for everything else. Or another analogy would be the U.S. Postal Service. Not efficient, but it works.

To be clear, globalization has been quite predatory towards weaker developing countries with less centralized authority – and hence – bargaining power. China "won" globalization by subverting it, and indeed, in hindsight, this was the only way for a developing country to win.

China industrialized on the basis of incredibly terrible working conditions (ie high profitability via low wages) that have only recently been improving. And as they've improved, globalization has shifted manufacturing to other countries who have worse working conditions again. "Lifted out of poverty" sounds nice but tends to mostly mean that people who were formerly peasants have instead worked in sweatshops and horrible factories for decades or centuries. It's easy to view that as all well and good if you are happily working in the global labor aristocracy, but it's not actually fair.

"Lifted out of poverty" sounds nice but tends to mostly mean that people who were formerly peasants have instead worked in sweatshops and horrible factories for decades or centuries.

Right, so lifted out of poverty. Just because you think their new job is a "horrible sweatshop", doesn't mean their lives haven't actually improved.

You're mistaken about the standard of living of peasants vs superexploited wage laborers, and doing that smug "the thing that worked super well for me must have worked for those guys no matter how bad off they seem" thing.

The definitive write up of their fears is in the book “Has Globalization Gone too Far?” by Dani Rodrick (1997).

It was not well received at the time, but sadly, it’s predictions have been proven correct over time.

Here’s a contemporary negative review of the book with a point by point refutation of its contents (it is painful to read with the benefit of hindsight): https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...

Here’s a chronology of related protests, ending in Trump. You could read up on the individual events, I suppose:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta-timeline-idUS...

Seems like GenZ is having their occupy moment. The police is probably just waiting for them to get tired and go home. In few weeks back to "normal".

There is a persistent desire to suck the funds out of the police force budget and redirect the money to things the community values. This unlike occupy is a tangible goal and if people only elect people willing to give it to them it will happen regardless of what people outside of Seattle want.

Occupy Wall Street had a tangible goal. Break up big banks, and forgive predatory loans.

Even with Obama in office, we ended up with even bigger banks and a spiraling debt crisis.

This goal can be accomplished one municipality at a time which cannot be said of occupy.

I didn’t mean to imply the current protests were hopeless. I certainly hope not, and you’re right: They can start with local action.

Even with Obama in office...

Ha! This is a better jest now than it was ten weeks into his administration!

What's funny is, at the time, we thoughts its goals were intangible!

That demand was not consistently communicated. My time at Occupy made it feel like it was basically against everything bad in society as believed by left/socialist/anarchists.

The Occupy demand messaging never really worked cause it was never nailed down to a simple single talking point. That this current movement can be simplified and understood as one demand, “abolish the police” seems related to the success of the movement.

I don't remember that being a consistent, clearly articulated goal. That's also orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish than shifting some city budgets around.

Protests almost never have a "consistent, clearly articulated goal," because of the nature of protests. People protest a problem and there are sometimes hundreds of proposed solutions. Unfortunately, certain biased media outlets choose the most extreme offered solutions and highlight them to discredit the entire movement and ignore the problem. And "shifting some city budgets around" is not as easy as it sounds.

Via http://web.archive.org/web/20120621221550/http://occupycg.or...

- Reinstate Glass-Steagall to separate commercial and investment banking

- Require all votes to be made on paper to prevent malicious manipulation

- Overturn Citizens United v. FEC to prevent corporations from buying politicians and elections

- Implement the "Warren Buffet Rule" and restore historical tax rates for the wealthiest 1% of Americans

> we ended up with even bigger banks

That's my prediction: they'll succeed in diverting tax funds from the police into social programs... and then three months later, the police budgets will be back where they started, but we'll be paying for the additional social programs, too. In a year, our taxes will go up, again, to pay for all of this.

Any group of people presently acting in a leadership role can be removed tomorrow.

if it's anything like occupy wall street then it will be abandoned when burger king stops letting them use their bathroom

The city is providing porta potties right now, as are local businesses and there are individually rented porta potties. Sanitation is much better than occupy right now.

"Right now" is subject to change...

I believe Denmark had something like this for a while. It started with squatters taking over an area kind of like this.

Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart. Sounds like it sort of restarted, albeit with regular Danish law enforcement and other city resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania

> Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart. Sounds like it sort of restarted, albeit with regular Danish law enforcement and other city resources.

As someone living in Copenhagen, I would not consider that anything near an accurate description of the history of Christiania. What happened was that an old military area and barracks was left abandoned and disused, so a group of squatters moved in, fixed up the place and built a community.

It did not turn into a "serious drug venue". They had issues with hard drugs in the 1970s, but kicked all of that to the curb and there is a strict community-supported ban on all hard drugs. Over the years various sellers have popped up here and there, but they are generally shunned and chased out by the community.

It also did not "fall apart", although it has had its ups and downs. The political winds have varied from indifference to acceptance to attempts to abolish the entire things, raze the area and built apartments. The current state is that the area is owned by a foundation and is treated partly as a part of the city of Copenhagen and partly as an independent enclave. Danish law enforcement is grudgingly accepted in cases of actual crimes, but otherwise not exactly openly welcomed.

I was in Christiania late last year and there were at least a dozen tables with sellers selling drugs. It didn’t seem like the community was shunning them or running them out

> They had issues with hard drugs in the 1970s, but kicked all of that to the curb and there is a strict community-supported ban on all hard drugs.

Are you sure that the dealers you saw were trading hard drugs, and not soft ones like cannabis, mushrooms, etc.?

That place consisted of people selling weed, people consuming weed, or someone decrying the perception that it was all based around flouting Danish laws relating to weed. It's situated in a nice area of the city, though, if it was just a random suburb it would likely not be a place you'd go.

I would implore everyone to think critically about the term "serious drug use" when used in the media to vilify scenarios and people.

Often these people need help and are self-medicating as anyone using traditional western medicine does (albeit with non-corporate drugs).

This type of stereotype further allows police to run wild and unchecked to "solve the drug problem" by beating and harassing than by actually solving any problem like a social worker is more likely to.

> treated partly as a part of the city of Copenhagen and partly as an independent enclave.

The "Now Entering the EU" sign at the exit hints at the locals' view of its status.

Hong Kong had the Kowloon Walled City for nearly a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

Its also how Vatican City exists as a sovereign state, and also many disputed territories that enjoy peaceful inaction as long as nobody brings it up

so if you squat long enough anything is possible.

> Turned into a serious drug venue and eventually fell apart

This is not true. I am Danish and my apartment is in Copenhagen. It's in fact so successful it has turned into a tourist attraction. Lukas Graham[1] is a Danish musician who grew up there. I don't see how this community can be called a failure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Graham

We visited Christiania a few years ago. It was lovely. The entire time, we felt just as safe as anywhere else in Copenhagen, and we didn’t see any evidence of drug use (certainly less than you’d see “on the wrong side of the tracks” in any other big city).

If you have a chance to visit Christiania, I recommend it. Copenhagen is one of my favorite towns. They have wonderful parks, museums, and even a really cool amusement park.

I don't live there, but there's something about all this that make it seem like a wildly overblown media event - that the actual thing itself is much more pedestrian and much less sensational than reports would have us believe.

I live there. This is correct in that the CHAZ itself has its biggest impacts through

a. having free snacks and b. not allowing through traffic, but

it really hasn't been stated enough how awful it had been when the police were there. Helicopters all night and if you were unlucky to be close enough: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/04/43840246/seattle...

This is correct. I live 3 blocks from CHAZ and I was gassed in my apartment 3 nights last week. I feel much safer without the police around right now.

Same. Nothing was more gut-wrenching than watching the flash bombing and gassing of peaceful protestors from our rooftop. Something felt so unconstitutional and fascist about it.

This is something that cannot be overstated: the helicopters and planes, the loud bombs and the gassing, were really awful. I don't have problems sleeping but last week was really hard...

Capitol Hill's police precinct has been abandoned, however, police are still responding to 9-1-1 calls to the area.

This feels very much overblown.

Seattle Times has an article that outlines similar "occupy" protests.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/welcome-to-the-cap...

There was almost an air of disappointment from SPD that the police station _wasn't_ burned down. It seemed that they were threatening that it was only a matter of time, "We told you so"-style. But alas.

I defer to moderators whether this crosses the line on political content.

It's interesting how this is organized by largely college educated people, many of whom are not PoC, and I think the federal response to this will be tolerance because these people are ultimately vying for institutional power, and feds realize they will all be working for one another in 10 years.

It's less about right/left than how I'd posit if CHAZ were operated by non-college educated people or even was exclusively a movement by people of color, the federal authorities would have already found some pretext for lethal force. It's not like the CHAZ organizers are poor or relatively uneducated people without political recourse, like say, a niche religious sect, some ranchers, or even just a radicalized family - all examples of subjects of federal sieges in recent memory.

Communes and autonomous zones are romantic, but they exist because they are tolerated or explicitly used as a source of volatility by a movement already within the establishment.

If this seems provocative, I'd argue it gets to the crux of the issue of why certain movements are tolerated and others are not. CHAZ is a tactic in a conflict between movements that are far above it within the establishment. That it has not been subject to an ATF-style siege shows it necessarily is the expression of top level political backing.

There are numerous precedents for how this plays out, as it has throughout history in France, Russia, Germany, China, and Cambodia. Unfortunately, the advice I have for people everywhere is above all, you must find a way to resist the isolation, paralysis, and atomization that separates people from their communities, which will be used to cow people into tolerating horrible things that will themselves just build momentum. The only way for CHAZ and related movements to yield peace is for people to recognize that before their relationships to these movements (positive or negative), you are members of families, neighbourhoods, communities, trades, professions, regions, and not insignificant atoms subject to global forces of history and nature. Especially if ostensibly isolated acts of terror begin.

I think it is urgent to recognize that there are precedents for what's happening today that provide predictive power to how this could play out, and to equip people with a reminder to above all resist political atomization, especially when it becomes hard to do so, because it deprives us all of our humanity, which is the only thing standing between us and the darkest chapters of history.

Capitol Hill is the gay neighborhood of Seattle. Could you imagine the reaction if the feds raided the Castro district in San Francisco for hosting a mostly-peaceful TAZ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone

> It's interesting how this is organized by largely college educated people, many of whom are not PoC

Do you have a source for this? I haven't been able to find a list of people involved in organizing this.

Not a source I'd be willing to provide, especially given such lists are precisely what political organizers avoid sharing. However, as an exercise, you can see the make up of the civil society organizations and businesses who provide funding and support for social causes, and neither of these are made up of the uneducated or working poor.

My only experience with social causes is doing labor organizing in Seattle, but that experience has been almost exclusively organized and run by uneducated working poor.

My point being that from what it looks like, there probably isn't a list of people organizing the CHAZ because it's mostly a spontaneous reaction to the current circumstances. They're explicitly non-hierarchical, and if they look anything like the circles of activism I've worked with in Seattle they're probably made up of more working class activists than this idea of liberal business owners.

But that is just my assumption based on my own anecdotal experience, I don't live in Seattle anymore and haven't been to the CHAZ myself.

You're probably not familiar with Seattle.... there is a base of people there who are capable of this. there has been ongoing conflict between the local populace and the SPD. for over a year. probably longer, but a 1-2 years ago is when it popped up on my radar.

this is hardly spontaneous, seems more like they just told the police to fuck off.

I don’t have an opinion on the morality of this instance of an “autonomous zone” but it made me think of the concept of “TAZ” as described in this book, may be interesting for those interested in anarchist politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone

Oh, Jesus Christ... I live about 3/4s of a mile from the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone". The way people are talking about this is ridiculous.

It's basically a bunch of wannabe Marxists LARPing.

They call the area "self-governed" and "abandoned", but the city had workers mowing the grass at Cal Anderson Park, two days after it was "established". There are cops sitting like 10 blocks away in case things get out of hand.

CHAZ is basically a block party at this point that the cops letting exist while tensions cool down a bit. If anything started to get of hand, you can be certain the police would be on the scene any moment. It's autonomous in the same way my house is autonomous. The police will let me do my thing until they get wind that I'm doing something decently illegal.

If you want to see a real "Autonomous Zone" in Seattle, 3rd and Pike is your spot. The cops let pretty much anything go there and it's a crap hole.

Edit: I'd like to add, I'm not trying to take anything away from their message. I think these protests need to be happening. I just think it's stupid that people are acting like some outside of the government people first commune has been created when really, it's basically the same as when people set up a bunch of tents in the park during the Occupy movement.

> If you want to see a real "Autonomous Zone" in Seattle, 3rd and Pike is your spot. The cops let pretty much anything go there and it's a crap hole.

Too true

too too true. for more color, the locals call that area McStabbys (also heard CrackDonals). It’s really really bad

LOL I used to switch buses there and "CrackDonalds" is way too fitting of a name

hahahah. the shit i’ve seen there waiting for the bus will also last me for a lifetime.

Pretty much. It's not so much a reason to panic as it is to laugh kinda hysterically, frankly. It's a great comedy show for people with a shred of common sense and a grasp of reality. So long as it doesn't tip into tragedy.

The comparison to Freetown Christinia is thought provoking, but the key difference seems to be that Capital Hill has been a trendy part of town with new apartments going up and rents increasing for the last decade, whereas Christinia was originally an abandoned site.

I don't question the resolve or peaceful intentions of the people currently occupying CHAZ, but instead the patience of property managers, local residents, and local businesses (though closed due to COVID-19).

Didn't expect this to be posted here. I've put up a FAQ now answering a lot of the questions in this thread and dispelling the rumours. Thank you!

From Wikipedia: Animal Farm by G.Orwell "The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

One reddit thread suggests it is already heading that way.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...

From the OP of that post:

>tl;dw: Man was tagging over someone else's art, Raz and group approach and separate him from crowd, chasing him for two blocks. He begins to film them with his phone, they take it from him. He tries to get it back and they attack him, kicking him in the head and breaking his glasses. At one point, Raz threatens to shoot the man. They then begin to gaslight him that it was all his fault. Audio only for most of the end, because woman in Raz' crew filming puts the phone in her pocket while the stream continues. [1]

So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_...

Because something like this would never happen with the police involved...

I don't think the person you were responding to ever made the claim that it would never happen if the police were there. I think the point is that it did happen. If this is supposed to be a utopia free of cops then they are doing a poor job. They have "cops" that beat up people for petty crimes.

Raz isn't a reason why the police exist. Raz is a product of a system where the police exist too much, which if given the proper social and educational services earlier in his life, his character and personality disorder exemplified here would have been nullified.

That idealism is great, but Raz exists today regardless. What’s your solution to that?

At what point are adults responsible for their own actions?

This guy and his crew beat up and threatened to kill someone for a petty crime. What does that have to do with the police existing "too much"?

> This guy and his crew beat up and threatened to kill someone for a petty crime.

That's exactly what caused all of these protests.

> At what point are adults responsible for their own actions?

It's constantly of interest to me how much "free will" actually exists. The more research comes out about environmental factors, the more we realize that people who suffer {home, food, employment, physical} insecurity exhibit symptoms as if they had a lower IQ and stress which is correlated with increased mental illness, stress, blood pressure, and other health problems.

It also strikes me that the current legal corrections system really only works if we, as individuals, have significant ability to decide not to commit a crime as opposed to it being the most likely destiny based on our current {personal, environmental} state.

I assure you that's utterly false. There's tons of "Razes" in the country where I'm from, and very few police officers.

That doesn't sound like a good excuse for him. Sociopathic behaviors have existed since time immemorial, and the old approach before any form of formal law enforcement even existed was for tribes to enact social law enforcement and isolate or exile such undesirable elements-- and tyrants are born when you got enough armed people on your side to override societal rule.

EDIT: Replaced a term for a more neutral one.

You seem pretty sure of that.

How do explain all the people that have those things Raz didn’t and are still assholes?

> So it took about 3 days for this anarchist utopia to demonstrate exactly why police exist.

Yes, but not current american police. What is demonstrated here is that unchecked power is bad, which is pretty close to what the american police currently seems to have, leading to crimes like the one that started the whole protest.

Well said. It's about checked power - abolishing police totally would just end up with them recreated again when the need arises, but without the proper infrastructure to control them.

What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police. Police should be as accountable for their actions and mistakes as every other citizen (equality under the law!), or at least that's the idea.

We can start by:

- getting rid of police unions that hide information and do stuff like have police be judged by three of their peers, one picked by the accused, and prevent police from getting fired.

- get rid of qualified immunity

And so on.

> without the proper infrastructure to control them.

Many, myself included, would argue that they're basically out of control right now. Just look at the sequence of events that unfolds almost to the letter after every unjustified police killing. At best the outcome is the cop involved resigns and quietly goes to work for another police department a few months down the line or retires with full benefits.

Defund of course means a million things to a million people but a lot of what I'm hearing is about moving the armed police response to the minority of roles where it's needed. The amount of time you need an armed officer is a tiny fraction of the times they're there and they're not trained for the vast majority of the actual work they do. Under this defund is about taking the glut of resources allocated to cops and moving it to people better trained to deal with the kind of mental health, mediation, etc tasks that take up the bulk of police's actual time.

I agree with you wholeheartedly on both points. I even said in my OG comment: "What we really need is a system of accountability and control over police." I know the police aren't well-controlled right now, that's why I was laying out a few ways to improve it! (:

I would say, though, that our US police are more controlled than what's going on in the CHAZ, however slightly in some ways.

> unchecked power is bad

Are you pro individual gun ownership?

The second amendment exists in the US Constitution, first and foremost to balance the power between a populous and would-be tyrants.

Funny though how the usual fervant supporters seem to instead cheering tyrant like action.

Not everyone.

Just like vocal anarchists make the left look bad, the freedom-loving libertarian side is marred by the vocal authoritarians; esp when they feel threatened.

Maybe a 100 years ago. The government has invested high tens to low hundreds of trillions of our dollars into the military at this point. Guerrilla warfare on peoples own land is almost impossible to snuff out but the people also can't possibly "win".

... but the tyrants also can’t possibly “win”.

There is little incentive to attempt tyranny when the result can be predicted so easily.

Also, don’t underestimate the power of 100 million people wielding guns. The world has yet to ever witness a force 1/10th as great and well-armed as the American populous.

The purpose of an armed populace isn't to "win" tactically, it's to win strategically and psychologically. It's basically like a poison pill clause, you want to make totalitarian takeover so unpallatable that every victory is a pyrrhic one. You want to force the occupiers to have to choose between killing your own countrymen or defecting, setting up more of a resistance. All the while, you shine light on all the atrocities.

With a sparsely-armed populace, it's easy for the occupying force to roll through without much conflict or challenging decisions.

Winning occurs through attrition of the occupiers, which, unlike Vietnam, can't just "back out".

> The second amendment exists in the US Constitution, first and foremost to balance the power between a populous and would-be tyrants.

So the solution for police not being regulated enough, is for the people to take up arms against them?

Rather than fixing the regulations?

It seems like folks have been demanding the regulations be fixed for some time now to no avail. Moreover, it isn't always so easy to just 'fix' a regulation. Qualified Immunity isn't a regulation in the traditional sense, it's jurisprudence. Sure, it's possible that legislation can resolve it (and hopefully it does so in a meaningful way) but "just asking" hasn't been working for some time now.

What CHAZ shows us is that there is perhaps a middle ground between "asking" and "taking up arms," but if none of the demands are met, I don't know that there are many other steps left.

Sure, I agree "just asking" clearly hasn't worked, but "the ballot box" hasn't been exhausted as an option yet, in fact I would say that we're gearing up now to see how effective both the soap box and the ballot box can be, as protest action finally seems to be getting through to both the public and (at least part of) the political class.

In fact it looks like in some places the cries to defund the police are finally being heard and actioned. I hope there are more, as this is a radical act and not just a legislative tweak. It's clear that a fundamental rebalancing of the relationship between police and society is needed, starting with talking away their weapons, and total de-escalation of police violence and their effective immunity to the consequences of their racist actions.

I hope "CHAZ" isn't a last step before open, armed conflict, because if it does go that way the public mood is going to shift in a millisecond to enforcement. Just like I hope here in the UK we don't see people pull down statues of Churchill - he was a racist asshole, but he was also the leader that brought us through WWII, and the population of this country aren't ready to stop venerating the latter because of the former yet.

I'm also not sure what "winning" looks like for either side when that starts.

Firstly, I never said anything about taking up arms against anyone. I am simply stating the fact that “unchecked power” is impossible when a monopoly of power (force... aka weapons) is held by the state.

History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.

Secondly, “fixing the regulations” is not necessary; what is necessary is enforcing the already existing regulations.

> History has shown us over and over and over that an unarmed populace will either A) be subject to unchecked violence by its overlords, or B) be successfully invaded by new and less desirable overlords.

Which is why the UK gets invaded every other week?

Seems an overly reductive viewpoint.

Well dang, we're certainly not inviting you to utopia.

That must be the "localized anti-crime system".

Yeah. Hopefully the people in CHAZ learn from Animal Farm and shut Raz down now.

Orwell would likely support CHAZ, he fight with the anarchists in Catalonia after all. People tend to not realize that Animal Farm was a criticism of the USSR from a socialist. It is not a criticism of all socialism or anarchism.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." - George Orwell (1946)

Seattle doesn't want to be beaten by Minneapolis to becoming the next Detroit

As someone who currently lives near Detroit, the city is faring remarkably well in light of everything that's been going on. I haven't heard anything about rioters, just people who are peacefully protesting.

I'm referring to Detroit circa 1967

I think it would take a lot more than this to get Seattle to resemble Detroit in 1967.

What does this mean?

This whole thread really illuminates how racist and sheltered this community is.

Ironically this would make the area much more affordable. I’m all for it :)

Uhh when was the last time you were in Detroit?

I actually live just a couple of hours west of Detroit. In any case, Detroit isn't surrounded by mountains and ocean in the same way that Seattle is- sort of a weird comparison. A cheaper Seattle would still have those things near by.

Yes, I'm personally very worried about this as someone who is heavily invested in the real estate market here. The issue of how to deal with the rapid growth in the city is multifaceted and it's difficult to pitch a stance on.

At the very least, you could easily make an argument that a rising tide does not lift all boats; i.e. many people are personally not benefiting much from the tech-boom in the area. On the other hand, if your stance is that our collective goal should be to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people; then we want more people to move to the city have prosperous lives to fulfill the new roles available here. In that scenario it's hard to keep income inequality from expanding.

It seems like thusfar the city council has done a good job at striking a balance; MHA (mandatory housing affordability) is a level-headed way to redistribute some of the gains that tech has brought to those who are less fortunate. However, our current city council is much more left-leaning and I'm worried that their stance towards growth is far more "progressive" and anti-business.

Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford? Cities like Manhattan or SF have sort of taken a stance on that and it favors the prosperous. I'm not sure how I feel about the matter; but I certainly do not want us to dampen our potential future potential by encouraging businesses to set up shop elsewhere. We need more initiatives like MHA and fewer like the business head-tax.

> It seems like thusfar the city council has done a good job at striking a balance;

I'm not from the area, but the sheer amount of anger and enthusiasm that has fueled these protests suggests that the city council has not been striking an appropriate balance.

Happy middle class people don't tend to riot and try to start new societies.

Ah sorry, I meant the previous city council, who had been doing a good job it seemed like at balancing the city's growth with the social problems that were becoming more evident at the time.

>Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford? Cities like Manhattan or SF have sort of taken a stance on that and it favors the prosperous.

I find it eerie that you're excluding from the equation the tens of thousands of homeless people in those cities. The right question is "to what lengths should we go to give people the ability to live with a roof over their heads?" The bay area has answered with "very little", where most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless.

Homelessness is a complex problem which I believe namely stems from psychological and substance abuse disorders. I think there is likely a relationship between the amount of income inequality in a society and the amount of homelessness.

I do believe that we should support the homeless populations of our cities; but if you're familiar with Seattle's homelessness problems in particular, you'll know that the city has essentially thrown literally hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem to little effect.

I don't believe Seattle should follow a path of growth-at-all-costs and ignore the social problems the city has; but the city council here is staunchly anti-business, and that carries a risk-too, like the original commenter said—take growth for granted and you can end up like Detroit. In that situation, no one prospers, and everyone suffers; which we definitely don't want. It's a fine line to walk. That's all I'm saying.

>Homelessness is a complex problem which I believe namely stems from psychological and substance abuse disorders

I think this is about as useful as saying "homelessness is caused by loitering". We're confusing cause and effect. Try living on the streets for a few years where people treat you worse than shit without developing some mental illness or abusing drugs to deal with the stress and loneliness. If you think that the cause is mental illness and drugs and throwing money at it mostly does nothing, why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America?

> highest rate of homelessness in America?

Please do not spread lies. SF does not have the highest homelessness rate in America. Eugene Oregon has the most homeless: https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/ , followed by LA and NY.

" why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America? "

I can answer this, I lived there since 2005 until this month.

The problem is once you stop enforcing the law it creates incentives for all kinds of people to try it out. This created a diverse population of people who are living outside, from mentally ill, to seemingly normal young people fixing bikes in their tents, to dangerous drug addicts that won't hesitate to stab you.

The problem is there is a law and it is not being enforced. People take advantage of this. Thinking everybody is a poor soul that would buy housing if it existed is an extremely naive view. The homeless population is very diverse in terms of reasons they are out there. SF leadership treats all of them as if it had one solution, so of course that will not work. Some people out there want to be there. You can see they are young and don't mind sleeping in a tent. Others are just out of their minds and need intervention ASAP.

RIP SF

Seattle homeless stats show that those who are simply homeless (I.e., don't have enough money to afford rent) are found shelter. The 'unsheltered' -- those who, despite social programs -- still have no shelter, are almost universally affected by problems not caused by landlord/tenant law.

"most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless. "

Enough with patronizing. They are not children or robots with no freewill. They have made decisions in their own lives and they need to own up to them. Not holding people accountable makes them more like children, and they are more likely to stay where they are FOREVER. They will all stay on the streets until old age and die there if you think it's not their own fault.

If you can't a afford a city, then MOVE. Guess what though, in cities like SF, they didn't.

They stayed, destroyed SF for decades, and now it is very clear... SF has made its choice... to become the home for the homeless, as a mass exodus occurs.

People are tired of shit and used needles on the sidewalk, dangerous insane people roaming everywhere, extremely expensive food and living, all while the leadership pats itself on the back for being woke. Enjoy your post-apocalyptic shitty.

> many people are personally not benefiting much from the tech-boom in the area

Gosh how can you be so jealous of people you're willing to destroy their stuff. It's the same kind of xenophobia that fuels anti-immigrant rhetoric. People upset that those moving to 'their turf' happen to do better than them.

Yeah, I don't know. The left needs to hold a mirror to themselves and realize that they are more and more becoming just a mirror-image of the right. The idea to "just let it all burn" is just so Trumpian. What the left hates about Trump's tendency to trample all over our international relationships and treaties—they're now advocating for in terms of destroying private property. It's an amazing double standard; and it's the very attitude that will get Trump reelected this November. A shame to watch.

The scary thing is that this protest is foreshadowed by the WTO protests also orchestrated by 'left-leaning' groups, and now we have a president -- Trump -- who is very much against the WTO, except he's bad now because they've moved beyond that.

The other interesting comparison here is the varied response to this and the Malheur National wildlife refuge occupation.

I couldn't agree more; I think part of the appeal of the right is somewhat dogmatic in that most of the sticking points are very fundamental and the messaging is very straightforward; guns, religion, family, low taxes. What does the left stand for? Being a progressive is a moving target, and the inter-messaging is very mixed and often contradictory. Ex. for a long time liberalism was about free speech but now we want to regulate speech with safe-spaces and trigger warnings.

Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been; but it's genuinely confusing and the party does not feel unified.

>guns "There is no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" - ronald reagan >religion, family There squirming to ignore trump on matters like these show how well in line the party walks that's definitely true >low taxes Lotsa say a, do b there They have been very keen to push up deficits tho the focal points where they like to increase spending are different.

They're not really consistent at all but their messaging and party policing has been more strict

>What does the left stand for >for a long time liberalism was about free speech but now we want to regulate speech with safe-spaces and trigger warnings.

it's funny watching americans sprinkling around left, liberal, etc as political terms whilst defining the weird mix that ends up under the wings of the two parties. Some (self-proclaimed) libertarians & conservatives, protectionists & free market hardliners standing under the same republicans umbrella with radically clashing beliefs. Free market liberals fighting with leftists who are laughing at social progressives under the umbrella of the democrats.

>Part of this probably evolves from the fact that Liberals are introspective and willing to challenge their beliefs to their own disadvantage in a way that the GOP never has been

I'd say with growing inequality and declining social mobility it's hard for the mainstream core of democrats to really push a broader platform that the party fully aligns with, differs from the republicans and rings well with their base. They don't really roll with protectionist stances a la bernie or trump, they don't really align with unions or workers anymore as they've dropped them for an upper middle-class educated focus whilst at the same time still keeping some actual more left wing remnants under their wing that they try to suppress and retain at the same time They have started less invasions but aren't really against global force projection at all. They don't really clash with conservatives on stock buybacks, markets, banking, what have you whilst at the same time still pushing cushioning programs like obamacare to give at least a sense of direction there. So when on a lot of those fronts you're not really united or notably different from the opposition what's left? Social issues. Social equality when it comes to sex, race or what have you. So pushing those makes sense.

> They have started less invasions but aren't really against global force projection at all

Trump has started the fewest invasions of any president thus far. We've had no regime changes, and no extended battles or fights. Obama (Syria and Libya) and Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan, others) and Clinton (Iraq, Kuwait) all engaged in new wars. Trump hasn't, and has in fact withdrawn America troops.

Surely the issue is deeper than jealousy. People develop strong connections to places, and when they begin to get priced out of the place they have a strong connection to, and an area's culture changes as a result, people grow upset by this.

>> "Should people really be entitled to live in an expensive city that they cannot afford?"

They do if you want the people who serve your $5 coffees and $20 meals to be able to live within a reasonable distance. I like to think the people gentrifying them out don't want to push them out, but I'm not sure most of them even realize they're responsible for the huge homeless population. They moved in for the well-paid jobs and pushed the people who lived there out. The pushed out don't always have somewhere to go or a way to get there.

It has the look of a mini Christiania, nice to see something like this sprout up in the US. I hope it sticks around and becomes something really cool.

I’ve always wondered, if a community like this were able to completely leave the US, and didn’t have to pay for the military, or the police, would they be able to fund their own demands for free healthcare, free college, etc? I’m going to guess that overall, the occupants are below the average income level of Seattle, but would they be able to afford the lifestyle they’re requesting?

I mean, they're setting up shop in the center of a city. They are building on top of everything they claim to not need.

Is "lifestyle" the most appropriate word you could choose for "access to healthcare and education"?

How is that not appropriate?

Each of those items have a cost associated with them, at least at a societal level, even if they are provided free to the end consumer. A doctor, even if providing free services in a completely altruistic manner, must eat and be housed, as do college professors. A society must choose how to allocate their resources. Based upon the CHAZ demands, they wish to have a society which provides healthcare and college. I would call that a lifestyle.

My question was, does there exist a sufficient productivity in the population in the CHAZ to provide those services to their population?

From Wikipedia: Lifestyle is the interests, opinions, behaviours, and behavioural orientations of an individual, group, or culture.

The demand for access to healthcare and education does seem to be the interest, opinion and behavior of this group.

Remember too though that they would likely declare all property to be the property of the people of the zone, which means no rent to any landlords and no overhead going to owners of capital, plus no taxes going to the state, so they would be able to free up a lot of resources. The Zapatistas in Mexico have been quite successful at building a decent health care system out of nothing, despite being some of the poorest people in the world.

No. If they were lo leave they would take a proportional amount of debt with them, which would render their ability to do anything moot.

It would be a little USA with a foreign currency, all the debt and no effective means to defend itself, should it work the miracle and become successful.

My first thought was 'I feel bad for the people who spent a million bucks on a condo in Pike / Pine', but my second thought was that these are likely also people who voted for people like Sawant so they made their own bed.

Given that Sawant won with a tiny majority, that's an unfair judgement of those people.

Sawant was running for re-election for her third term. She wasn't an unknown political figure.

I never understand why likeminded people don’t just start a city? “Wild country” was an example of this, but they were bound together by a quasi religion.

There’s so much unincorporated land in the USA. So many opportunities to prove things work or don’t work. Why move into a place somebody else built?

> I never understand why likeminded people don’t just start a city?

Mostly, probably, because starting a city has a process defined in state law (or, out of the US, law of some other higher level of government) which is different than “a bunch of people just buy up land and decide to declare it a city”, e.g., California’s LAFCO process.

When you ran away from home, why did you go to your Grandma's house?

Because you were a child.

Unincorporated but not unowned and there's a huge amount of infrastructure and money required to setup even a small town ex nihilo in some randomly selected part of the country.

Building infrastructure is something easily solved by capitalist. Can it not also be solved by likeminded people with alternative economic principles?

Because beyond doing it by hand and setting up a city sized septic system the equipment for stuff like processing waste and preparing water is extremely expensive and the only sources want lots of money for them. It's doable just very delicate and requires permission and buy-in from actors in the existing system.

> Why move into a place somebody else built?

In all seriousness, because if you dropped these same people in the woods with construction tools and resources, they’d produce nothing of value; all eaten by bears within weeks.

IOW, your question answers itself.

This was the old model of the United States when we had a frontier. The frontier, land owned by the natives, was deemed available for the violent taking by the settler-colonials. Whenever sufficient ferment began to develop in the US proper, they would push for a new wave of expansionism which would act as a pressure release valve.

I don't understand unincorporated land, but clearly someone "owns" it or the government wants it for some reason and the former era of free expansion and manifest destiny is over. Now we must reckon with the damage and reparations owed to Native Americans.

This site documents the zone with a timeline, some pictures and local articles as well: https://chaz.zone/

Their first demand is that the Seattle Police Department be abolished, as in 100% defunded, as in completely deleted. Coming out with a demand like that is just asking to lose right off the bat.

I wish they would delete it and stick with their second demand - take all weapons away from police. No guns, no batons, no tasers. It's also crazy, but at least it's crazy in a "this might just be crazy enough to work" kind of way.

A bunch of people are calling for defunding the police and not total abolition, although that is what this site says. Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant has already pledged to bring legislation to cut the police department budget by 50%, and city officials are going over it in depth.

> Their first demand is that the Seattle Police Department be abolished, as in 100% defunded, as in completely deleted. Coming out with a demand like that is just asking to lose right off the bat.

Abolition of existing centralized paramilitary police departments in favor of rethinking public safety and social services and reconstituting and redistributing law enforcement within a new framework is an idea which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.

It may seem, by a pre-June-2020 perspective, to be an out-of-the-range-of-serious-debate demand, but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.

Here's a recent summary: https://kottke.org/20/06/police-abolition-defund-the-police

It's also extraordinarily unpopular, across the ideological spectrum[1].

>...which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.

>but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.

Well you're right about that. Because it's insane, and generates clicks, likes, and retweets and so media keeps covering like it's actually popular despite the fact the inverse is true to keep generating their clicks, likes, and retweets. I've been waiting for the Star Tribune to actually run some local polling on this, because everyone I know still back there also thinks it's insane. My guess is they do run the polls, and don't publish the results for the same reason.

[1]https://twitter.com/databyler/status/1268555840098906115?ref...

“Cut funding for police departments”, that is shown in that poll isn't what the dismantle/abolish is about (it's not even a fair portrayal what “defund” is centrally about, which is shifting funding from PDs to alternative services.) And that poll is from near the beginning of the recent protests.

More recent polling shows much higher support for both “defund” and “dismantle” than what that poll found for it's lopsided framing of “defund”.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-e...

Yes, there exists nuance to the "defund the police" stance (though a lot less on the whole "abolish" the police position). My point is that many people have essentially been gaslit into thinking this has widespread support. It does not, regardless of whatever nuance exists.

From your article:

>For example, 39% of respondents supported proposals “to completely dismantle police departments and give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.”

So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence. This is an echo chamber proposal if there ever was one.

If you told me this stat a month ago, I would never believe it. 39% is a shocking amount and I can only imagine it is going to increase.

You're right that we would still need to train a new organization to deal with violent events. But you're also ignoring the upside of not having a cop with a gun issuing speeding tickets, or dealing with someone experiencing mental health issues, or other things that could be better served by more specialized roles.

>give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.

is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this poll, which should be obvious. I'm not ignoring anything. Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems. The grand irony of all of this is that the defunding of the police departments in this country will make the kinds of reforms you are talking about impossible.

>Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems.

This makes no sense.

You ever put a duty roster together? Done a Troops to Task analysis? If you wanted to have separate divisions that all do only one thing you need more troops. If you spread the workload around you can get by with fewer but the service level probably suffers. It's that simple. So sometimes you do domestic calls, next rotation you're on traffic or patrol. If you want specialized units, which to me does sound smart and does sound like an idea worth exploring, you need more officers. Maybe it's possible to save some money here (I imagine there'd be some salary disparity depending on which specialization you choose). Ironically, again, this would make the police more like the military - not less. The military already has specialized branches that have categories of doctrinal tasks they are responsible for (artillery vs infantry, armor vs cavalry ... and in this example patrol vs traffic).

> If you wanted to have separate divisions that all do only one thing you need more troops.

This assumes that generalists are equally effective at all tasks as specialists. Well, as a generality; in the specific case of all-purpose use of police vs appropriate use of other community services, it actually involves the assumption that specialists in the application of violence to achieve compliance are as effective in specialists in tasks unrelated to application of violence in those non-violent tasks.

In technology, if senior IT management decided they could reduce staff by having network installation specialists, with little to no additional training, cover application development, QA, requirements analysis, SRE, DBA, desktop support, and project management tasks instead of having specialists in each of those domains, they'd rightly be viewed as insane. But that's, broadly, what local governments have done with city services, with cops in the role of the network installers.

> Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems

Cops respond to a wide variety of calls all the time because over time (particularly between the 1960s to 1990s with concerns driven by crime statistics, though the trend has continued even as the original impetus reversed) resources were pumped into police departments, often diverted from other local services organizations.

When all you have is a paramilitary force trained for the application of force, every local problem looks like a target for the application of paramilitary violence.

> So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence.

“Dismantle” and “abolish” are about equally popular in the movement for those that support the position that goes beyond “defund” in organizational change.

And 39% is widespread, though obviously not majority, support (and “defund” has 76%—a large majority—support in the pool, which I notice you ignore completely.) And nothing in the quote (or the movement) suggests that whatever armed law enforcement functions were retained would be concentrated in a single new organization created ex nihilo. While, again, advocates are mostly calling for a community process to rethink a design new service delivery and public safety systems rather than selling an already completed redesign that just needs legislative blessing, one framework concept I've seen mentioned more than once is redistributing domain-specific law-enforcement functions within service agencies consistent with the agencies’ domain, broadly the same much state and federal law enforcement functionality is rather than being concentrated in a single paramilitary force of general remit.

Abolish police is a first step. The idea is to create an alternative way to keep public order, and not _start_ from the police as a concept.

For those interested, this is a previously streamed speaking event in the CHAZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7nDkd3V2V0

Is assumption here that if you are a technical enthusiast and read this site, you have to support whatever leftist phenomenon is happening? This has nothing to do with technology at all.

Nice to see this here. Maybe the "hacker" in HN is returning.

Wish I was in Seattle to go check it out. I love this kind of thing.

...eh it took two dead versions of this story and multiple emails to the mods for this to get unkilled and it’s still weighted off of the front page. So it took serious effort and intention to front page a story over the power of flag mods and because of weighting still barely got the discussion deserved. I think a lot of people just must defacto flag things that aren’t about software or business?

I would come back here more regularly if I knew that actual huge news would be regularly discussed here, or if I thought interesting articles not about coding had much of a shot.

As good writing about CHAZ keeps happening or the situation evolves I’ll continue trying submissions.

I am rather amused that the same group is simultaneously calling for the tearing down of secessionist monuments and statues, while promoting a secession of their own. The cognitive dissonance is real.

> I am rather amused that the same group is simultaneously calling for the tearing down of secessionist monuments and statues, while promoting a secession of their own. The cognitive dissonance is real.

From the webpage:

> Fundamentally, CHAZ is an occupation of Capitol Hill, not an official declaration of independence.

They are fairly clear that their ultimate goal is neither secession or independence. The area was abandoned by the police in a political move, and CHAZ is occupying it as a statement of how they would like to see the city as a whole run instead.

Not only that, but those secessionist statues being turn down, are about people who lead a violent rebellion against the US in order to protect their ability to enslave people.

This protest is quite the opposite in nearly every possible way.

That misses the point. The problem people have with the statues is that they honor people who they feel promoted/protected the subjugation of another group. They’re not taking offense to the act of secession.

> secessionist monuments

You misspelled white supremacist. All of the confederate monuments I know of were built during _CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS_ as an expression of power by white supremacist governments and political traditions.

As a die-hard libertarian, I'm amused by a group that's been telling libertarians for decades that we should move to Somalia if we like living without government so much and then creating a purely libertarian social experiment the first chance they get. If this doesn't dissolve into complete chaos it's a vindication of libertarian principles.

I think you're missing the economic aspect. People don't tell libertarian socialists/communists to move to Somalia. Only libertarian capitalists get told that, and it's because of the perceived notion that companies seeking profit without the regulation of a strongish government resort to some pretty awful things. And there is some great historical precedence for this.

Walked though it yesterday, wearing a mask. The majority of people are also wearing masks and seem to be peaceful. Mostly a bunch of protestors and people milling about. There was one argument right by the speaker, but it didn’t look violent. Here is a link to my video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/8kktcXopLDdFKbQP9 IMO it will last a month or two then engine will get bored and it will fizzle.

It has reflections of the Summer of Love and 'Human Be Ins'. Instead of racism, the common cause was the Vietnam War. Instead of CHAZ, the Haight Ashbury.

From the descriptions of Seattleites (sorry) in the thread, it seems there may be more to compare than contrast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love

Have we been here before?

I live nearby but I haven't visited. I've been staying up on different livestreams however. I would say it's a naive waste of time, but clearly it is an outlet for people to feel creative and free, and there is some value in that. I think the long term is that people who support it are going to look back at it and cringe at some of the fantasies being played out.

All the clubs, bars, and schools have been shuttered for months. That buildup of stifled young adult socialization energy had to be dumped somewhere.

If anyone is interested in an unfiltered view of CHAZ I've been going down there every day and filming. Here's a link to the first video in my playlist about CHAZ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJblgfCwWtU&list=PLlgnc9Wjog...

I can confirm that the media isn't accurately representing what's there. It was a little crazy up until last Sunday (before the formation of CHAZ, right before the police left). It's totally peaceful now. People are bringing their families down there. I've even been there in the middle of the night and it's fine.

Serious question: What's to stop Seattle Police or state authorities from removing people from CHAZ? I wouldn't be surprised if there are city, state and federal officials drawing up probable cause to shut it down.

Protestors occupied the intersection of 11th and Pine (1 block from the police station) for multiple nights prior to the police abandoning the precinct. The police tried clearing people multiple nights with tear gas and flash-bangs, but the images and video of clearing the protestors night after night became politically unsavory. They probably won't try evicting people from the area again because they didn't succeed politically the previous times they tried.

(Plus, tear gas would seep into the nearby residential buildings)

https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2020/06/after-mayors-spee...

> They probably won't try evicting people from the area again because they didn't succeed politically the previous times they tried.

Interesting. The city might not, but feds might try, as they probably don't have much to lose.

Both the governor and the mayor said they won't let the Feds try that.

Wouldn't the feds just overrule them anyway?

Do you think that the feds would win politically from overriding local authorities to send in armed troops to evict thousands of people from a glorified festival? There was a ton of push-back on the feds clearing out sections of DC, and the feds have a lot more authority there.

Clearing out the area is fundamentally a political issue, so I think you need to focus less on who would clear out CHAZ and more on how they would justify their actions. The area is in a dense area and is easily accessible by transit so tons of people have gone there in person. Plus, the local establishment news has been visiting the area and taking pictures.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/dubbed-a-lawless-s...

Whoever clears it would need to create "probable cause" as you mentioned initially. Our police chief has been trying to justify clearing the area by saying: 1) business are getting extorted (no evidence) 2) assaults and rapes have increased (the crime blotter doesn't support this) 3) there are armed guards doing ID checks at the barricades (people can just walk in to the area and tons of people have visited. There have been a few people with long guns hanging out, but my understanding is that they leave shortly because other people tell them it's not a good look). So far, none of those accusations have stuck:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-prote...

Everythings peaceful... for now. What happens when something gets out of hand. It's always easiest in the beginning when everyone's on the same page. Given time disagreements are bound to flare up.

Reminds me of Christiania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania

If this is going to be anything like the autonomous zones I've visited in Berlin and Copenhagen, it is going to be filled with graffiti, drug dealing, and not much else in terms of public use.

"Autonomous Zone" is a reference to this book by Hakim Bey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone

It's an interesting read..

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-...

Have all the business owners whose storefronts are now covered with graffiti ceded their properties to the group voluntarily?

Now that’s an impressive achievement: https://www.reddit.com/r/CapHillAutonomousZone/comments/h7km...

“Black lives matter” art painting in the street.

Splendid!

I don’t understand why would someone downvote this comment... anyone willing to explain the issue with it? It’s just a link to great art made at CHAZ, I don’t see how that can be taken negatively.

Bumping this towards front page discussion, the Wikipedia link on this got flag killed from the front page.

Interesting and relevant speech from Abe Lincoln: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum....

I wondered if it's inspired by Christiania?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania

It's been a thing half a century now.

Sure, but also Paris in 1871, and Barcelona in 1936.

If you are trying to start a respectable state at least spell correctly, it really makes people not take it seriously:

>siezed!! by anarchists, BLM supporters and other protestors who have since transformed it into a unverisal!!

> anarchists

> state

Why would you think that anarchists are trying to start a state?

According to a June 10 article by City Journal, hip hop artist Raz Simone acts as "co-leader and enforcer" of the Zone, while former mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver formulates the commune's political aims.[24] However, according to Simone, the Zone has no central leadership, with all residents serving as leaders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone

The City Journal article is interesting but has such a strange perspective and bias that I appreciate you not linking it here.

I've lived in a neighborhood with an "enforcer". Let's just say most of us were happy when the police showed up from time to time.

Living in a neighborhood in Oakland CA with no enforcer and annoyingly blatant property crime, I’m willing to give an enforcer a try cause it’s not like people trust the police here or that they even come when you call them.

Then stop electing the same people who de-prioritize prosecuting property crime.

I'm amazed by SF and close areas utter disregard for what is normal crime wise. Most people in most cities don't have a story about their car window being smashed in and rummaged through. Every thread I see here / on reddit about SF someone mentions that its completely normal and should be expected there.

...living in evolving anarchy has benefits though. I suspect that San Francisco’s open air drug market with dangerously cheap methamphetamine is one of the dirty secrets behind the engine of creation of Silicon Valley.

Interesting theory; from what I've seen though, it's fueled more by Adderral scrips.

There’s lots of that too. My theory implies that a bunch of people that say they’re taking adderall are actually doing a little meth before they get on the Google bus because it’s cheaper and easier to get.

More years ago than I care to admit, I suspected that Intel's Multibus II design showed evidence of the use of "nose candy" in SV...

I have a related theory, which is that a prime differentiator between astounding life success and abject failure is which drugs you get addicted to.

Interesting - meth is considered a poor man's drug in Europe, a person with more than less money would never touch it (and favor cocaine).

I’m not a meth user but I have one very wealthy friend who is. He insists that meth in the USA is used only by the very rich and the very poor with no middle class use.

Enforcer is a pretty loaded word.

Looks like my employer was quick to add this site to the block list of sites we can't access using the company network.

Any chance of this turning into something like Copenhagen's "Freetown Christiania"?

I have mixed feelings on my own reaction to this. A huge part of me loves this - and supports a huge chunk of their demands. Then they talk about free housing and rent control... and I can feel myself shy away. I can imagine how other moderates / economics students / actual conservatives might react. It pains me to have to split my values. Do you support good intentions paired with policies you believe will cause more harm than good - or do you side with policies you agree with even though it makes you an “enemy” to the peer culture you yearn to belong to. Republicans won’t listen to comments about open borders, and Democrats won’t listen to comments about the issues with nationalization.

This has been my political problem my whole life. Agree with old white boomers on tax policy and with young radicals on immigration policy. Far too often my brain says “keep your mouth shut” - “save it for other Econ nerds” - and I’m beginning to think I’m no longer OK with that conclusion. Support to Seattle!

I love CHAZ so much, I hope it becomes a national trend.

If city councils would defund the police and use the money for actual good things then we wouldn’t have this problem of police brutality and police being above the law. But no, the police need to buy tanks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hadn’t heard of CHAZ until now.

Zona, Galaxy News Radio, Radio Free Europe... so many cultural touchstones for CHAZ to riff on. It must be a designer’s utopia!

It also reminds me of Daily Mail Island but at another end of the political hyperspectrum.

good for you Capitol Hill your friends in Vancouver support you :)

Is this comparable to the Paris Commune?

"...

The demonstration, an irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They ‘cut off these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatise the power they still lack.

The demonstrators’ view of the city surrounding their stage also changes. By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence – a greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic – than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.

...

Either authority must abdicate and allow the crowd to do as it wishes: in which case the symbolic suddenly becomes real, and, even if the crowd’s lack of organisation and preparedness prevents it from consolidating its victory, the event demonstrates the weakness of authority. Or else authority must constrain and disperse the crowd with violence: in which case the undemocratic character of such authority is publicly displayed. The imposed dilemma is between displayed weakness and displayed authoritarianism.

..."

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1968/no03...

This seems like a false dilemma. There is a third option: Do not tolerate crimes but otherwise let it be.

I'm sure there are a lot of folks here who are either living, or have been to Seattle/Cap Hill.

Politics aside for a moment, this is the pinnacle of Cap Hill IMO. Good on them, as long as they stay safe and try not to get too culty.

It’s funny; this being HN, some of you must live in Seattle. So instead of spreading sub-Facebook level rumors and FUD, why don’t you walk over to CHAZ and see the reality for yourself?

I live in Seattle, went over yesterday with no preconceived notions of what must be there. I had seen some posts that it was pretty lawless, but really took them with a grain of salt. Nothing I had heard about it was true. I didn't see any guns, no violence, or anything, no checkpoints (just barricades stopping actual cars from coming in, but not stopping people/bicycles). Just a bunch of people kind of hanging out listening to speeches near the East Precinct building. The live stream link on the OP shows it, basically people hanging out, walking around, etc.

If you do live in Seattle, you should head over and see it for yourself. It's a very unique thing and who knows how long it will be there. I assume at some point the police will drive a tank through it or something.

There you have it folks, eyewitness testimony. And yet somehow I suspect the people that believe the rapper warlord Orwellian dystopia narrative won’t change their mind one bit.

Stories are all over the place. How an area looks at 10 AM and how it looks at 10PM can be completely different. Some very nice and safe towns are anything but after a few hours pass.

Well I am a brown man who's lived in America my entire life, and I've never been harassed by police. So there you have it... eyewitness testimony. And yet somehow I suspect the people that believe that America is a police-state dystopia won't change their mind one bit.

It's almost like ... anecdata isn't trustworthy...

EDIT: downvoted for pointing out the hypocrisy.

Thank you. I think people discount the power of speaking out. Don't worry about the negativity. Speak the truth, and it's all that can be asked of you.

I'll never stop speaking the truth. Had a white professor in an immigration history class attempt to discount my view of being an actual child of immigrants by saying I had become a white person. The gaslighting of immigrant experiences is real. Thanks for the support!

lmao yeah thanks for sharing, it was totally pertinent to the point at hand

Does anyone think this would not have been crushed without mercy if the protestors were 'white supremacists'? Serious question.

The irony is that if these AZs were permitted it could give said segregationists exactly what they had been after for decades.

well this thing did happen in Charlottesville a couple years ago, and resulted in massive counterprotests by the left. I would imagine the same would happen here.

In terms of declaring themselves "autonomous", I'm thinking (and I imagine others in power are thinking as well) that this is simply done as a statement of protest, rather than an actual serious attempt to form a sovereign government. So crushing this without mercy is politically infeasable, especially given that the whole protest is about police and justice reform. I don't think this sets any kind of legal precedent. Better let them make the statement and let it run its course on its own.

Serious answer. Hoping for an actual reply but if feels like you’re just baiting given your “white supremacist” line in quotes (???).

If you mean to ask what would happen if white people took it over? Having been through chaz a few times, the population is overwhelming white (Seattle itself is only ~7% black). Capitol Hill is itself a white, gentrified area.

Or do you mean actual white supremacists? Charleston went down fine without a hitch. I seem to recall our President call them some, “very fine people.” [1] I also don’t recall any police response to the recent armed Michigan courthouse takeover.

I did, however, see multiple beatings and tear gas used against protestors for no reason at peaceful, unarmed protest events.

Maybe you can explain why you out “white supremacists” in quotes? Maybe you could list some recent examples of protestors being “crushed without mercy”? (I can list plenty, but none that are white movements. Please inform me!)

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/tru...

Not OP. But lots of people just use single quotes for emphasis. And not neccesarily the way i think you think it to mean. Not sure OP intention but kust wanted to say lots of people use single quote to imply italicized(emphasis).

I guess we can wait for their response to find out. I’m genuinely curious to hear about the merciless shutdowns the preview.

Just as the right wing Proud Boys in New York were ruthlessly put away by the criminal justice system, while no just example was made of left wing antifa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...

Like this scenario in 2016 that ended when the last far-right occupiers of a national wildlife refugee left after 6 weeks?.

That was the news story of the month. This has barely been talked about in most of the media.

That isn't what OP was talking about, but to answer your separate question--in Seattle you have unarmed people who pushed some concrete blocks into the street, in Oregon you had well armed people occupying a federal building.

"Within the self governed blocks you can find food vendors, daily marches, public film screenings and community councils hosted throughout the day".

Performance Art, I guess. Reads like a story of children building a treehouse/fort.

To me this whole thing reads more like the plot and gameplay of the next Far Cry game. What a time to be alive.

LOL. This will not end well.

When will they declare independence? That’s when the fun will really begin.

I doubt anything will happen. The smart move would be to let it fizzle out.

They already have a warlord, they aren't just LARPing

https://nypost.com/2020/06/12/raz-simone-accused-of-acting-l...

Two fascinating observations I've seen others have point out that are worth pondering:

- One of the first things they did after seizing six city blocks is setting up a border and controlling who enters the CHAZ

- How would the media have reacted if right-wing groups had commandeered several city blocks of any American city?

This is super interesting to watch unfold.

I live down the block. Anyone can wander in. If you're a local politician or an unfriendly news org you might be yelled at by protestors, but that shouldn't be a surprise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge doesn't appear to be in the middle of a city.

They were all arrested on felony charges and one was killed, and the media called them radicals... (iow, exactly what GP proposed)

Glad to see the #Occupy franchise has a new installment out.

So my question: will Trump quickly and lethally invoke the Insurrection act? Will the Joint Chiefs comply or create a constitutional crisis?

If this isn’t shut down quickly, I predict we see a national movement like this by Juneteenth.

His threat to use the Insurrection Act last week was one of the most unpopular acts of his entire presidency, and directly led to the major rebukes from people like Mattis. So I doubt it.

While that’s a fair point, this situation is a more literal insurrection than the previously seen protests and taking of goods from stores. CHAZ has declared their independence from the USA and historically that kind of thing is really not allowed. Has Trump so thoroughly lost control that secession is legal now?

They haven't actually declared themselves independent from the US.

That blurb on the website "You are now leaving the USA" is tongue in cheek.

The actual demands make no such claim about independence, all US Federal, State, and Local laws still apply.

There will eventually be arrests, and the WORST thing Trump can do is attempt to use the military to squash relatively peaceful protests.

I think the Seattle Police are thinking, "these are a bunch of kids who want to play-act La Revolución. If we just ignore them for a week, they'll get bored or disillusioned and go home."

So the police aren't going to storm the barricades -- they figure they won't have to.

This basically happens in Berlin every year on the May Day celebrations/marches.

The police let the anarchists do whatever they want, within certain constraints (no injuring people, constrained to certain neighborhoods), and the anarchists only do it on that day of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts between the police and the rioters, but it never escalates to huge conflicts any more.

It’s a display of mutual respect for authority, and it allows the radical groups to blow off some steam, while campaigning for progress.

I know this idea makes no sense to law and order -type people, but it’s an ancient human idea to ritualize and sanctify the behaviors you want to discourage or control.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day_in_Kreuzberg

This is a fitting explanation, and I think developing these kinds of rituals further will help heal some of the divides in this country.

Your last paragraph reminded me of Eric Gans’ “Originary Hypothesis” [1]:

> Gans hypothesizes that language originates in "an aborted gesture of appropriation," which signifies the desired object as sacred and which memorializes the birth of language, serving as the basis for rituals which recreate the originary event symbolically. The originary sign serves to defer the mimetic violence threatening the group, hence Gans's capsule definition of culture as "the deferral of violence through representation."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans#The_Originary_Hypo...

It’s definitely not an idea that originates with me! :)

I think I got it from a German Literature class. The professor had us read some formational texts, and one of them was a theory for the establishment of religion, written by some German 20th Century thinker. I can’t find the source now, but it was probably a pretty mainstream one, for all you internet sleuths out there.

He tried to put forward an evolutionary theory of religion. Basically, a tribe would come into conflict and children would kill their parents as a result. To try and prevent the same thing from happening to themselves, the children invented rituals that they taught to their children, so that they could control and direct their violence away from the parents. Instead of killing people, they would kill effigies made to look like people. Eventually, the children associate the effigies with their parents. But they like their parents, so they leave out the whole killing part when they teach it to their kids, who come to worship the effigies. They then kill animals instead of people. And so on. It was a really interesting exercise of rationalism!

If someone can find the source for me, I’ll give them my 2 internet points :)

Edit: I think it was Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard.

Ah, yep! Gans’ work is heavily based on Girard.

This is a bunch of leftists forming a squat in territory consciously ceded by local police. Hardly a national security issue. The city continues to provide the area with utilities, clean-up services, port-a-potties, and EMS when requested.

Whether or not the city planned on this, it's a nice clean way to quarantine the most radical protest elements in a playground that lets them live out their revolutionary fantasies in an environment where they can either be constructive, or hurt one-another away from everyone else.

In a month, they'll probably cut services and start pushing them out without making a huge deal of it.

From 10 USC 253:

“ The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—

“(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

“(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

“In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.”

I don’t know. Without sufficient intel as to what is happening on the ground I wouldn’t know if civil rights are being denied. If they are and the local authorities are cooperating with the rebellious group then there might be a way to utilize the act. It is just too soon to tell.

send in the 101st airborne

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/seattle-autonomous-zon...

It is plainly illegal. A bunch of criminals have barricaded several city blocks that do not belong to them and barricaded shared public infrastructure (roads). These are crimes. They should be apprehended, charged, and sentenced. This is very straightforward. Either the laws exist and they are enforced equally upon everyone or we do not have a functioning society.

You break the law many times per day, we all do. Enforcement of law is always discretionary and thus political.

Do you mind if I put up a barricade around your house so cops can't come near us? :)

Don't threaten me with a good time!

If you're paying!

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