How "Defund The Police" Plays Out IRL
Nellie Bowles writes at The New York Times about what it's like when a city abandons a neighborhood and the police vanish. Business owners in Seattle's CHOP zone describe a harrowing experience of calling for help having none come:
SEATTLE -- Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own mayor that the protests in his hometown were peaceful, with "a block party atmosphere."But that was not what he saw through the windows of his Seattle coffee shop. He saw encampments overtaking the sidewalks. He saw roving bands of masked protesters smashing windows and looting.
Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.
"They barricaded us all in here," Mr. Khan said. "And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns."
For 23 days in June, about six blocks in the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood were claimed by left-wing demonstrators and declared police-free. Protesters hailed it as liberation -- from police oppression, from white supremacy -- and a catalyst for a national movement.
...On Capitol Hill, business crashed as the Seattle police refused to respond to calls to the area. Officers did not retake the region until July 1, after four shootings, including two fatal ones.
Now a group of local businesses owners -- including a locksmith, the owner of a tattoo parlor, a mechanic, the owners of a Mexican restaurant and Mr. Khan -- is suing the city. The lawsuit claims that "Seattle's unprecedented decision to abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood, leaving it unchecked by the police, unserved by fire and emergency health services, and inaccessible to the public" resulted in enormous property damage and lost revenue.
The Seattle lawsuit -- and interviews with shop owners in cities like Portland and Minneapolis -- underscores a key question: Can businesses still rely on local governments, which are now rethinking the role of the police, to keep them safe? The issue is especially tense in Seattle, where the city government not only permitted the establishment of a police-free zone, but provided infrastructure like concrete barriers and portable toilets to sustain it.
Unbelievable. But it happened. Blue state thing that businesses in blue states should be very worried about.
Here's how it "works" for the individual business owner:
The impact of the occupation on Cafe Argento, Mr. Khan's coffee shop on Capitol Hill, has been devastating. Very few people braved the barricades set up by the armed occupiers to come in for his coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Cars coming to pick up food orders would turn around. At two points, he and his workers felt scared and called 911. "They said they would not come into CHOP," said Mr. Khan, referring to one of the names that protesters gave to the occupied Capitol Hill area. "It was lawless."He had to start chipping in for private security, a hard thing to do when his business had already been hurt by the coronavirus.
But he considers himself lucky -- and he was. Even weeks after the protests, blocks of his previously bustling neighborhood remained boarded up and covered in shattered glass. Many business owners are scared to speak out, Mr. Khan said, because of worries that they would be targeted further.
Just like in places like the Soviet Union, except that thug citizens are targeting business owners, and not a thug government.
Well, there's your answer to that old question, "If the policies you advocate are so wonderful, surely you can point at an example of how they work?"
It will never occur to these people that they got exactly the service they voted for.
Radwaste at August 8, 2020 7:00 AM
"... except that thug citizens are targeting business owners, and not a thug government."
No, this is how it is usually done. The government pulled police and fire protection. They then let people know those areas were not protected. The businesses were directly targeted by the government.
Ben at August 8, 2020 7:09 AM
That whole proletarian ownership of the means of production meant that in Soviet Russian, government was business.
Read up on Viktor Belenko, who stole a MiG-25 and defected to Japan. He was sure that the average grocery store was actually a CIA psyop. Fast forward about 15 years and Boris Yeltsin is marveling at a grocery in the Houston area.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 8, 2020 7:22 AM
It will never occur to these people that they got exactly the service they voted for.
While I agree with Rad that you get the government you vote for, I'm sure that this wasn't the service they voted for. Mostly because none of the candidates ran on a platform of "defund the police" and "allow rioters to run roughshod over your rights and burn down and loot your property".
We'll see what comes to pass in the next election, which will be in 2021. See if they get rid of the socialist on the council, or if they vote in more.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 8, 2020 7:31 AM
"A block party atmosphere"? With a Lord of the Flies theme?
Patrick at August 8, 2020 8:01 AM
My friend denies that CHOP ever happened. It was never on Facebook you see. Her friend lives in Portland and never saw it. People have a right to protest she said. Of course they do but physically attacking the police and burning buildings is not "speech". It is insurrection. To take the most rational of their demands "no more racism" and "justice"--but what exactly could a mayor do to satisfy those demands? "Ok, we have made racism illegal and there won't be any now". Right. Then you get the defund demands.
The protesters think they are resisting an authoritarian government--but the only reason they are getting "authoritarian" responses is because they want to destroy stuff. Most of these white kids have probably never had an encounter with police in their lives. How are they "oppressed"? It is a mass delusion. If you burn the city down and get rid of the cops there will be rainbows and unicorns?
cc at August 8, 2020 9:06 AM
Defunding the police and spending that money on social workers and non-violence counseling operates under the assumption that we need social control by the government. It's not replacing the police with freedom, but replacing them with a different control agency.
What we really need are fewer laws, fewer regulatory agency rules, less bureaucracy - a society based on mutual responsibility to each other within a freedom-oriented framework.
Since that may be impossible to achieve, we use the police to handle the worst of the transgressors against our civilizational framework. Petty bureaucracy requires the use of them against the least offenders.
By design, police forces in democracies have limitations put upon them and are directly answerable to an elected government. Will regulatory agency employees be similarly encumbered? Or will they be more like the past uses of posses and private security forces which Isab and others have pointed out did nothing to protect the rights of the wrongfully accused.
Conan the Grammarian at August 8, 2020 9:38 AM
This demonstrates the foolishness of abdicating your responsibility to anyone else-- government, for example. Don't become dependent or it will come back to bite you.
Thugs are thugs. To differentiate between governmental thugs and other thugs is looking for big differences where the only REAL difference is that the governmental thugs have paperwork giving them permission to bully and molest while the freelance thugs of CHOP didn't. Government isn't the problem; accepting rule by bullies (or anyone) is.
Kent McManigal at August 8, 2020 12:13 PM
"While I agree with Rad that you get the government you vote for, I'm sure that this wasn't the service they voted for." ~IRA
I don't know about that. From the people I know who live in Seattle this is pretty much what they voted for. But as always they wanted someone else's house to be in the CHAZ and not their own.
Ben at August 8, 2020 2:57 PM
"This demonstrates the foolishness of abdicating your responsibility to anyone else-- government, for example." If you are in Seattle, the government does it's best to ensure you cannot own the tools to protect yourself. They write gun laws with no thought of constitutionality, and enforce them unless and until a generally supine Supreme Court voids that law. Then they change it slightly, because they'll get another 10 or 20 years before the SC will act again - and it NEVER fines them for their contempt for the Constitution, nor makes them compensate their victims.
But there is a big hole in "progressives" thinking: they have only contempt for the law, as shown both in their attitude towards inconvenient Constitutional provisions and in their enabling of CHAZ - and yet they count on conservatives' respect for the law to keep the conservatives from killing them. (And if they somehow succeeded in the clearly impossible task of keeping guns out of hands of those who have lost respect for the law, there are dozens of other ways to destroy vermin.)
markm at August 13, 2020 6:34 PM
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