Seattle ‘CHAZ’ reckoning continues
Hudson Crozier
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Seattle, Washington, is experiencing a well-deserved onslaught of legal trouble for its handling of the George Floyd riots of 2020. Lawyers for teenage shooting victim Robert West are next in line to hold it accountable.
West and a friend tried to escape the barricaded “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” that the Black Lives Matter mob had established. They were shot in their car, costing West his eye and part of his skull. His friend lost his life, prompting his father to file a wrongful death lawsuit just weeks ago.
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“Through their actions and inactions, the city of Seattle, Seattle agencies, Seattle employees, the County of King, the State of Washington, their agents and elected officials are responsible for the preventable and predictable significant injuries of Robert West,” West’s attorneys said in their notice of claims.
The city, as they point out, “aided and abetted” the illegal occupation by purposefully pulling police out. Victims of the anarchist experiment learned the hard way, through property damage, at least six shootings, and a lack of medical assistance, that structured law enforcement is necessary. The city has already settled a case with business owners with a $3.6 million payout for the destruction.
The political motives the government had were abundantly clear. The mayor at the time compared it to the leftist “Summer of Love” movement in 1967, said riots were “peaceful” and “patriotic,” and praised BLM’s mission of “true equity for communities of color.” She eventually brought CHAZ to a swift end by ordering the police to kick out the ringleaders, confirming the fact that ceding control was a choice from the beginning.
City officials know the choices they made are legally indefensible, so they disobeyed a judge in a separate CHAZ case by deleting thousands of text messages. The city then had to reach a settlement with whistleblowers who alleged they were “subjected to scorn, ridicule, abuse, and hostility … and the demand to perform illegal acts” for exposing this.
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It doesn’t matter that CHAZ happened three years ago. When crime is actively sanctioned by the government, the government itself becomes a lawbreaker. The city’s subsequent cover-up should have been one of the most highly publicized scandals in the country. Such profound betrayal cannot be swept under the rug. These legal battles are one of the only ways to set a firm precedent that leaders cannot get away with it. The future well-being of American cities is on the line.
Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.