From The Seattle Times: Shooting at Seattle’s CHOP protest site kills one, leaves another in critical condition
One male was killed and another was wounded early Monday morning when they were shot in the protest area known as CHOP.
Seattle police tweeted the shooting happened near 12th Avenue and Pike Street. According to an email from Harborview Medical Center, one of the wounded males was brought to the hospital by private vehicle around 3:15 a.m. The second was brought in by Seattle Fire Department medics about 15 minutes later.
One man died and the other was in critical condition, according to the hospital.
The article has since been edited. The opening paragraph now reads:
A 16-year-old boy was killed and a 14-year-old boy was wounded early Monday morning when they were shot at 12th Avenue and Pike Street in the protest area known as CHOP, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
(Featured image is “288” by grotos and is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
One of the things about shootings is that there’s pretty much definitive proof that they happened.
We all remember two weeks ago where the Seattle Police Chief said that her department had gotten calls about sexual assault in the CHOP and the debate was over whether this was something that she was making up.
These shootings? They happened.
I’ve seen people theorizing that the shootings were caused by fascists who came in to discredit the CHOP. So there’s that.Report
I would think there are a lot more criminals (or even civilians who can’t call the police now) than there are “fascists”.
More importantly, is this normal for Seattle? This is 4 shootings in the last 10 days in a small area.Report
I’ll apply the comment I made about the Trumpists to the people of CHOP;
They are insurgents who have no desire or ability to govern.Report
When I first started following this the story was that two white men plowed through a barrier and opened fire on everybody. That version didn’t seem to hold up very well, and I’m starting to wonder whether the people in the Jeep even had guns at all.Report
The Seattle Times story has been updated to note that he Jeep’s driver was 16.Report
Oh, jeez. I should note that.Report
I’ve seen a handful of articles talking about record number of homicides in various places. Minneapolis, Chicago… I’m guessing that the CHOP has seen more than that area is used to seeing.
Are these being cherry-picked? Are we seeing an increase in homicides nationwide?Report
I think the homicides have only gone up in major cities with protests. Prior to the protests the homicide rate should’ve dropped way down because nobody was out and bars were closed.
112 injured or killed in 83 shootings over 9 days in NYC: ‘I haven’t seen anything like this in my entire life’.
Last year New York had 300 murders, but the above story notes only six dead over the previous week, which would be on par with the previous norms. However, the nine day period with 112 victims means they had been at 420 shooting incidents with 493 victims over five months, which would be an annual rate of 1,000 shootings and 1,200 victims. At that 9-day surge rate they’d have about 3,300 shootings and 4,400 victims over the course of a year. So the amount of violence in New York seems to be about 3.5 times what it was last year.Report
Hoo boy. The noise online seems to signal that it looks like the shooting was done by CHOP security.
It took 3 days to get Raz the Warlord. 3 weeks to get CHOP cops killing people.Report
Here is a security camera video of the incident.
You can hear the Karen talking about a stolen Jeep and shots exchanged by some unknown vehicle, then telling everyone to keep their heads up and be alert, long before the Jeep even comes onto the scene.Report
Man that’s nuts. It sounds like right after the shooting stops someone shouts ‘oh you’re not dead huh?’ Then maybe asks if he wants to get pistol whipped.Report
Someone did indeed say that.
If this incident had involved an actual uniformed police force, heads would already be rolling. I’m not sure this would even have been acceptable in Fallujah. In the US, a shooting like this would create calls for an increase in police training, but the self-appointed CHAZ security folks don’t get any police training at all. I’ll bet they don’t even have an internal affairs division or a legal advisor.
So now CHAZ/CHOP has some obvious issues to deal with. If they try to protect their own, they’ll look worse than even a bad police department, and trying to brush this aside might be too much hypocrisy for even CHAZ folks to swallow. But then again, their tribalism and wildly anti-police viewpoints will incline them to not cooperate with the police in any way. So everyone is going to ask why CHAZ protects “cops” who murder black kids and laugh about it, and that could cause multiple internal splits among the followers.
This also might be more than enough for the mayor to morally and politically justify a massive police sweep to disarm and apprehend the armed thugs who have taken it upon themselves to kill whoever happens to wander past their checkpoints. She might feel compelled to make that move before Trump makes it for her, in the name of protecting black teens from murderous BLM and Antifa protesters whose violent racism was enabled and encouraged by the worthless anti-American mayor.Report
If I wanted to make an argument, I’d say things like the following:
The guys who shot the children weren’t trained. They shouldn’t be held as accountable as police, who are trained.
Nobody complained when Trayvon Martin was shot by a “community policeman”. Why are you complaining now?
Those children were 14 and 16? Where were their parents? This is their fault, not the people who shot them.
I’m sure there are a couple more.Report
They were no angels.
Well…they are now, I guess.Report
The question isn’t “why didn’t the CHOP police shoot these children?” the question is “why didn’t the CHOP police shoot these children sooner?”Report
The CHOP followed procedure
The CHOP cops were standing their ground.
The yoots made a furtive movement.
They didn’t comply when ordered to.
They complied but didn’t kneel fast enough.
They knelt but should have laid down.
The CHOP cops were exhausted from waiting for their Egg McMuffins.Report
The police (like, the real police) aren’t bad apples.
People are just like that.
See, for example, the CHAZ.Report
We’re in the process of figuring out that getting armed people to police a law disobeying population without killing them is hard.Report
Who was disobeying the law, and which law exactly?
See, what this is going to force both the CHOP participants to confront is the idea of legitimate force and government and who is authorized to enforce it.
A lesson which the rest of America could stand a refresher on as well.Report
Just for starters, protesting is typically illegal… and a police free zone is probably going to attract law breakers just because it’s easier to function there.
However agreed with the rest of what you said.Report
I figure they’ll also deploy smoke and confusion. “The people involved are no longer associated with CHAZ, and it’s rumored that some of them may have been fascist infiltrators and saboteurs, or possibly SPD undercover agents!”
Meanwhile the SPD is hopefully proceeding with a homicide investigation, sweeping up clues from idle chat until they start hauling people in for questioning. If the video is an indication of how high-strung and paranoid the CHAZ people are, this kind of thing is not a freak accident but a very predictable tragedy.Report
In high school, I learned of a particular narrative trick. It was called “uncanny familiarity”. Let’s say that a ship with 100 sailors leaves port. Two years later, this ship, completely empty, listlessly floats into a harbor. No sailors on board. No record of what happened.
Someone who tells the story of how Midshipman Jones woke up the first day at sea with a chill in his spine and looked at the morning mists and saw them as threatening for the first time in his life was engaging in “uncanny familiarity”.
The ship left. Nobody knows what happened after that. Talking about how this sailor or that sailor must have recognized an omen here or there before the unknown happened… well, it’s cool, I guess. But you should recognize it when you see it.
Anyway, I read this tweet.
Report
Darn. It was tragic that one of them was killed in the crash. If only his airbag had worked he might have lived. *rolls eyes*
How does a white boy with fireworks provoke two kids into beating a lady? That sounds as difficult as teaching my cat to use a can opener. Where did two underage kids suddenly get guns in a town that doesn’t have gun stores, and why didn’t they instead use them on the privileged white boy with the fireworks?
30 minute video of the immediate aftermath. One of the guys in the video with blood on his sleeve insisted on spelling his name for the CHAZ reporter, and another bragged that he only stopped shooting because he ran out of bullets. A third laughed about the whole thing. The camera shows the inside of the vehicle, almost certainly before the police arrived, and there are no shell casings in the seats or on the floor, and the passenger side window had been fully up.
No one there seemed to have the vaguest idea that you can’t just open up on a vehicle because you heard somebody say that it was the same vehicle in some earlier incident. If the SPD did that they’d probably kill several thousand people a year.Report
I found the comments to this post illuminating.
This comment (from GREIGEMONEY, if that means anything):
You guys are protesting for police brutality and for the killing of George Floyd, yet you guys are willing to put 15 shots at 2 kids at the age of 16 and 14 rather going the peaceful route.. They were wreckless but did thy really deserve to die? They still had many more years left of their lives.. now FUCKING 4 shootings in 1 week, at least 2-3 people dead now. Like what is the point of all of this anymore? You guys are literally killing each other, turning Capital Hill Seattle into the next Chiraq. CMON guys this is embarrassing.
Got this response (from EquinoxHope9):
what should they have done, just let these kids shoot at them?
maybeeee people should stop driving into CHOP and shooting at the inhabitants? has anyone suggested that yet?
Do you recognize that argument?
The conversation continues (from GREIGEMONEY):
Where are the proof that these 2 African American kids even had guns? They drove on the field yes. But did they deserve 15 bullets shot through the car? This kid was 14 years old for freak sake.
And the response (from EquinoxHope9 again):
so if a kid is young enough, just let him keep shooting at you? alright.
“Where are the proof that these 2 African American kids even had guns?”
there is no hard proof, but multiple people said they were armed when they were robbing people. more eyewitnesses claiming armed than unarmed. I can’t say anything with 100% certainty, but it’s leaning toward them having been armed, at least initially when they were sticking people up for phones and wallets.
I mean, that entire conversation is *SO* nuts, my initial response is to say “well, they’re both trolls” (or one of them is).
In any case, apparently the CHOP is being retaken by the local police.
Report
So a couple of armed vigilantes got spooked by some guys they thought might possibly have guns and opened fire, thinking they were standing their ground and being the good guys and ended up shooting innocent kids?
This is my shocked face.Report
Chip, that’s not what my comment was about. The original post was about that, yes.
This here is the discussion caught, in the wild, that perfectly mirrors any and all discussions of police violence.
Hey, those kids were no angels. They were engaging in violence. Their deaths were regrettable, but they could have avoided them by just not breaking the law.
It’s not about what happened.
It’s about the tricks people use to justify what happened.
The tricks are the interesting thing.Report
You don’t make a connection between the tricks used to excuse cops and the tricks used to excuse vigilante violence?
Maybe this discussion is better on the Hollow Points thread.Report
So I post a comment showing a discussion where the talking points are identical and your take is that I failed to make a connection between these things?
Well, I’d like to thank you for pointing out my oversight.
Yes! Golly! I *DO* see these things now!
Holy cow, thinking about it some more, I hope they don’t give these vigilantes a Union, Qualified Immunity, and fail to investigate whether a crime was actually committed!Report
Uhmmm, isn’t the whole point of CHOOP to unionize, like, everyone?Report
I don’t know what the whole point of the CHAZ/CHOP is.
We seem to have evolved from “Defund the Police (but Keep Police Unions!)” to “Get rid of Confederate statues” to “Cancel Alyssa Milano”.
I know what the point of the CHOP might have been, at the beginning? I don’t know what the point of CHOP is now.
Or was, at the tail end there, given that the police seem to be retaking it following the vigilante murder of one kid and attempted murder of another.Report
The point was to show that without the police there is no violence. That the police are either making things worse or the actual cause of the problems. That police are the bad-guys, so just get rid of them and it’s all good.
Unfortunately CHOP got mugged by reality.Report
(Oh, and Michael Crowe’s timeline is very good right now with the retaking of the CHOP/CHAZ. Live footage and dispassionate (so far, anyway) commentary.)Report
Two narratives about the cops going into the CHOP:
1. They’re only doing this because of the deaths of the two young men.
2. They’re only doing this because protesters started protesting outside of the Mayor’s house.Report