And what was your take from the whole debacle? [from Reddit]

Real lesson: occupy the building. Once you’re inside, you have bargaining power, and it’s a lot harder to get you out than a street or park sweep.

Some people will say that the precinct should have been burnt like in Minneapolis, however, Seattle’s East Precinct is in a fairly dense residential and commercial neighborhood. It’s not isolated in the middle of a parking lot, so you are risking lives, especially given how cops and firefighters collude to sabotage protests against cops and to raise body counts.

Longer lesson: it’s important to recognize that the original iteration was mostly tongue-in-cheek and not even aspirational of anarchism. “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” was never a goal for most people, particularly those already living there who just were sick of cops tear-gassing the whole neighborhood for weeks.

While they were mostly pleased cops that were gone, and that the violence cops were doing to people in the streets was over, they were not trying to create self-governance or anything of the sort.

The new people who came to the area were some of the unhoused population looking for an area to just exist safely, some open-air drug sellers, but also a ton of essentially festival goers. As time went on, people were traveling from around the country to drink and party in this world-famous place, especially at night.

The re-naming to “CHOP” (alternatively “Cap Hill Occupied Protest” or “Ongoing Protest”) was to clarify this better. It was to be a place for doing the work, not just hanging out. But that didn’t go well because there was no way to keep out 18-year-olds from California who wanted to have their own Haight-Ashbury or whatever, do get drunk and climb up a fire-escape ladder to hang out on a roof.

Presumably anarchists were involved in organizing trash pickups, meal services, and volunteer or pay-what-you want programs focused on keeping the area livable. Anarchists got people to bring their cars to physically block streets early on. But it was not an autonomous zone. Garbage collection, barriers blocking traffic, and medical responses were all bargained with the city to continue going on with the greater resources the city had, just without the cops in the precinct and without them assaulting people.

Unfortunately, cops utilized public radio/scanner chatter to threaten that the area was under attack from armed Proud Boys (who later did show up armed and assaulted people outside the zone with impunity). Cops lied to legacy stenographer media and said anarchists were checking people’s IDs to be let in, something that was an especially revealing projection in hindsight because that’s what Seattle cops did a month later when they took the zone back, not even letting residents back into their own homes without ID. Cops also blocked an ambulance from getting to a shooting victim so people waited and waited then took the person to hospital in a private vehicle.

Cops and then the city lied to sympathetic and lazy media who then repeated the lies broadly to ignorant folk far away. That meant that people in Texas but also the eastside (as in Bellevue) assumed Seattle was a war zone rather than a few blocks that cops stayed out of and more resembled a block party most of the time than a revolution.

Because CHOP remained entirely outside and the precinct remained abandoned (people assumed it was a devious trap rather than incompetence and chaos), the whole event couldn’t really build to anything more or transform better. Sort of like moss growing on rock, it would have needed a lot more time to become stable, and any storm coming through could tear it right off.

The cops won the propaganda war because the Seattle Times and Fox News moved in lock-step repeating copaganda. Our side has bloggers and posters on social media but nothing could scale or reach the local community as well. We can bully straight news and embarrass them for errors so they will be better about not repeating cop lies, but as long as we rely on social media accounts that can be throttled by billionaires, we will always be subject to disinformation that turns public opinion against us. Given that, we need local support to be firm, direct, and real.

The last thing is amplified by the media/propaganda environment, but there was no good way to deal with the violence and (justifiable) paranoia people had. Prior to cops abandoning the precinct, the brother of an officer had attempted to run over protesters and then to shoot them before he was stopped by protesters and fled to cops for protection. Another person was killed by a vehicle running into a highway protest with more badly injured, and again, fascist street gangs were openly coming into the zone and attacking people at the edges or driving around threatening people.

So self-defense was necessary, but some people just wanted to be cops themselves, which in an “All Cops Are Bastards” sense can hardly be called an improvement. While some of the shootings during that month would have happened anyway — just in places that affluent white people could continue ignoring — one shooting in particular seemed initially to be someone driving a vehicle through the soccer field shooting at people in the area, people who tried to hide while still getting information out. Then the vehicle was stopped by being shot up by volunteer overnite security, and it turned out it was just two Black teenagers who apparently had no weapons on them. That’s why some people initially celebrated the deaths (“FAFO”) before discovering it wasn’t one of the fascist street gangs working with cops. It’s legitimately a tragedy, and it’s never been well-explained.

“What do you do when up against the full resources of the state which is able to lie without consequence and whose own extrajudicial violence and executions are forgiven or even celebrated?”

No one yet has a great answer for that question in practice, clearly.

But in addition to preparing everyone now to be better ready for the next one, borrowing the police’s tactics to stretch them thin and fill them with worry about many parts of the city at once rather than just one place that can concentrate on would probably be fruitful.

Organizing your own neighbors is good anyway, but having the ability to do direct action in lots of places instead of just one that will eventually be smashed should cops (or Homeland Security) commit to smashing it seems important.