I'm sure it was mostly fine, in the same way if you stuck to certain places in the capital riots the majority of the people congregated were peaceful. The Chaz also usurped local businesses, there were plenty of firearms and at least five shootings. This is indisputable. Now you will say those are just bad apples, but you wouldn't give the same leniency to the capital riots would you. Also the leaders of the Chaz bare some responsibility for the deaths that happened in them do they not? But of course no one really cares about that, whereas assinine tweets by unpopular politicians mean they are traitors who orchestrated an attempted coup. To me the framing of similar events is very different based on political allegiance.. hence why I'm worried about these biased reporters gaining more power to determine who does and does not have a voice in society.
There were more deaths and more crime than what is just officially attributed to CHAZ. CHAZ also left behind a massive tent encampment that took over Cal Anderson park (adjacent to CHAZ), which at one point was used for riot staging. Police found a weapons cache hidden inside a tent that appeared to be for the homeless but wasn’t (https://thepostmillennial.com/revealed-antifa-stored-weapons...). The sprawling homeless camp became its own controversy, with black bloc/antifa affiliated activists trying to set up a new autonomous zone following something similar in Portland (https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/12/18/296959-n296959). All this chaos and the park being taken over as an illegal homeless encampment provided cover for a homicide-suicide (https://thepostmillennial.com/homicide-suspect-in-seattle-sl...). The person committing the homicide was Travis Berge, a repeat offender who was featured in the documentary “Seattle is Dying” as a prime example of permissive restorative justice policies don’t work (https://komonews.com/news/local/travis-berge-repeat-offender...). He killed a woman that was allegedly his “girlfriend” before killing himself.
Call me biased but I happen to think that being at a “protest” that results in the storming of the Capitol during the tallying of electoral votes for our country’s leader is not equivalent to the occupation of a public park after a man was suffocated by a police officer. I happen to think that storming the seat of government is worse.. Chaz was two (maybe three square) blocks, and the news was acting like it was a country. Also absolutely nothing was stopping the police from doing their job, they literally abandoned a precinct which made zero sense at the time. I acknowledge there were shootings, but yeah like I said, I went there on multiple occasions and didn’t see a single firearm, but the news (both CNN and Fox) described checkpoints and anarchy when all I saw with my own eyes were art booths and a stage with speakers giving lectures.
I watched the mainstream news and I walked down the street. The vast majority of news coverage was very favorable to chaz/chop. It was extremely unsafe after sundown, made that way by the residents of chaz/chop.
I lived about 4 blocks north and I can give you videos of cal anderson and the general capitol hill area being dangerous after sun down throughout the past 4-5 years if you'd like. Seattle is overall not a nice place to live unless you're in the suburbs or only exist indoors.
One night right outside my window, I witnessed a homeless man with a gun to his head, right out in the open, screaming "KILL ME MOTHERF***" to the guy screaming "GIVE ME MY MONEY". I've seen knife fights by both QFC's.
Everyone just normalizes it and like, finds an equilibrium when you live there.
All the live footage I've seen from people who have actually gone suggests that it was as bad as people suggest.
Things I've seen video of includes guys handing out guns to (what appear to be) minors, fights breaking out, and people getting assaulted for recording what is happening there.
Can you link to any of that? I lived nearby and it felt more like a street festival the times I went by. I know this stuff happened, but I genuinely never saw what it was like.
Yeah, pretty much. I remember a Twitch streamer who'd broadcast from there even abused the DMCA to take down a video that Seattle's police department posted to try and identify the CHAZ-affiliated people who were caught on stream shooting and killing a black teenager. As far as I know Twitch didn't have any problem with that, because "Black Lives Matter" doesn't actually mean black lives matter...
I remember peacefully eating Subway about 2 blocks away from CHAZ watching bunnies hop around in the grass. I was there for photojournalistic purposes. I had to walk past a Starbucks with broken windows however. Actually being there and experiencing it, media most definitely blew it out of the water for outrage advertising $$. You're very right.
The initial few days of george floyd protests were tense, but almost every large city around the country also was.
