Welcome to the CHOP
Today, I visited the Capital Hill Occupied Protest, (formerly Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), partially out of curiosity, partially out of solidarity for the anti-racist, anti-cop protests that have been occurring in Seattle. There has been a lot of misinformation about the protests, and a fair bit of misinformation about the CHOP, so I’d like to share what I saw, what I didn’t see, and some questions and thoughts I had about the experience.
The CHOP occupies about 6 city blocks at the moment, and includes Capital Hill’s Cal Anderson park. For those not from Seattle, it occupies one of the main thorough fares in one of the busiest sections of Seattle. It’s centered around the now captured East Police Precinct.
The first thing that’s immediately noticeable is the graffiti and street art. It’s everywhere, it’s political, and it’s aggressively anti-cop, anti-racist. It’s mostly text, but as the CHOP has persisted, there’s been more and more visual art and murals being added.
“All Cops Are Bastards”
There were hundreds of people on the streets today. There were discussion groups, medics, public speakers, musicians, artists, and even a guy getting folks to play a little soccer in the crowds. The sheer variety of activity was surprising to me, and speaks to the spontaneity and organic use of the space.
Most interesting to me were the gardens. Folks have seized park land and slowly started turning it into garden land. Wheelbarrows of soil have been dumped, large water catchment barrels have been brought in, and leafy greens are now being grown.
I didn’t see disorder, I saw a bunch of little communities and directions and opportunities for growth.I saw a lot of white people exposing themselves to the protest for the first time, I saw dozens of little projects and expressions of human will. I saw written down for the world to see, painted in bright letters, the pain and suffering that the black community has had under capitalism and policing.
I saw impromptu civil organizing. This woman was prompting people to stay out of an alley due to a potential gas emergency. She had no real authority, no title, just took it upon herself to organize and protect people.
Right now, the CHOP is a little community figuring out how to work. They are sorting through their logistics around food, shelter, human waste. It’s land that’s been seized back from capital, seized back from a city that has failed to justly treat its citizens. The CHOP is a political statement from normal people that there are many modes of political action, and it is in our hands to decide how we are governed.
We don’t know yet how this will all shake out, how the SPD will respond, what the long term sustainability of the CHOP is, or how to protestors and organizers will use the CHOP as a building block in finding change for our society, but I’m inspired by the action that arose out of justified outrage. It’s very easy for those on the outside to look at the CHOP and see disorder, complain about the means that were used for change, or critique the weaknesses in the methods, but right now, there is a cop-free zone in a major city, there is a little commune growing on the streets of Seattle, there is a space where the injustice done by the state to its citizens can be discussed freely without fear of violence.
My hope is that we can see the lesson in standing up for what we believe, for fighting against forces we see as unjust, and pursuing alternatives to the current system.
