Capitol Hill Occupied Protest

My God.

But yeah, I feel like we should bring back Chaz Chop.

Let's corner off a piece of land for these folks and let them live

there.

I don't know.

Just make it a whole...

We should bring back that Chaz Chop zone, I think.

Yeah.

We'll do, do this, that, and the third." And, and then other people were like, "No, like, if we leave, they're gonna come back." And that kind of sparked this idea of, we should stay.

This was the beginning of a protest encampment that would come to be known as the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, CHOP.

The Capitol Hill Organized Protest.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

This is Seattle Now.

During the summer of 2020, a protest zone known as CHOP emerged on Capitol Hill.

What started as an idealistic movement against police violence eventually turned tragic when a black teenager was shot to death.

To this day, no one has been arrested or charged in the death of Antonio Mays Jr.

The mayor's office plans to make their final selection by early 2027.

Check back for more headlines on tonight's episode of Seattle Now.

Six years ago, during the height of the racial justice protests, 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. was shot and killed at CHOP, the protest zone that emerged on Capitol Hill.

No one has ever been arrested or charged, despite an abundance of witnesses on the scene.

Seattle police abandoned their precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and hundreds of protesters set up a camp in the blocks around it.

A lot of people called this camp the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, CHOP.

Early one morning at CHOP, about three weeks in, bullets started flying.

When the shooting was over, a Black 16-year-old lay dying, and a story emerged, a story that seemed like it could contradict the entire point of the protest, that people trying to protect CHOP had shot him.

Very unlikely it's going to function very well in rural environments because rural environments, you know, you can find yourself staged against snipers in a farmer's field.

And so far better for them to control the urban environment, the concrete jungle, where we can section off this, you know, like what they call the CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

You know, you fence off the CHAZ, whatever it may be, your autonomous zone, whichever, whatever you want to make it.

You fence it off and then the ruthless gang controls everything inside it.

And all these mutual aid organizations coming together to support them in that endeavor.

The Chaz Chop movement.

Yeah, they'd already had all of these projects in place, and it was like, okay, we can actually use the organization that we've built around this project to support the people doing this, right? Yeah.

And I think that that's where mutual aid actually shines.

hypothetically here.

Yeah.

Because, like, here's the thing, right? Take Chaz Chop, for example.

If it wasn't a complete bomb and a laughingstock, right? If people saw Chaz Chop in an organized way that convinced them that they could also live that way, maybe there's something there, right? Instead, it was, like, a bunch of black bloc Antifa anarchists and then, like, they shot a black dude.

And not everybody, a lot of people.

You know, come together a certain way with like the Capitol Hill autonomous zone, which was, you know, a little experiment that was very chaotic and crazy, but also kind of beautiful in a way.

And I do think like...

I don't know.

Isn't that kind of what downtown Seattle is?

That's basically the Chaz.

Yeah, that's the Chaz.

But

we don't got to spend any money on it.

A

chapter in the book is called Lord of the Chaz because they just gave him an island just like the kids in Lord of the Flies.

That's like

Yeah.

in Portland to Chaz Chop up in Seattle.

He can just stay where he is.

It's