Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone: Six Blocks in Twenty Twenty

On May twenty-fifth, twenty twenty, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of a man named George Floyd for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Floyd died. The video of his death was widely circulated within hours. In Seattle, as in dozens of American cities, protests began almost immediately and continued for more than a week.

By June seventh, the confrontations between protesters and Seattle Police in the Capitol Hill neighborhood had become daily. Officers deployed pepper spray and flash-bang devices; protesters threw projectiles. On June eighth, the Seattle Police Department made a decision that had no precedent in American policing: they abandoned the East Precinct on Capitol Hill entirely, boarding it up and withdrawing. Protesters moved in. Within hours, they had declared the surrounding six blocks the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The name was later changed to the Capitol Hill Organized Protest.

For approximately three weeks, the zone operated on a kind of improvised community governance. There were free food stations, community gardens planted in Cal Anderson Park, a medical tent, evening speakers and rallies. There was no police presence. The city declined, for several weeks, to send any. President Trump described the zone on Twitter as a domestic terrorist occupation and demanded that Seattle's mayor retake it. The mayor declined to send police immediately.

The reality inside the zone was more complicated than either the supporters or the critics wanted it to be. Four shootings occurred within or near the zone during the occupation, two of them fatal. The organizers of the protests had not designed a mechanism for managing violence among the thousands of people who passed through. The Seattle Police Department retook the zone on July first, citing the shootings and the disruption to emergency services for residents within the occupied blocks.

What happened in those six blocks in the summer of twenty twenty was genuinely contested from the inside as well as from the outside. Community self-governance proved real in some dimensions and inadequate in others. The historical record is the accounts from The Stranger, from KUOW, and from the participants themselves, most of whom will tell you it was more complicated than anyone reported at the time.