CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City

From The Stranger

by Rich Smith • Jun 15, 2020 at 6:45 pm

Original note accompanying the cover photo: CHAZ is going through some ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

On Sunday morning residents of the protest zone around the East Precinct on Capitol Hill met with the heads of city agencies to continue discussions on the site's footprint, and to address concerns about getting vehicles in and out of the area quickly.

Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, one of the few public leaders who seems to have earned the trust of CHOP residents, led the meeting. He was joined by Seattle Public Utility CEO Mami Hara and Seattle Department of Transportation director Sam Zimbabwe. Converge Media and Future Crystals ran livestreams.

Carmen O’Toole, who represented business owners, expressed concerns about road repair, blockades hampering "a lot" of early morning deliveries, and first responder access, among other things. Real estate investor Ron Amundson, speaking for property owners, called for a return to "normal."

Those representing the protesters included CHOP garden operations director Marcus Henderson, live-streamer and artist Chai Adera, protest organizer Shannon, rapper Raz Simone, and barrier security guard Cove. Filmmaker Tracy Rector, who runs Longhouse Media out of Northwest Film Forum, also facilitated the discussion.

Cove said CHOP's current borders present fire concerns, and added that working with the city to manage "thousands of dollars of infrastructure" will "look very good" for the movement. As night security in CHOP is thin on the ground, Cove argued that a smaller perimeter would be easier to control.

Zimbabwe distributed two proposals for new configurations that would reduce the size of the area and clear paths for emergency vehicles, delivery drivers, and residents and business owners who needed to access their buildings.

The protesters were amenable to negotiations, but seemed to prefer one proposal much more than the other.

Shannon, one of the Capitol Hill Organized Protesters, showed me a copy of one SDOT proposal and a drawn copy of the protester's preferred proposal.

One option from SDOT allows thru traffic on 11th and 12th Avenues, limiting CHOP's street presence to a block of Pine. During the meeting, Shannon said this layout would create a "kill zone" that would make protesters vulnerable to cars, active shooters, and police looking to arrest a bunch of people.

This option allows thru traffic on 11th and 12th Avenues, limiting CHOP's street presence to a block of Pine. As you can tell from her note, Shannon thinks this plan will create a kill zone.

Protesters showed KIRO's Deedee Sun the other proposal, which would block off Pine completely between 10th and 11th Avenues, and block half of Pine from 11th to 12th Avenues, allowing for one way traffic westbound from 12th to 11th.

Tweet: "#UPDATE: Security from #CHAZ / #CHOP protest zone tells me they’re working with Seattle Fire, SDOT, and Public Utilities to change up some of the protest areas/ barricades and where emergency vehicles are allowed. This is to improve first responder access. @KIRO7Seattle pic.twitter.com/gpmxKgY3w5— Deedee Sun (@DeedeeKIRO7) June 15, 2020"

Zimbabwe said these two options create "access to all buildings and businesses that are necessary." I asked SDOT and SFD for a copy of both proposals, but they didn't send them to me. I'll update this post when I hear back.

On Sunday evening Shannon told me this hand-drawn map represented her preferred proposal, which would block off parts of 11th and 12th Avenues, including any access to 12th north of Pine.

Shannon told me this was her preferred proposal. It would block off parts of 11th and 12th Avenues. I asked SDOT and SFD for a copy of both proposals, but they didn't send them to me.

A spokesperson from the city's joint information center said city leaders have been meeting "daily with CHAZ/CHOP leaders to work with the organizers on sanitation, hygiene, and any other needs since June 9," and added that "any updated footprint to facilitate more access would be done in agreement with CHAZ/CHOP organizers and would ensure CHAZ/CHOP residents can continue to protest peacefully around the East Precinct while allowing deliveries, sanitation and easy access."

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Interesting to read this with this in mind:

Excerpt from "The Master's Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility"

"As a phenomenon, or series of phenomena grouped together under a single term, policing must occur in some time and in some place, otherwise we are speaking of phantasms. But for this to be the case, policing cannot be reduced to an inert conceptual object: incapable of acting, being, moving, and so on. We can never group together the concept and the phenomena of policing into a single entity. Rather, we have to either speak of the conceptual object of policing, at which point we cease to analyze the phenomena of policing, or we have to form a different sort of analysis, to understand policing as a phenomena particular to a time and space, one that also shifts in form. This entails a fundamental change, away from the ethical and conceptually political, and into a grounding in tactical immediacy and logistical dynamics.

[...]

Projection of force, visually and materially, is the attempt to construct a terrain that is conducive to the movements and operations of policing. We have seen numerous aspects of this within the tacti-cal terrains that we inhabit: the proliferation of surveillance cameras, the networking of private cameras into the police surveillance matrix, the proliferation of private security and semi-official police departments, and the growth of neighborhood snitch networks, also known as Neighborhood Watch, but also the leveling of vacant buildings, the mowing of vacant lots, and so on. Most innovative in the methods of projection is not a technology, but merely the construction of metropolitan space itself. The street grid developed in the 19th Century and the freeway systems in the early and mid-20th Century made movement through space easier and more efficient. Projection does not just involve the ability to latently hold space, even outside of immediate presence,15 but the ability to move through space. However, like any technological innovation, the development of the road structure, standardizing space within Cartesian models, may have made movement easier, but also disperses concentrations of force and largely confines police movements to the roads themselves. As in Paris where Reclus suggested turning into gun turrets the row buildings lining the newly-built wide boulevards (that now characterize that city), this confinement to the road generates zones of elongated vision and projectile movement,16 but also limits the vision of what occurs off these roads, in zones of indiscernability, whether Iraq’s open desert plains, Afghanistan’s mountains, or the “unbuildable” spaces on the sides of wooded hills in the middle of Pittsburgh. These zones of indiscernability, of invisibility and possibility, become wider the more resistance is waged within a space, the less that people snitch each other out, the more open space off the roads there may be within a terrain, and the density of the dynamics and physical objects (whether trees in a forest or barricades on streets) within the lines of flight within that terrain.

One can easily trace this trajectory of containing land for policing beginning with land enclosure and the standardization of naming and surveillance structures in the 16th and 17th centuries, of policing saturating space more and more thoroughly, as the dynamics of this space come to shape policing. The co-immanent dynamic between policing and space can be seen everywhere. In the suburbs we find the proliferation of private security, on every corporate campus, on every college campus, in every mall and shopping center, as well as the growth of increasingly fortified gated communities. In the core of the metropolis the street grid, the walls around the security buildings and precinct stations, the proliferation of private and public cameras, the deputization of pseudo-police forces at colleges and hospitals, the 161proliferation of non-police and “task forces” hired by development organizations, the rise of the community watch group, and the growth of the federal security apparatus have come to form spaces that are almost entirely framed around the movements and operations of police. With the enclosure of space, and the elimination of the commons, the “public” has become something to protect against. Surveillance saturates the workplace and the park. Police roll down the street looking for someone that looks suspicious; the streets in the poorest neighborhoods are cordoned off and Baghdad-style armed check-points are set up on the streets of LA. Paramilitary tactics are adopted by SWAT teams that increasingly become aspects of everyday police operations and the flip-side of the velvet glove of “community policing.” Everywhere we look the metropolis has become structured around the separation of space, the separation of bodies, the dispersal of the street and the fortification of the private. This does not occur in a vacuum, or in the absence of the attempt to amplify projection across space and time. As space becomes increasingly striated, increasingly operated upon, space itself begins to shift around a new series of imperatives. As static as many of us may feel built space is, the solidity of terrain is largely mythological. But just as space shifts in order to allow for the smooth operation of policing (or prevent it), policing has been modified to operate in the post-WWII metropolis with the incorporation of ever faster forms of communication, ever more sophisticated forms of monitoring and surveillance, and ever heavier weapons and paramilitary tactics.

What we are witnessing is nothing short of a constant security operation, a constant attempt to eliminate these zones of indiscernability, structured not only to respond to actions but also to prevent actions from arising or becoming apparent. Every day this more defines the spaces that we exist within; it is nothing short of the expansion of the prison out-side of the walls. As in the prison, a terrain conducive to police movements and operations necessarily involves an almost total vision, a complete ability to project across space, the ability to justify unlimited uses of force. But, along with this, we come into contact with the primary paradox of counterinsurgency (policing is necessarily a form of occupation, and thus a form of counterinsurgency). As policing becomes more and more all-pervasive, as the police become more and more able to mobilize overwhelming concentrations of force, their very movements generate resistance, resentment, conflict. As they project through space they become visible, and the methods of tracking their movements and avoiding their detection are becoming more and more effective."

(p. 141 - 164, "The Master's Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility")

A different excerpt of it may be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tom-nomad-we-give-a-shit

You may find this and other books at Little Black Cart

What? Working with the city OR autonomous...
Why work with the authorities?

Its called co-operation snowflake, its not an ideological flip.

You're clearly here confusing "co-operation" with blatant "co-option"...

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