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
BTW - love the church picture (I think it’s the one in Spain?)
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.
Doesn’t sound very utopian
[1] https://twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1271291958296604675?s=2...
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".
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)
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.
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.
> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You could buy the pieces and build it yourself, but you'd need some tooling.
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.
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. :)
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 ..
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.
Oh you mean like police officers?
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.
- "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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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/?
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....
> 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.
Chief Best has made multiple false statements of fact just this week, so, no.
So the simplest answer is actually: protesters benefit from police using force. (because they'll get more protesters, more media coverage etc.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This sounds like at least an implicit threat of imminent violence, without disputing the rest of your description.
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.
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?
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.
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.
In other words:
> An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
> -- Huey P Newton
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?
And who knows, they could have bought the parts and assembled it, if they can find things in stock somewhere.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
In big European cities it’s pretty normal to see cops wearing body armor and carrying rifles around such events.
My guess is the mayor and/or the forces that pull her strings.
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.
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.
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...
[0] https://twitter.com/spekulation/status/1271631384025554944
Your experience of music festivals and heavily armed people going hand in hand is not universal.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)"
If you really want to feel sick read-up on the Highway of Tears and the systematic brutalization of indigenous women by Canadian society.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
