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Police Clear Seattle’s Protest ‘Autonomous Zone’

The so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest area was taken over by protesters after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It was the site of at least four shootings last month.

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Seattle Police Clear ‘No Cop’ Zone

The so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest area in Seattle was taken over by demonstrators after the death of George Floyd, and was the site of several shootings.

[shouting] “Move back!” [shouting] “Excuse me, can I have a dialogue with somebody, real quick? It’s very important.”

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The so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest area in Seattle was taken over by demonstrators after the death of George Floyd, and was the site of several shootings.CreditCredit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

SEATTLE — For weeks, officials in Seattle have been grappling with what to do about a protest zone set up near downtown that became the scene of several shootings and a war of words between city leaders and President Trump: Support it as an exercise in populist democracy? Or shut it down?

On Wednesday, a resolution took the form of squads of riot police and several pieces of heavy machinery. The police swept through the so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest area in the early-morning hours with little opposition, pulling aside barricades, arresting protesters and retaking the police station they had abandoned several weeks earlier.

“Our job is to support peaceful demonstrations,” Carmen Best, the city’s police chief, said as police officers re-entered the East Precinct station and set up formidable lines outside. “What has happened here on these streets over the last two weeks — few weeks, that is — is lawless, and it’s brutal, and bottom line, it is simply unacceptable,” she said.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Jenny Durkan said she was urging the police to avoid criminal charges against anyone arrested in the zone for failure to disperse or other misdemeanors.

But she said the city had been forced to act because of the repeated episodes of violence.

Seattle’s largely progressive leadership had sought mightily to find common ground with the protesters who were demanding an end to the disparate and sometimes violent treatment of African-Americans by the police, in part because of the city’s own recent history. The city committed to sweeping police reforms after the Department of Justice accused it of biased policing and excessive force in 2012. Ms. Best, its first Black female police chief, was appointed in 2018.

But the encampment known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest began drawing homeless people from elsewhere in the city who showed no inclination to leave anytime soon, and the happy communal vibe during the day was often turning darker at night.

The outbreak of violence over the past week left many in the neighborhood — an area of artists and students and also some of the city’s grandest old homes — demanding an end to the chaos.

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Barricades erected by protesters were dismantled on Wednesday.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

“The deteriorating conditions and repeated gun violence required us to immediately address public safety concerns,” Ms. Durkan said. “It was clear that many individuals would not leave, and that the impacts to the community could not be reduced, and public safety could not be improved, until they did leave.”

Chief Best said it even more succinctly earlier in the day: “Enough is enough.”

The move to clear the area came as protests against police brutality around the country, sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in May, have begun to wane. Many cities, including Seattle, have committed to new police reforms after Mr. Floyd’s death, and some of the officers involved in the most recent shooting deaths of Black people, including Mr. Floyd, have been fired and charged with crimes.

There are continuing moves to redefine the mission of police departments around the country, and to arrest other officers involved in deadly shootings of Black people, including Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was shot by Louisville, Ky., police officers at her home.

But millions of Americans are out of work because of the coronavirus, and some of those whose grievances go well beyond the latest cases of police violence have remained in the streets to demand further change. Perhaps taking a cue from Seattle, demonstrators in Portland, Philadelphia, Richmond, Va., and elsewhere have tried to set up protest sites of their own.

In New York, what started as a small group of protesters and a few square feet morphed into a group that took over the large part of a park, and attracted extensive attention on social media. Police tried to clear the area on Wednesday morning, removing barricades and making several arrests.

The Seattle protest zone included tents, a “Decolonization Conversation Cafe” and even a medic station over six blocks, establishing what protesters called a “no-cop” zone after the police agreed to board up their precinct station and withdraw outside the barricades. Part street fair, part commune, the so-called CHOP became an experiment in maintaining order with no police in sight.

But leadership in the zone was unclear, and community organizers said it was hard to figure out who was in charge. Some activists called for a few specific demands including defunding the police department, while others focused on broader issues such as economic inequality.

“There was no leadership because there were different factions,” said Andre Taylor, a local community organizer who had struggled to broker a meeting between representatives in the zone and the mayor. “When you’re dealing with a very volatile situation and there’s no cohesive voice, it’s really hard to deal with.”

Some residents and local business owners had initially been supportive of the enclave. Matt Mitgang, who lives across from the abandoned police station, said he had joined protests after Mr. Floyd’s death, and had been tear-gassed in his apartment when the police initially clashed with protesters.

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Bystanders watched the Seattle police dismantle the encampment on Wednesday.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

“None of us were happy with the police department,” Mr. Mitgang said. “I think we were all looking at the evolving situation on our street with cautious optimism.”

But the recent violence worried him.

“We had kind of reached the point as residents where it felt like the message was getting lost,” he said.

A few days ago, Mr. Mitgang and his neighbors called the fire department to assist a man who appeared to be in medical distress, he said. No one came.

“Their station is less than a block away, but they never came,” he said, “and I think at that point a lot of us got truly shaken. Seeing that they wouldn’t even come in half a block I think made a lot of us really worried about what would happen if something else were to occur.”

A 19-year-old man died and a 33-year-old man was injured in the first shooting that took place at CHOP on June 20. A 17-year-old man was injured in a second shooting the following day. And on Monday, the police said they were investigating a third shooting that had left a 16-year-old dead and a 14-year-old seriously injured.

The tension over how to handle the zone had drawn national scrutiny, including from President Trump, who blasted Democratic officials in Seattle and Washington State for failing to clear the area earlier.

“If they don’t do the job, I’ll do the job,” the president said last month.

City officials had responded irritably, with Mayor Durkan saying on Twitter: “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”

On Wednesday, the White House spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, called the protest zone “a failed four-week Democrat experiment by the radical left.”

“The results are in,” she added. “Anarchy is anti-American. Law and order is essential. Peace in our streets will be secured.”

Seattle officials had initially announced their intention to shut down the protest zone over the weekend, but it was not until Wednesday morning that a crowd of police officers pushed through the area just after 5 a.m., some wearing helmets and carrying batons. Officials said the equipment was “not meant to be a pre-emptive show of force” but was necessary because people gathered in the area were known to be armed.

“I woke up to everybody screaming and running, saying, ‘The cops, the cops, they’re here,’” said Derrek Allen Jones II, who said he had been staying at the zone for several weeks.

Officers lined up on the edge of the area as a helicopter whirred overhead. Protesters milled around the intersection, some shouting at the police. A couple of officers engaged in dialogue directly with protesters as others led a man away in handcuffs. One man said he had been hit with pepper spray as officers pushed protesters back to 12th and Pike Street. A woman raised her fist in the air and chanted, “These are our streets.”

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A pile of leftover belongings from the encampment.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Thirty-one people were arrested on charges of failure to disperse, obstruction, resisting arrest and assault, the police department said on Twitter, including a 29-year-old man who had a large metal pipe and a kitchen knife.

Protesters had been issued warnings to disperse when the police arrived, according to Detective Mark Jamieson.

“There were people that wanted to be arrested,” he said. “We gave multiple orders to disperse and then either people leave or they don’t.”

The police also cleared protesters from nearby Cal Anderson Park, he said.

After the arrests, traffic began moving through the streets once again, and city workers in yellow and orange vests hauled out spray-painted barricades and artwork. Left behind were some tents, and a few signs: “R.I.P. E. Precinct,” one of them read. “All lives don’t matter until Black lives matter,” said another.

Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.

Rachel Abrams joined The Times as a business reporter in 2013. She was part of the award-winning teams that covered sexual harassment and misconduct and General Motors’ crisis involving fatal ignition switches. She previously worked for Variety. More about Rachel Abrams

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Blaming Gun Violence, Seattle Officials Clear City’s Police-Free Zone. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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