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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

BLM took over an entire section of Seattle for weeks.

The cops pulled out before that happened, and it was quite peaceful there while that was going on. It's really not the same situation.

I'm not defending what's going on here, but CHAZ/CHOP had a higher murder rate than Somalia because of unelected volunteer "private security". Not sure how you see that as peaceful.

Source, please. For both parts of that claim.

I'm sure that was hyperbole, CHAZ/CHOP has 2 deaths and 4 wounded in a 24 day period.

So the murder rate is 2/24=0.0833_

Somalia had a murder rate of 599 deaths in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

599/365=1.641

That being said, at least 1 of the killings at the CHAZ/CHOP was by the self proclaimed security forces. As far as I know no one has ever been identified or held accountable. If the idea is that you do not need police/ want to hold them to greater accountability because they are violent and kill innocent people but your replacement does the same thing...then what is the point?

Murder rates are typically reported on a per capita basis, not per day rate.

Siri is reporting CHAZ had a population of 80(??) and Somolia a population of 15MM. The respective per capita rates would be 0.025 and ~3.99e-5

I apologize, some how I misread the parent as saying that there were more murders per day....

I am not sure how I misread that.

No reason to apologize, just trying to add some context/clarity

Murder rate is a per capita statistic. Larger populations have more of all types of crime, almost by definition.

I know that, for some reason I had misread the parent as saying that more murders occurred per day. My brain may have translated rate as change over time....

At least one of them was also by a cop's buddy, who drove in, shot somebody then wandered over to the cops for a high five and to be arrested.

> and it was quite peaceful

and also quite illegal and a complete breakdown of rule of law

It was peaceful. Very few people got murdered.

Quite peaceful? There were four shootings in ten days and at least two people killed [1]. I personally went there and within a span of an hour or so that I was there I saw a woman screaming about how she had been raped and I saw a mob of people violently ejecting a street preacher.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone#S...

In comparison to the violence that was going on before the cops pulled out of their precinct, it was definitely more peaceful. It was also many orders of magnitude more peaceful than the current situation at the Capitol.

There were somewhere between 1 and 10 thousand people living in the zone. If we assume it was 10 thousand, and there were 2 murders inside of 10 days, then that works out to a rate of 73 (2*36.5) murders per year per 10k people, or 730 murders per 100k. That's approximately 7 times the rate of the most murderous city in the world[1].

I don't know what the murder rate in the neighborhood was prior to the occupation, but I'm pretty confident it wasn't nearly that high.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

What? More people were murdered there than at the capitol.

I lived a block away from the CHAZ/CHOP and while it was mostly peaceful during the day, it was angry, aggressive, and deadly at night. I took video of a mob of people brutalizing (pushing to the ground, pinning on the ground) a Christian street preacher in broad daylight because they didn't like his annoying speech. At night, for days at a time, there were gunshots and people getting shot. If you think it was "quite peaceful" there, then you're getting your information from a severely biased source. I lived there and spent more time there than probably any of your sources.

My source is me, I live 3 blocks from it. Things were for sure a lot quieter at night with CHAZ/CHOP going on than they were in the week prior to it.

Are you saying it was "quite peaceful" in absolute terms or relative to other extreme events? I took it to mean absolute terms, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you lived there as I did, I don't see how anyone could look at the CHOP and say it was "quite peaceful" in absolute terms (eg, relative to an average day).

Bit of both.

The week before the CHOP started was full the sounds of helicopters overhead, flashbang explosions, and "less lethal" rounds being fired. The week after CHOP started was quiet. Comparing the shift from yesterday to today in DC's Capitol Hill against the shift from June 7 to June 8 in Seattle's Capitol Hill, the CHOP was extraordinarily peaceful. That's mostly the comparison I was making by initially saying it was "quite peaceful": the day before and the day after in those two locations.

But even then, the CHOP compared to the same location today (for example) is honestly pretty similarly peaceful. It was certainly a relatively violent time for that street, but I didn't feel at all at risk walking through it. I also didn't have any problem living 3 blocks away from a place that many news agencies tried to construe as violent anarchy.

Seattle is a place where people can throw each other off of overpasses into traffic just fine.

CHOP wasn't significantly different

And during that time they surrounded a federal courthouse... where people were free to come and go and court remained in session...

I like the original better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_General_Strike

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