The City of Seattle has agreed to settle a lawsuit with business owners and residents over how the city handled the 2020 so-called autonomous zone protests, originally called the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest (CHOP).
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Capitol Hill businesses and residents in Seattle “will now be compensated for the city’s mishandling of CHOP, which has resulted in a significant increase in crime and even loss of life,” lawyer Angelo Calfo said in a statement, according to The Seattle Times.
More than a dozen business owners and residents of the Capitol Hill area filed a lawsuit v. the city over city policy, which, according to the lawsuit, “effectively sanctioned the actions of CHOP members.”
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The city announced a settlement totaling $3.65 million, including a $600,000 fine for the removal of thousands of texts by city leaders, including former mayor Jenny Durkan, according to The Seattle Times.
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Protesters gathered in the area in June 2020, seized the East Precinct of the Police Headquarters, and prevented law enforcement from entering the area. The incident comes amid protests and riots that erupted in cities across the country following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sparking renewed calls from activists to stop funding police departments.
The protest camp, known as CHOP or CHAZ – Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, became the national focal point that summer, as deadly shootings unfolded, including the killing of a 16-year-old boy. The rioters in the zone put forward a list of demands for the city, including cutting the police budget by 50% in 2020, abolishing prison sentences, and releasing prisoners imprisoned for marijuana-related crimes.
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The protest zone ended on July 1, 2020, when the police cleared the area.
Amid unrest in the city, Durkan infamously declared that Seattle was experiencing a “summer of love” before returning to comment. By the end of 2020, Seattle data showed a sharp rise in homicides.
In 2019, 31 murders were reported in Seattle. The following year, that number soared 61% to 50 murders, the highest in 26 years.
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The companies that joined the lawsuit said they want to hold the city accountable for the destruction and violence caused by the CHOP zone, KING 5 reports.
Senior city officials, from former mayor Durkan to former police chief Carmen Best, have deleted thousands of text messages that were likely related to the zone. Recently, a judge sanctioned the city for deleted texts and found that Best alone manually deleted more than 27,000 texts.
“As determined by a federal court judge, our clients’ lawsuit exposed a cover-up by high-ranking officials who destroyed their text messages with each other,” Kalfo said.
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City Attorney Ann Davison said in a statement that she was “delighted that we were able to resolve this issue and turn the page on a difficult period in the city’s history.”
