The city of Seattle was ground zero for the George Floyd revolution.
The spectacular looting and violence in Minneapolis and Portland might have dominated the headlines, but under the surface, activists in Seattle launched an unprecedented campaign to turn the street protests into a new political regime. They had perfected the Angela Davis–style narrative about the “prison-industrial complex,” rallied thousands of militants to the streets, and made the case for overthrowing the three pillars of the traditional justice system—the police, the prisons, and the courts—and replacing them with a new conception of law and order based on the principles of social justice.
This campaign was decades in the making. In the years leading up to 2020, the city’s radical-progressives had slowly gained control over the entire apparatus of local politics, from the media to the academic institutions to the philanthropic foundations to the city council to the public bureaucracy. There was, however, one notable exception: the criminal justice system. Activists believed that the police, prisons, and courts were the final remnant of an oppressive society and the last remaining bulwark against total control.
If they could dismantle the institution of criminal justice, they believed, they could finally begin to establish the new society that has escaped their grasp.
During the George Floyd protests, rather than resist, the city’s political establishment joined the activist campaign to dismantle the justice system. Following the activist line, elected officials in Seattle and King County announced their intentions to simultaneously defund the Seattle Police Department, permanently close the county’s largest jail, and gut the municipal court system. They made the case that traditional law enforcement should be replaced by what could be described as a “shadow justice system” of ideologically aligned nonprofit programs. They believed they could replace the carceral state with a new therapeutic state, under the assumption that, when the oppression of the justice system is lifted, the new society could be guided through psychotherapy, criminal diversion, and tribal-style justice rituals.
The theoretical underpinnings of this movement were straight from the handbook of black liberation ideology. Nikkita Oliver, the self-described “abolitionist” who became the figurehead of the movement to dismantle Seattle’s justice system, self-consciously modeled her politics and aesthetics on Angela Davis, shouting to the crowds that they must join the struggle to overthrow “racialized capitalism” and smash “patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism” once and for all.1 During the uprising of 2020, thousands of left-wing activists heeded Oliver’s call, pouring into the streets, smashing store windows, and seizing control of a police precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill district. For a brief moment, they established their own Paris Commune—the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ—and attempted to create a system of self-government beyond the reaches of the American oppressor.
The activists, who deemed themselves the “new abolitionists,” were willing to play the dangerous game. They saw the chaos as the necessary price—and the accelerant—for their revolution. Their agenda was lifted nearly verbatim from the pages of the Black Panther Party. “Honoring the long history of abolitionist struggle,” they said, “we join in their efforts to divest from the prison industrial complex, invest in our communities, and create the conditions for our ultimate vision: a world without police, where no one is held in a cage.”2
But, unlike the Black Panther Party, which had been dissolved into history, the young revolutionaries in Seattle believed that they had the organs of the state on their side. The highest officials in the region knelt to their demands, mimicked their language, joined them at the barricades, and pledged to “defund the police” and transform the criminal justice system according to the principles of “anti-racism.”
During this period, the city, it seemed, was coming apart at the seams. Crime exploded in the downtown corridor; businesses barricaded their windows; citizens started to fear that the city would collapse into prolonged disorder. Yet the activists and political class moved forward with their experiment in “abolition” at an astonishing rate of speed. They elevated a series of three commandments—“Abolish the police,” “Abolish the prisons,” “Abolish the courts”—into a new holy trinity. They transformed “burn it down” from a street slogan into a real political platform.
They believed their time had finally come.
* * *
The first commandment of the new abolitionists is to “abolish the police.”
In the activist narrative, American police forces were first established to catch fugitive slaves and have served as the guardians of white supremacy ever since. As the Decriminalize Seattle Coalition has argued: “The police have never served as an adequate response to social problems. They are rooted in violence against Black people. In order to protect Black lives, this moment calls for investing and expanding our safety and well-being beyond policing.”3
The solution, then, can never be reform: the system of policing must be demolished. During the rioting following the death of George Floyd, this line of thought gained currency with the local government. The Seattle City Council responded to activist pressure by releasing draft legislation that suggested a path for abolishing the police department and replacing it with a new civilian-led “Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention.” The plan was predicated on the idea that “institutional racism” and “underinvestment in communities of color” were the cause of crime, and, once the police department was abolished and its budget redistributed to communities of color, social workers and nonprofit organizations could keep the peace with “trauma-informed, gender-affirming, anti-racist praxis” and “the immediate transfer of underutilized public land for BIPOC community ownership”4—which, in effect, means government by activism.
Meanwhile, in order to increase the pressure from the outside, a roving mob of activists patrolled the streets of residential neighborhoods and paid midnight house calls to wavering public officials. The group, which called itself Every Day March, assembled groups as large as three hundred people and descended upon the personal residences of Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, Seattle police chief Carmen Best, and nearly all of the city council members. They banged drums, chanted slogans, terrorized neighbors, and left threatening messages on the driveways and doors of their perceived enemies: “Liberate oppressed communities,” “Don’t be racist trash,” “Guillotine Jenny.”5
In one incident, the mob marched to the home of Councilman Andrew Lewis and roused him out of bed past midnight. When Lewis arrived at the entrance of the building, the ringleader, Tealshawn Turner, demanded that the councilman verbally commit to “defunding the police.” Lewis, standing alone at the gate, was visibly frightened—and relented. He promised to cut the police budget by 50 percent, to fire officers who had citizen complaints filed against them, and to redirect millions of dollars in public funding to “communities of color.” Turner, having extracted his demand, left with a threat: “If you don’t keep your promise, we’re for sure coming back.”6
Despite, or perhaps because of, these threats, the government weighed in on behalf of the mob. At the same time that the demonstrators were extending their control of the streets, the city council passed legislation to deprive the police department of essential crowd control tools, such as pepper spray, tear gas, blast balls, and stun grenades.7 In a desperate letter to residents, Chief Best warned that officers would have “no ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large, violent crowd”8—in essence, announcing the potential end of law and order within the city limits.
Although the riot control ordinance was blocked by a judge hours before taking effect, one veteran police officer said the activists had adopted a bare-knuckled strategy: reduce police power enough to achieve “mob rule” in the streets, then press the politicians for more. If they could defund the police and deprive officers of crowd control weapons, they could end the state’s monopoly on violence. Whenever its leaders could mobilize a large crowd, they could dominate the physical environment and establish a new standard of public order that conformed to their principles of social justice.
Incredibly, in the midst of rising street disorder and intimidation of public officials, a majority of Seattle voters supported the plan to “defund the police.” In a telephone poll, more than half supported the plan to “permanently cut the Seattle Police Department’s budget by 50% and shift that money to social services and community-based programs.”9
According to sources in the police department, officers found themselves in a state of “disbelief.” They were besieged on two fronts—in the streets and in the corridors of City Hall. The black-clad mobs smashed the windows of banks and storefronts with impunity, the city council voted for an initial set of budget cuts that set the stage for “abolition,” and the activists successfully waged a campaign of legislative humiliation and political intimidation against Police Chief Best, who eventually resigned.
“Our leadership is in chaos,” said one frontline officer. “The mayor has made a decision to let a mob of 1,000 people dictate public safety policy for a city of 750,000.”10
* * *
The second commandment of the new abolitionists is to “abolish the prisons.” This has long been a motif for radical movements, from the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution to the jailbreak of Kresty Prison during the Russian Revolution.
In modern-day Seattle, however, the revolution is happening from within. According to a trove of leaked documents from the King County Executive’s Office, during the season of George Floyd, policymakers were busy laying out the rationale for permanently closing the region’s largest jail and ending all youth incarceration—including for minors charged with serious crimes such as rape and murder.
The official documents cast the prison system as an institution of “oppression based on race and built to maintain white supremacy.” In a pyramid-shaped graphic, policymakers claimed that crime and incarceration were merely expressions at the “tip of the iceberg”; on a deeper level, however, the justice system is rooted in “white supremacist culture,” “inequitable wealth distribution,” “power hoarding,” and the belief that “people of color are dangerous or to be feared.” After establishing this premise, the conclusion is foregone: white supremacy cannot be reformed, it must be abolished.11
To this end, the King County executive, Dow Constantine, released a plan for permanently terminating youth detention and shuttering the downtown Seattle jail, which represented approximately two-thirds of the county’s total jail capacity. And, contrary to the rhetoric about releasing “non-violent offenders,” more than half of all inmates in the King County system are incarcerated for violent crimes—so the plan would, by simple arithmetic, release violent criminals to the streets.12
County corrections officers, who had not been consulted on the executive’s surprise announcement, were horrified. One senior manager said that “activists [are] seeking to rewrite the narrative of society” and, if the shutdowns were to pass, “the ones who will suffer in the end are [racial minorities], as crime skyrockets and lawlessness becomes the norm.” According to the manager, following the announcement, frontline correctional officers and medical staff within the jails were in a state of “chaos” and bracing for “mass layoffs.”13
But rather than accommodate these concerns, the county executive decided it was simply the price of progress: according to the internal documents, he warned his team to expect “stress, confusion, and a sense of overwhelm” within the department, but said it should not impede the work to create a “shift in power structure” and counseled his employees to let “internal discrimination and racism come to the surface,” so it could be suppressed.14
The question facing these officials was obvious: What will replace the jails in this new regime? The leading coalition of the progressive reform movement in the region, Budget for Justice, had an answer: the government should “transfer resources from formal justice systems to community-based care” programs that are “rooted in restorative justice practices that are trauma-informed, human rights–, and equity-based.” The activists highlighted three nonprofit programs as models for the new justice system—Community Passageways, Creative Justice, and Community Justice Project—that offer programs such as “healing circles,” “narrative storytelling,” art-based therapy, and community organizing.15
All three providers share a common philosophical foundation: they are predicated on the assumption that poverty, racism, and oppression force the dispossessed into a life of crime and violence. Their programs are explicitly designed to deconstruct how “systems of power create conditions that perpetuate violence in our homes and daily lives” and help offenders “reimagine a society in which their liberation is not only possible, but sustainable by the community itself.” They embodied the heart and spirit of the revolution—but were a disaster in practice and could not develop the capacity to serve as practical replacements for the “formal justice system.”16
In one high-profile case, prosecutors diverted a youth offender named Diego Carballo-Oliveros into a “peace circle” program, in which nonprofit leaders burned sage, passed around a talking feather, and led Carballo-Oliveros through “months of self-reflection.”17 According to one corrections official with knowledge of the case, prosecutors and activists paraded Carballo-Oliveros around the city as the “shining example” of their approach.18 However, two weeks after completing the peace circle program, Carballo-Oliveros and two accomplices lured a fifteen-year-old boy into the woods, robbed him, and then slashed open his abdomen, chest, and head with a retractable knife. The boy placed a desperate phone call to his sister and a passerby called an ambulance, but the boy bled out and later died at the hospital.19
Despite these public setbacks, however, County Executive Constantine plowed forward with his plan to permanently close the downtown jail and end all youth incarceration. And the activists on the outside worked to speed up the process. During the riots, they dispatched a mob to Constantine’s home in the darkness of night to demand that he shut down the jail immediately. They shouted him down and shook cans of spray paint, calling on Constantine to release all youth prisoners, including minors charged with murder, because “the police are murderers all the time.”
Constantine, standing under a streetlamp with his arms crossed, nodded his head blankly and tried to placate the mob.20
* * *
The third commandment of the new abolitionists is to “abolish the courts.” In simple terms, the modern revolutionaries want to destroy the existing conception of “justice” and replace it with a new regime of “social justice.”
In the historical imagination of the radical Left, American courts are not the impartial and public forum described in the Sixth Amendment, but an extension of a brutal, racist, and punitive state apparatus. In Seattle, activists have long sought to limit the scope and authority of the municipal courts. For years, influential organizations such as Budget for Justice and the Public Defender Association have advocated eliminating cash bail, decimating the probation department, reducing the number of municipal judges, and softening sex offender registration requirements—all under the rubric of “ongoing, real and progressive policy and system change.”21
However, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement providing an even more favorable political ground, the activist coalition mobilized behind a much more ambitious agenda: abolishing the municipal court altogether and transferring authority to a shadow court system administered by ideologically aligned nonprofit organizations such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, which provides “crisis response, immediate psychosocial assessment, and long term wrap-around services including substance use disorder treatment and housing”22—that is, an effort to replace the punitive state with a therapeutic process.
Unfortunately, the sociopolitical regime that emerged following these initial “reforms” didn’t usher in utopia—it devolved into anarchy. In the years leading up to 2020, Seattle became a haven for tent encampments, public drug use, and street disorder, and boasted one of the highest property crime rates in the nation. The LEAD program, which received millions in annual city funding, had repeatedly failed to produce results. In its original “scientific study,” when controlling for old warrants, LEAD had no statistical effect on new arrests—in other words, participation in LEAD was as effective as doing nothing.23
In 2019, following a series of high-profile “repeat offender” cases, Seattle Municipal Court judge Ed McKenna tried to raise the alarm about the city’s failure to prosecute career criminals such as Francisco Calderon, a homeless man who had garnered more than seventy criminal convictions but continued to secure jail-free plea deals from the prosecutor and public defender’s offices.24 McKenna’s call to restore public order caused an uproar. The Calderon story was widely covered in the media and dovetailed with an explosive report about the city’s “prolific offenders” who had been terrorizing residents and businesses with little consequence.25
But McKenna’s public stand caused an even more powerful backlash. Almost immediately, the leaders of the progressive-justice movement—City Attorney Pete Holmes, Public Defense Director Anita Khandelwal, and LEAD cofounder Lisa Daugaard—waged a merciless public relations war against the judge and successfully pressured him to retire two years before the completion of his term.
After moving out of state, Judge McKenna warned the public that the progressive-justice coalition was perilously close to establishing a shadow court system. He argued that the leaders of the government-and-nonprofit criminal justice coalition were becoming “modern-day lords and landowners,” with the power to dispense justice outside the constitutional framework. McKenna explained that nonprofit diversion programs, which exist beyond the confines of the state and are not subject to meaningful public oversight, were potentially violating the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a public trial before a jury of one’s peers.
“In [pretrial diversion schemes], potential defendants are contacted by prosecutors and told that if they ‘voluntarily’ participate in specific programs, criminal charges will not be filed against them,” McKenna said. “The ethical concern, however, is whether accused persons are waiving their rights ‘knowingly and voluntarily’ or whether accused persons feel compelled to waive those rights under threat of prosecution and jail.”26
However, despite these ethical concerns, the campaign to replace justice with activism continued apace. After the George Floyd riots, dozens of King County prosecutors, organized as the “Equity & Justice Workgroup,” issued a letter encouraging their office to stop filing charges for assault, theft, drug dealing, burglary, escape, fare evasion, and auto theft—in effect, moving all but the most serious crimes into the nonprofit-diversion process.27
Meanwhile, the architects of LEAD, sensing the opportunity to extend their power, formally declared its intention to move the city “beyond police” and serve as the centerpiece of the new progressive-justice complex.28
The officials in the municipal courts sensed their vulnerability. They feared that their entire branch of government, designed to provide an open forum for justice and a bulwark against tyranny, could be obliterated by the new abolitionists. “The system does not wish to be remade and it resists remaking,” LEAD cofounder Daugaard told reporters. “And there’s no doubt that we would not be having anything like the scale of a redesigned conversation that is occurring if not for the top-line demands of people in the street.”29
Suddenly the activists who had patiently built their movement had the upper hand. Seattle found itself in the midst of a remarkable moment: the movement to abolish the police, prisons, and courts was no longer the dream of marginalized radicals and utopianists; it had been adopted at the highest levels of the state itself.
“We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society,” declared socialist city council member Kshama Sawant at the height of the unrest. “We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism—this police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it and replace it with a world based instead on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality—a socialist world.”30
* * *
The new abolitionists’ Paris Commune moment came during the long and tumultuous afternoon of June 8, 2020.
Protestors had been relentlessly attacking the city’s East Precinct police headquarters, barraging the line of officers protecting the building with bottles, fists, rocks, and explosives. Then, suddenly, the police disappeared. The mayor had made the decision to abandon the precinct to the mob. Officers boarded up the building, moved the barricades, and retreated into the city, leaving demonstrators to make the bewildering transition from protest to conquest.
That evening, groups of armed men associated with Antifa, the John Brown Gun Club, and other left-wing militant organizations established a new security perimeter around the neighborhood and declared the territory the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, and promised to govern it according to the principles of social justice. Overnight, the CHAZ turned into a small-scale laboratory experiment for the ideological commitments of the modern Left and, they hoped, proof of concept for a new system of governance beyond the police, prisons, and courts.31
The results of this experiment in abolition are deeply illuminating. Almost immediately, activists established the basic social structure of the CHAZ, following the theory of identity politics formulated in the Combahee River Collective Statement. Black, indigenous, and trans women were elevated into the highest authority; identity determined social rank; whites were called to perform rituals of atonement. Through a series of speeches and meetings, the leaders of the commune sought to implement the social practice of “decolonization,” doling out favorable treatment for racial minorities, “centering” black and indigenous women in all public meetings, and encouraging whites to “move past guilt or fragility” and “commit to long-term action and accountability.”
At one evening event, an indigenous rights activist with a purple bandana wrapped around his face announced a campaign for immediate small-scale reparations: “I want you to give ten dollars to one African-American person from this autonomous zone,” he said to the crowd. “White people, I see you. I see every one of you, and I remember your faces. You find that African-American person and you give them ten dollars.”32
The practice of racial distribution was a recurring theme. The leaders of the CHAZ adopted policies of explicit racial segregation, with some spaces reserved exclusively for BIPOC, or “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” Activist Marcus Henderson, a black urban farmer with an engineering degree from Stanford, created a shared agricultural project in the neighborhood park with a sign announcing: THIS GARDEN IS FOR BLACK AND INDIGENOUS FOLKS AND THEIR PLANT ALLIES.33 As Henderson told reporters, the urban garden was a response to “the question of how Black people have been disenfranchised for so long”34 and a demonstration of “collective land ownership, taking back property and really making it work for the people.”35
A few days after CHAZ declared independence, activists began to consider formalizing the governance of the autonomous zone.36 Although the protestors were unified in opposition to the Seattle Police Department, a number of competing factions emerged within CHAZ—and engaged in an intra-party struggle to represent the movement.
Black Lives Matter activists, led by Nikkita Oliver, wanted the new microstate to focus on racial inequality and defunding the police. Socialist and anti-fascist groups emphasized the radical political nature of the protests, with socialist city councilwoman Kshama Sawant insisting that the occupation must be oriented toward the “dismantling of capitalism itself” and the progression of the “socialist revolution.” A third faction of predominantly white bourgeois youth wanted to transform the CHAZ into a block party, with muralists, musicians, and small vendors providing Woodstock-style handicrafts and entertainment.37
On June 10, with the goal of building consensus and designating leadership for the movement, protestors organized the first CHAZ People’s Assembly. After setting up a stage and PA system, one of the speakers introduced the question of legitimate authority, asking the audience: “What’s the structure, how are we going to achieve some sort of communal hierarchy that we all feel comfortable with?” In response, the audience booed and insisted that the movement should remain leaderless and horizontal. At the end of the People’s Assembly, one of the activists conceded that no leadership had been established, but maintained that the group had settled on the ideological principles of an “abolitionist framework” and “commitment to solidarity and accountability to Black and Indigenous communities.”38
This vacuum of legitimate authority, however, did not last.
Within days of the People’s Assembly, the most heavily armed and aggressive factions in the CHAZ started to exert dominance over the neighborhood and became the de facto police power. A revolving group of vigilantes armed their followers with semiautomatic rifles and took up positions at the barricades. These soldiers forcibly removed journalists from the autonomous zone and beat up dissenters who opposed their rule. In one incident, masked Antifa militants violently confronted a Christian street preacher and provocateur, choking him unconscious and dragging him through the streets. In another, a large mob hunted down a man who had allegedly stolen items from a local automotive shop before setting the building on fire. The police, having ceded control of the CHAZ to activists, did not respond to any calls for service.39
Then the killings began. The first homicide victim was killed in an outburst of gang violence. The second, who was reportedly unarmed and joyriding in a stolen car, was gunned down by CHAZ paramilitary forces. In the autonomous zone’s brief history of independence, there were two murders, four additional shootings, and an overall homicide rate that turned out to be nearly fifty times greater than the city of Chicago’s.40 In a cruel irony, all of the identified victims were black men—precisely the demographic for whom Black Lives Matter and the leaders of the CHAZ had claimed to offer protection.
After the killings, activists lost confidence in their revolutionary project and the mayor moved to retake the territory. Early on the morning of July 1, a phalanx of Seattle police officers, armed with long batons and semiautomatic rifles, cleared out the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone for good. As officers and public works teams cleared the barricades and washed away the graffiti, the true legacy of CHAZ was revealed: two black youth, Lorenzo Anderson Jr., nineteen, and Antonio Mays Jr., sixteen, had died under the false promise of utopia.41
The truth is politically impolite but factually unassailable: the real problem in America, from the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter, is not police brutality, but the brutality of the American streets. By instituting a “police-free zone,” the CHAZ did not become peaceable; it became lawless, brutish, and violent. The rule of the margins is not automatically better, but often worse, than the rule of the center.
As the national media conducted its final autopsy of the CHAZ, there was one tragic detail that escaped notice. The Seattle Police Department East Precinct building, which radicals believed to be a symbol of “white supremacy,” was originally constructed under the leadership of Seattle’s first African-American city councilman, Sam Smith, who wanted to provide faster response times to the city’s Central District, where black residents had demanded greater police protection.42 The irony is cutting: Smith, who grew up in the Deep South during Jim Crow, saw policing as a public service; sixty years later, college-educated radicals saw it as a force for evil that must be abolished.
The consequences of this movement have been devastating. The activists of Black Lives Matter have yielded the same results as the black liberation movement before them: violence, instability, chaos, death. Following the George Floyd riots, the United States witnessed the greatest single-year rise in homicides since record keeping began in 1960: a total of 21,500 people shot, stabbed, poisoned, beaten, and bludgeoned to death;43 social scientists have attributed thousands of excess murders to the unintended consequences of Black Lives Matter.44
In Seattle, the same story holds. During the riot year, police recorded the largest number of homicides in a generation, with the highest rates of violence concentrated in black communities.45 The victimized often became victims again. Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr., for example, the father of one of the teenagers killed at CHAZ, was shot in the face, but fortunately, and unlike his son, survived.46
The failure of the CHAZ, however, like the failure of the Paris Commune, will not stop the revolution.
Like their historical predecessors, the new abolitionists are not seeking to achieve reforms within the given social order; they are seeking to overturn that social order altogether. Marx, and later Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, saw the short-lived Paris Commune as a small-scale model for their larger project of moral and political revolt. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone serves the same function, updated for the digital age—and, as in the past, the emergence of violence and instability is seen as an accelerant, rather than a deterrent, for social change. The revolution is, after all, the relentless application of the negative dialectic: to subvert, to shift, to unmask, to destroy.
In Seattle, the revolutionary mood has created a sense of danger. Building owners have fortified entire city blocks. Groups of vagrants have established large open-air drug markets. Dealers ply heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in broad daylight. Addicts collect cash by emptying corner stores and smashing car windows.47 Meanwhile, the professional-class revolutionaries use the image of the oppressed to justify deeper action and to wage their own symbolic war. They use their vast informational apparatus to shape the perception of reality toward revolution.
The ultimate goal is to achieve the impossible: to bring the promise of heaven down to earth. “Karl Marx [once] said that religion is the wish-dream of an oppressed humanity,” Angela Davis once told her students. “Real wants, needs and desires are transformed into wish-dreams via the process of religion, because it seems so hopeless in this world: this is the perspective of an oppressed people. But what is important, what is crucial is that those dreams are always on the verge of reverting to their original status—the real wishes and needs here on earth. There is always the possibility of redirecting those wish dreams to the here-and-now.”48