We Keep Us Safe: The Standoff

21:57David Lewis kind of became the organizer to which other breakout organizers were drawn to. And that was when I first met Rishaila. My best friend had a flashbang thrown directly at her wife. What were we doing? This. This is all we're fucking doing. Rashilah Levitt was a local bartender. And she brought this gift for connecting with people to the protests. What else do we do when they throw shit at us? What else do we do when they shoot us? When she got in front of a crowd, she would be able to, you know, she would leverage and utilize her voice to be able to move people. And this is the street that we demand to walk on.

22:40David kind of looked at me and he was like, you're loud. I was like, yeah. She's not just loud. She's passionate. She's also recognizable. At the time, she had these long locks so you could easily spot her out of a crowd. He handed me a megaphone. He was like, he was like, just keep doing what you're doing. Stand with the members of the community. Stand with the members of the community. Who feels ready? All of a sudden, I was in this role that I wasn't expecting. And it just escalated from there.

23:20One thing that made Rashilah and David stand out early on was that they had strong convictions about how to protest effectively. Like, we're not going to break windows. We're not going to vandalize. They wanted these protests to be disciplined. We weren't here to just create chaos. We were here to protest police brutality. The people flooding into the streets that summer were showing up for all kinds of reasons. Not everyone was there for George Floyd. The pandemic was raging. Some people were just frustrated, scared, lonely, bored. And leaders like David and Rashilah were trying to harness that raw energy to achieve the movement's goals.

24:05Protesters had three main demands. Cut the police budget by at least 50 percent, reinvest in social services, and drop charges against protesters who had been arrested. While more and more of the movement's energy was focused on the barricade outside the East Precinct, there were still marches going on elsewhere in the city. We kind of got this idea in our heads of, let's just go all the way to the top. It's not even about the police chief anymore. Like, now we need to speak to the mayor. We were able to march 7 ,000 people exactly to where the mayor was. Now listen, folks, listen. We have news cameras.

24:46We want to make sure that this message is seen across the world, across the nation, loud and clear, and that it's not diluted. At this point, there's real movement in the protesters' direction. Multiple city council members are showing up to stand with protesters against police. We sat down and we said, we will not leave until Mayor Durkin comes out. Mayor Jenny Durkin was a former federal prosecutor and elected as a pro-business moderate Democrat. Like a lot of big city mayors, she was trying to maintain order while still showing support for the protest movement. And within about 10 minutes, the deputy mayor comes out and says, Mayor Durkin is here.

25:29She will see you now. We want you to march. We want you to raise your voices. We want you to continue on the path of justice. These new protest leaders, who were regular people just a couple of days ago, end up sitting face to face with Seattle's mayor. After that meeting with the mayor, the support was palpable. We had eyes and ears everywhere, in every piece of the government. And if you were an SPD and you went to a grocery store, that grocer was messaging me. To the police, it feels like the entire city is turning on them. We are changing things. This is a start to a start. And it needs to stay that way.

26:17But the only way it can stay that way... Everyone wondered, what would the police do next? The moves they ended up making would lead directly to the creation of CHOP and add to the climate of fear that would take over by the time Antonio arrived. That's after the break.

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29:54A week after Pink Umbrella Day, protesters' worst fears materialized. It started with an incident on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. There was a car that turned onto that street, and I could hear people yelling on that corner. And I'm like, uh-oh, and we're watching him, and I'm like, maybe it's an accident. Danielle Meehan was an ICU nurse, volunteering as a protest medic. She was in the crowd when she saw a car driving up a side street, straight toward the group protesting outside the East Precinct. And then he started to accelerate. And I remember just thinking, oh my God, my friends are going to die.

30:36Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! It looked like a car attack. And then I heard a gunshot and I froze for a second. Oh Jesus! and then people started screaming for medics, and so I just took off running towards them again. He has a gun. He just got shot. A protester tried to stop the car as it came close to plowing into the crowd. He reached into the driver's side window, and the driver shot him in the arm. Danielle arrived in time to help him. Someone gave me a knife, and I'd cut off his shirt and found the wound and found that there was no exit wound. I'm like, okay, he's going to be okay. In the confusion, the driver got out of the car and managed to slip through the crowd to the police line to surrender himself.

31:25It turns out that this driver was the brother of a police officer who was assigned to the East Precinct. He told police he drove toward the crowd by accident and he fired in self-defense. In the end, prosecutors said they only had enough evidence to charge him with reckless driving. But the way the driver was able to slip past police lines with a gun and walk into the precinct without resistance seemed to protesters to be a sign that this was a war and it was clear which side the police were on. So we want to keep this safe. There is no reason for this to get escalated as it is. Please return to the other side of the whatever.

32:16They take him into custody and that's just like, oh, my God, that's just the start of today. All week, Tammy Floyd had been watching the standoff escalate. She was a Seattle police lieutenant at the time and a top aide to the commander managing the police's response to the protests. What is going to happen? Tammy says she'd warned her boss that stopping the crowd from marching past the precinct could turn explosive between protesters and police. And now it was. I'm going to go get a recent part of the bus phone. And 40. Got it.

32:59Bloody Sunday saw the most severe protester injuries since the protests began.

33:11There was a woman who was hit in the chest with a tear gas canister. And she lost consciousness. Her heart stopped.

33:28I remember her eyes looked super bloodshot. She really wanted to go home. She's like, I just want to go home. Then she stopped talking. And she was still laying down. And I'm like, she's not breathing. I don't have a pulse. I started CPR. And I'm like, holy shit. Luckily, there were volunteer medics there to revive her. But she could have died. We had nothing. We were not safe. We had no resources. It is a miracle that we were able to save her.

34:02Police also felt like their worst fears were coming true. Two officers went to the hospital with injuries. By nightfall, there was this overwhelming kind of impending sense of doom. I was receiving calls from commanders that were trapped. The crowd had swelled and they were not backing off. There are officers crying, breaking down. There were leadership command also breaking down, convinced tonight they were going to die. We were going to be overrun. The morning after Bloody Sunday, Tammy's boss was called into an emergency meeting with top city officials. A lot of the mayor's staff is there, deputy mayors.

34:55Tom Mahaffey was an assistant police chief and the person responsible for overseeing the police's response to the protests. They say we can't continue with what we're doing. Just let the protesters march by. It was just so volatile at this point and there was so much anger and angst. The mayor's staff wanted him to open up the street. They told police to plan on emptying the precinct of guns, ammo, and evidence. Protesters could break in. But Tom couldn't shake his fear that protesters would burn down the whole precinct. We were getting information from our intelligence unit who were connected to various resources throughout the country and the FBI that there's a likelihood they would target other police facilities because of what happened in Minneapolis.

35:41For a while, we weren't sure whether the FBI had passed along information about a specific threat to the East Precinct. But former Mayor Durkin told us they did. She was briefed on this threat. She said this in an email this spring, but was unable to sit down for an in-person interview with us.

36:05Tom Mahaffey says he came up with a plan to deal with the threat of a fire. He was going to let the protesters march past the East Precinct. But he wasn't just going to remove weapons and documents like the mayor's office wanted. He was going to remove the officers, too. If protesters just walked past, then great. hey, police could just wait them out and go back to work in the precinct. If protesters attacked, tried to set the building on fire or break in, police would swoop in from outside and make arrests. And if the building did burn down, at least there wouldn't be any officers to get trapped inside.

36:49Tammy Floyd, who worked as Tom's aide, had been worrying for days that police leaders would abandon the East Precinct And now, to her, it was actually happening. I went and sat in the watch commander office and sat down in a chair and just teared up. I had no words. I had no words. And, you know, he looks at me and says, oh, my God, they're going to give it up, aren't they? And I just shook my head. Shook my head, yes. and just started crying. Tammy wondered, why did police fight so hard to defend the precinct if this was the outcome? It was a complete collapse of your very mission, which was public safety.

37:43For Tammy, this was the decision that set the stage for CHOP in everything that came after. It was that fork in the road that went one way instead of the other, and history is what it is because of that. You wouldn't have had three weeks or 23 days of nightly mayhem. I think we wouldn't have had the shootings. I think some people would be alive today. Yeah, I feel and I believe it would have been very different.

38:21I always bristle at the fact that we gave up a precinct. It's way more nuanced than that. I'm not trying to make excuses for it. We had to make quick decisions that were going to be significantly impactful to the safety of Seattle police officers and the citizens of Seattle and the protesters. I still believe that the decision that I made, given the circumstances that we were faced, was the right one. After we talked with Tom Mahaffey and Tammy Floyd, we asked Seattle police about the department's conduct during the protests. Why they set up the barricade and used crowd control weapons on protesters there.

39:02Why they walked away from the precinct. The department declined to answer our questions.

39:12The day after Bloody Sunday, Rashilah Levitt, one of the new protest leaders, notices something feels off outside the East Precinct. The police have started to, like, thin out almost. People thought that they were just doing, like, a shift change. But by that evening, it's clear something is happening. This is the scene now. Journalist Omari Salisbury is there, recording as usual. Seattle police are going to be abandoned in the East Precinct. We're right here behind the barricade. And the police are now moving out. The street is going to open up. The police are actually packing up. They're leaving.

39:55And it was that moment that we were like, we won. This is a victory. Like, we did something. At first, for protesters and even some residents of the neighborhood, this is a relief. No more tear gas every night. But now the question is, what are the protesters going to do? And there was a couple different opposing moments and viewpoints and ideas. People were like, no, we should keep marching. We'll do this Saturday or 3rd. And then other people were like, no, if we leave, they're going to 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.

40:49CHOP. The Capitol Hill organized protest. The Capitol Hill autonomous zone. Surprisingly little is known about CHOP. It became a national spectacle, and right-wing media started calling it a takeover of part of Seattle. They planted a flag and they stole it, just like the Conquistador. And the protesters moved in to occupy roughly a six-block area of Seattle. But protesters never set out to drive police away from the precinct. They didn't set out to form an occupation. With all this negative attention, many Seattleites felt like they needed to correct the record and defend the protesters. Let's bring in the mayor of Seattle now, Jenny Durkin.

41:33Welcome back, Ms. Mayor. How long do you think Seattle and those few blocks looks like this? I don't know. We could have the summer of love.

41:49A thousand miles away, Antonio May Sr. and his son were talking about what was going on in Seattle. I talked to him about that precinct that was overran in Seattle, and then they barricaded a neighborhood. That to me was an unprecedented thing at that time. That's never happened. I've never heard it happen. So I'm sharing this stuff with my son because history is happening right before our eyes. Antonio Mays Sr. had forbidden his son from joining the protests. But about two weeks after CHOP was formed, Antonio Jr. left home to go see it for himself. I had no idea that he would travel that far.

42:32When we look back now at all these decisions in that first week of protest, Police deciding to block off the road and then use crowd control weapons. Police leaving their precinct. And then protesters deciding to form an occupation. It's hard not to wonder, what would have happened if even one of those decisions had been different?

42:59Some protesters at the time had a bad feeling about staying. David Lewis was one of them. What were your feelings about occupying those blocks? That it was instantly a mistake. That fundamental decision to stay there and occupy was very questionable. My suggestion was never to occupy. You stay in one spot, then your opposition, who at this point we knew SPD were nothing but opposition to this point, can strategize against you. Three echoes, yeah, just for information. Small group, possible proud boys. Soon, protesters would face an existential threat to this brand new occupation. It looks like a few of them might be open carrying, but right now it's in pretty peaceful.

43:49It would inject fear into the encampment and shape the kind of protest Antonio would later step into. Somebody over there, is there anything to use a gun? Take the clip out and put it back in. That's on the next episode of We Keep Us Safe.

44:08If you want to look at evidence from this episode, like the letter Antonio wrote for his dad, visit npr.org slash chop. We're adding new evidence there each week. We Keep Us Safe from NPR's Embedded is a collaboration with The Seattle Times and KUOW. The series is reported and written by me, Sydney Brownstone, David Gutman, and Will James. This episode was edited by Luis Treas and Laura Grenius with support from Katie Simon. This episode was produced by Dan Germa. Additional production support from Daveed Goodherts. Our senior producer is Adelina Lansianese. Additional reporting by Omari Salisbury, who contributed his recordings to this project, along with the live streamer Joey Weiser.

44:57Research and fact-checking by Dania Solomon and Miyoko Wolfe. Jimmy Keeley mastered the episode. Music by Audio Network, Audio Socket, Mike Doughty, Sound Ideas, Ramteen Arablui, and Universal Music Production. And a big thanks to our NPR Plus supporters. Embedded is where we do ambitious, long-form journalism at NPR, and NPR Plus helps keep that work going. Supporters also get to listen to every Embedded episode early. Find out more at plus.npr.org. If you'd like to email the show, you can reach out at embedded at npr.org. I'm Sydney Brownstone. I'm Will James. This is Embedded from NPR. Thanks for listening.

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46:38And I also had a lot of sadness that I had spent such a long period of time going through this and not getting the right care. And so essentially what we really want to do at MIDI is democratize access to this type of care. MIDI Health, committed to helping women in midlife with paramenopause and menopause care, accessible via telehealth visits at joinmidi.com. Every episode of It's Been a Minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity.

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