A Police Defunder Has Some Regrets

I’ve been following with rapt attention the new NPR/Seattle Times podcast, “We Keep Us Safe” which investigates the murder of 15-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in 2020.

This summer, we’ve been looking at what it takes to make community work. This new investigation of CHOP highlights the challenges of building a society from scratch apart from traditional institutions like the police.

What Was CHOP?

For those of you unfamiliar with CHOP, it was a protestor takeover of Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park and several blocks around it after the Seattle Police Department abandoned its East Precinct station in June of 2020 after several days of protest after the murder of George Floyd.

The media portrayed CHOP, varyingly, as either a Summer-of-Love-type sit-in or a lawless hellscape. Anxious to cut through the hype, I visited CHOP and witnessed both its promise and problems first-hand.

Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There were many positive things happening at the park: tables offered free food and water to anyone who wanted them. There were medical personnel on hand and teach-ins using the “human microphone” technique many folks learned during the Occupy Wall Street protests. People were exchanging ideas and vigorously debating how to create the post-racist, just society so many of us were crying out for in those dark days.

But while there were many in the park there to learn and vision together, the vibes weren’t exactly peace and love. Homeless people, some behaving erratically, had also streamed into the encampment. And as my friends and I sat eating tacos on the baseball field, we witnessed a group of masked men surround someone who was recording video. The group began shouting at the videographer, threatening violence. I’d seen enough and decided not to stick around past dark.

Four days after my visit, 15-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. would be murdered and his friend gravely wounded right in front of the abandoned police station. Questions remained: who killed Mays and why? And how had this protest against racialized violence ended up taking the life of a Black teenager?

The Investigation

In the days after Mays’ murder, rumors swirled: he was a gang member or a troublemaker, there to cause mayhem and possibly harm CHOP protestors. Having witnessed the various groups of people filtering in and out of CHOP, I all too easily accepted this explanation, figuring we’d probably never get the whole story.

But reporters from our local NPR station and The Seattle Times were able to reconstruct a timeline of the murder using hours of security camera and livestream video scraped from social media. This, combined with eye-witness interviews, led to some startling revelations about why Mays was at CHOP and who likely killed him.