Angry Planet - Antifa's Car Brigades

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

In the summer of 2020, violent riots broke out across America between ordinary citizens and police. These riots led to groups finding ways to develop their own security forces to deal with violence from police, opposition groups, and other antagonists on the ground.Here to help us understand what’s going on is Nikki West. West is a local Seattle photojournalist who was previously on the show talking about the Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone. She’s documented the push and pull between protestors and tracked the development of new tactics.One particularly unique tactic is the development of Seattle’s car brigade. This protection force consists of a multi-layered security system that is centered around a highly organized car brigade. Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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freedom is never safe-guided peacefulness anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach hello and welcome to angry planet i'm matthew in the summer of 2020 violent riots broke out across america between ordinary citizens and the police these riots led to groups fighting ways to develop their own security forces to deal with violence from the cops opposition groups and other antagonists on the ground here to help us understand what's going on on is Nikki West. She's documented the push and pull between protesters and tracked the development of new tactics. One unique tactic is the development of Seattle's car brigades. This protection force consists of a multi-layered security system that is centered around a highly organized

car brigade. Nikki, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on again. I'm excited to talk about Car Brigade. I feel like this is a very interesting topic that I haven't seen outside of the Seattle local media market. It's quite fascinating. I think one of the reasons I like talking to you is that we get this real granular view of stuff that in the mainstream media, we're only getting like small slices of. And like I think on cable news, people have very strict political priorities. And I want to get some like basic stuff out of the way here at the very beginning.

So we're going to be talking about Antifa today very broadly. And when we use that term, I think it's a very broad brush. So can we narrow that down a little bit? Like when we talk about organized groups in Seattle, who are we actually talking about specifically? Yes. So I use Antifa because that is the easiest term for people to understand. But Antifa is actually a very specific group within the Seattle movement towards police reform. So I was thinking about it earlier.

It's like squares and rectangles, right? So everybody who is in Black Lives Matter is not necessarily. in Antifa, but everybody who is in Antifa is in Black Lives Matter. There is a very large coalition of groups involved here. So we're talking everybody from indigenous rights groups, environmental groups, feminist groups, a local black clergy based out of the Central District. Antifa is a large component. And even within Antifa, they are not an ideologically combined group. One of the things that I try to explain, particularly to my right-wing friends, is that Antifa actually ideologically is not homogenous.

Their entire goal is just to oppose fascism, and that's it. So you have everybody from anarcho-sindicalists to, you know, your college students for Bernie types. It is a very large group of people who's involved in Antiva, and their entire goal is just to oppose fascism. Perfect. Yeah, I think there's this kind of idea, especially on the right, that there is some sort of central planning committee that is distributing the Antifa talking points to everybody. And it's just not the case. Thank you for explaining that. Also, I wanted to just note that in earlier conversations about this topic, I noticed that you called the protests violent.

And that is a marked difference from what I've seen in a lot of mainstream coverage in the last year, which called the protests mostly peaceful. And that caveat does seem to have been dropped now. So just how violent have you seen things get? So I can take off my journalist hat and put on my first. philosophical hat here. And one of the things that I have consistently seen over the past nine months is there's kind of this phase phrase, people not property. Say I'm in a car accident and we're, I'm in this beautiful portion 9-11 with this guy like whatever. And it's between saving the car and saving the guy like obviously the human life matters here, despite how beautiful the car is.

So there are groups and they are not necessarily black lives matter. Personally, Black Lives Matter is a little bit all over the place. It's designed that way intentionally, right? Because it's a decentralized group. But there are elements of BLM and Antifa that engage in property destruction. And as they're doing it, they're saying people not property. And it comes to a really interesting discussion of what constitutes as violence. Right. But in domestic violence situation, it's really common for the abuser to basically punch the wall next to their victim. Now, if we are strictly defining violence as force committed against from one person to another person, like, yes, that meets the definition. But I have a hard time struggling to see someone who breaks out and smashes windows and other things like that as peaceful. If we're going to use that classical definition, yes, that's technically not a violent protest. But I think it does qualify as menacing, if that makes sense. I think I'd never heard the domestic violence comparison before.

that's really apt. You're someone who has been in some of those situations personally. When someone punches and puts a hole, puts their fist through a wall, it's damage to property. But yes, there is an implicit threat there, I think, too. And there is also a big difference between smashing, like, the front or burning down a Starbucks and burning down someone's small business. And I think, like, that I also think gets lost in the shuffle. I think, some like local news outlets come back through and interview those people after the fact, like the people who lost businesses that are not just like Starbucks franchises, which people generally don't feel bad about. But yeah, no, I think it's violence against property, but it's still

violence, I think. And there's been incidences, particularly with there's one group. They've disbanded now. They're called the Every Night Daily Demonstration. And they would actually specifically target businesses that, that they actually had political grievances with. So there's two businesses that come to mind specifically in Seattle. One, it does not exist anymore. It was a vintage shop called Robe. The shop owner, her husband was the police officer who had shot Charlena Liles, which is one of the most infamous cases in Seattle Black Lives Matter. So background on her is that she was a pregnant woman. She had four kids. The kids were in the house. She basically had had a DV call. She had been in mental health distress. And she had

charged the officers with a knife, and then the officer shot her as she's, she was very, I think she was like seven or eight months pregnant. She was pretty far along when the children were in the house. And I think it was somewhere in August. I remember watching this live that basically a group of people basically went out, broke the windows, took the clothes out of the shop and burn them. And now the shop, it's gone now these days. They implicitly threatened them for a very long time and explicitly threatened them for a long time. Now they're gone from the community. There was another shop as well.

They were a local bakery. And so this happened around Christmas is that there was a homeless encampment that had developed in Cal Anderson, which was the main spot where Chaz was. And there was a proposed sweep. And this is still one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my entire life.

So what they did is they, Antifa and a couple other groups, they had formed eviction defense. So they took everything from like police barricades to pallets to broken furniture to whatever they basically could find. And they created like a giant barricade. I have pictures of it. And they basically sat there until the cops forcibly removed the protesters, the people who had been camping there and made several arrests. And so there was a letter that it came out with a group of people in Seattle.

It was everybody from Seattle Central College to a couple of local shop owners. And this one particular shop owner basically had supported the sweep in the situation. And two weeks later, his job got its windows broken out. So people over property. But again, it's people own that property, right? You're, when you damage that, that it may not, you're not damaging a person directly, but you are damaging a person. Let's move on.

So what is a car brigade? Yes. Actually, I want to talk about. Yeah. So this will take it some different car brigades. because I think when you ask the question, are the protest violent? I think we also need to discuss violence that come from outside groups. And they're not necessarily even outside groups.

They're bystanders. One incident, I remember it was, I think, early January, very small protests, maybe 40 people. But we were walking up through the Central District and someone shot a firework down upon the protest. And it was just a random person off their balcony. So you're often very exposed in these situations. And I think that's what developed several protecting tactics that happen within their reign. Well, can we talk a little bit more about the violence of these groups' experience? Because I think that is a really key part of why this car brigade tactic started, started as a response to protect other people from cars, right?

Yes. So these are not sanctioned protests, right? They're not getting permits from the city of Seattle. So they're going out there pretty exposed. And I've walked with these people for a very long time and they experience a variety of different threats. So there are people who do actually try to drive their car in into protests. That is unfortunately a thing that after what happened at Charlottesville is become a thing that some unhinged individuals want to do. In particular, this was during the 12 days leading up to Chaz, is it was, I believe it was June 7th when this particular incident occurred.

the butt. Basically, a man had tried to drive into the protesters. He had a firearm. Somebody tried to stop him. That man was shot. And then he came out of his car, basically walked up through the police line, and then he was arrested. And so there was that incident. And Carp Brigade really ramped up after the murder of Summer Taylor in June of 2020. Yeah, tell me about that incident. Which one? Summer Taylor. So Summer Taylor, that is, that is a situation. I I think that I think will take a very long time for everybody to truly understand. There's a lot of conspiracy theories on the ground about exactly what happened there. So part of how the Seattle protesters were going is one of the things that they would do is they would block part of I-5, which if you've been on the West Coast, that's basically our I-90, and you can shut down traffic for a while.

And so the protesters had actually worked out a deal with the city of Seattle that between each. 8 o'clock and 8.30 p.m. that they would shut down that section of I-5 to do that protest. I know because I got caught behind it a couple times, just driving home. And so I guess at one point there was a shift change. And because Seattle police actually had blocked off several of the intersections in order to get into that section of I-5, I guess there was a shift change. And that was a night that summer Taylor had been killed. by that man as well as Diaz Love. And so after then, which was a very traumatic incident for all involved, there became a discussion that there needed to be more formalized tactics on how to protect protesters. And so the Car Brigade is born, right? What is it exactly? So Car Brigade is a car protection force that is designed to basically accompany protesters as they're walking through streets. So they're supposed to basically protect on all sides. And because they're walking through streets unsanctioned, they're there to protect just, like,

to create a physical barricade between protesters and other cars. When did you start seeing it deployed in earnest? And what kind of numbers are we talking about for the cars? Generally, I think it's around 10 to 15 cars that they use. So there's generally three or four in the front, three or four in the back and then there's three on each side. So I started seeing it about three or four weeks after Chaz ended. So that would have been like late July is when I started seeing it happen. And so what I saw first was Bike Brigade, which they worked together in tandem. So Bike Brigade directly came out of Chaz and directly came before Chaz even. So when the protests were happening at 11th and Pine, they had basically

been there as like a scout group is watching for watching and identifying threats that around the protest zone. And so when people were going out, they originally started with brigade, just bikes in the front, bikes on the side, bikes on the back. And then they have a group of other scouts that basically come around and they block off streets leading up to where the protest is coming. The idea being that with a bike brigade that no person generally in their right mind would run down somebody on a bike. And like the read reading some of the sources that you'd sent me about all of this ahead of time, it also seems like bike brigade was mostly made up of white people.

Yes. Yes. They generally send to be white. They tend to be younger. And they exist as like a support force. And why bike brigade is effective and is that they're mobile. Unlike a car that has a certain amount of like there's a limitation. is just basically like a thousand-pound car.

With Bike Brigade, they can move around and be flexible. And their job is almost more so to be like the watch guards. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes total sense. So does this stuff work? Has it been keeping people safe? Yes. For the most part, there has not been a significant injury or death since the death of Summer

Taylor. There have been a few injuries. And recently there has been a situation. where a car did manage to make its way through and it did hit a protester. No one got seriously hurt. This was about a month ago, I believe. And then Seattle police did end up catching that person. But so far, I have not seen any serious significant injuries come out after the car brigade was formed.

One of the things that really strikes me about this, and you sent along a bunch of stuff, is how formalized it is. There are these training manuals. There are zines. There's all the supporting literature that really explains how people are supposed to do this. Can you talk about this a little bit? Like, when did you start seeing this stuff show up? The literature specifically.

Zines have always been an integral part of anarchist movements and protest movements because one of the things, when people are protesting against the state, they can't exactly go to CNN. and read exactly how to do these things. And there has to be some level of concealment. What these people are doing is not only just highly illegal, but also highly dangerous, highly difficult, and requires technical knowledge.

And zines have been this massive resource for people to learn how to do these things. Because we all understand that the police have to go through so much training when it comes to crowd control. And so in response, people who do go against the police officers in these settings, they feel the need to have these highly technical organized resources. And there's also other groups that do support this. So there are groups like the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt. And so what their entire function is, so for the audience, you may not know who these groups are. They're basically, they are left-wing, anti-racist, anti-fat, anti-fat,

groups that their entire mission is to legally train people in how to use firearms and do wound dressing. It's pretty much all they do. And they also provide support at protests where they believe that hard right wingers or really any right wingers will be. And they are typically open and carrying firearms. And how police responded to all of this? You said that it's illegal, very dangerous. Are people getting arrested? Are our cars getting impounded? Yes. Yes to all of that. So this is a very, this is a very interesting kind of drama that's happening right now is that so they, so how Car Brigade functions is it's not technically part of any one specific group. So within the Seattle Black Lives Matter movement,

there's everybody from Black Action Coalition to a Native American group to et cetera. And so, Car Brigade basically comes and provides support to anybody within that protest umbrella. And so that can be everything from a very mild protest where people bring kids and babies to some very intense action. And the drivers don't necessarily know what they're protecting. They're just basically there to create support. And there is, let me pull this up right now. So there's been a couple things that have happened. So there have been incidences where there are late-night protests and SPD has been recorded smashing out Carper Gates windows. There is one incident where a Carper Gator has was falled all the way to Fawth, Washington, which is about like 30-minute drive outside of the city. And they were impounded out there, which is well outside of Seattle Police's jurisdiction.

I've had Carper Gators tell me that they have been followed by police. and follow well outside the city, which hard to verify that claim. So I'll put it out there, but these people are driving with their actual license plates on. They have been identified. They've had their cars impounded. Part of the reason that they have an organized group now that fundraises money is just to deal with just the amount of times that people have been impounded, arrested, had windows smashed, had tire slashed, other things like that. And so basically, they have been arrested for rendering criminal assistance because some of the protests that they do cover end up leading to property damage. And so this is, yeah, let's see. Car Brigade would not be, this is what Acting Police Chief. Adrian Dia said. The Car Brigade would not be an issue if there was not destruction going on the crowd. They cannot allow that property damage. They become complicit. Part of the issue that the Seattle Police Department has with Car Brigade is that they, They argue that Carb Brigade does not exist as a protection force for protesters against threats,

but actually a way to impede arrests from protesters from SPD because it's a physical barricade. It's harder for SPD to come in, like, sneak in there. The cars can just basically box them out. I mean, kind of right, though. It is a physical barrier between police and protesters, right? I mean, I would assume that Car Brigade may not be saying that's part of the point, but it feels like that's probably part of the point, right? Possibly.

And I can't speak to their internal motivations. I can only say what I see, which is that it's a physical barricade between protesters and everything outside of it. Let's see. Let me look at this. So, oh, interesting. Yeah, so there's actually like warrant affidavits against a lot of car brigators. But basically it says in this report from publicola, In the war and affidated, the unnamed detective accuses car brigade members of providing cover for array of crimes, including malicious mischief, arson, possessive of explosive devices, and failure to disperse.

Specifically, the detective called out the car brigade's use of handheld radios to coordinate the movements of drivers and marchers as evidence of their complicity, also arguing that by positioning themselves between SPD vehicles and marchers, the car brigade specifically intended to prevent SPD from conducting arrests. The Carp Brigade drivers don't deny being present at marches that involve property damage. However, they say the role of those marches was the same as the role at any other march. They were there on hand to protect vehicular attacks not to block the officer's land of sight or prevent. Yeah, fine. You're making the you're making the hand motion at me right now, which I think is fair. All right. So you have, you've done a write-alongs with these, correct?

You've been in the car? what is that experience like? So the first time I did this is it was just merely an accident because I actually sprained my ankle, which comes to my point is that one of the things that's interesting about Car Brigade is that not all of them are just specifically there as part of the blockade. Some of them actually, like, if you go in there, they have like giant barrels of snacks. They have medical supplies in there. They are not all just specifically there as Carbigate.

Some of them who are in the brigade actually provide other services. Some of the people in Car Brigade, they will drive protesters home. Some of them will provide some basic first aid medical care. And it's really interesting being in there because you do actually see people on the outside. They'll engage with the only way I can describe it as edging behavior where they won't full on come and try to attack, but they'll just clay at the line a little bit and try to intimidate the people who are in Carb Brigade. I did see it once with a pretty large pickup truck. Like he just started going like this at them.

Like, I'm pointing that you can't see it, but basically he was just edging his car closer and closer and flashing his lights a little bit. You do see like- Doing, I'm not, I'm not touching you, but with cars. Yeah. Yeah. So you start to see why this started to develop because there are people who are not bold enough to actually try to attack these people, but they just feel festering resentments. And they just play at the line a little. Let me ask you, let me ask you this. When you are, so you've been stuck behind these protests.

on the highway before in a car. Yes. You were trying what, how did you feel when you got trapped in your car behind one of these? Well, so I'm a Buddhist. So my ability to like to be chill about things like traffic is probably much higher than other people. But it is, you do feel helpless a little bit. And they have done stuff like where they've blocked out like major arteries in Seattle,

which what most people don't know is like Seattle's an issuice. So there's pretty much only two ways out of that city. You can either go up, like north and south on I-5, or you can go west on 405. There's no other way out of that city. So if you're trapped on I-5, you were trapped on there. There's no way to get out. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back after this.

All right, angry planet listeners, thank you for sticking with us. We are back on talking about Car Brigade Tactics in the Pacific Northwest. What do you think of this? Let's, let me ask you this. What do you think of stepping away from Carbergade specifically? What do you think of the political of blocking off major thoroughfares as a political tactic? Do you think it's effective in any way or does it just piss people off? From a trying to win hearts and minds standpoint, I don't think it, I don't think it works as a women's and hearts and minds tactic, but I'm not entirely sure that's the point. I think the idea is it's a squeezing. mechanism for the state. It's basically, like, we will push and push and push and push until you eventually give us what we want. I don't think the idea is to make you and I be sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. I think the idea is to just make the state have to lose so much money, so much time,

get so much complaints from the transport boards, just because Seattle is so reliant on transportation, export, and whatever it may be, because Seattle is primarily an import, export town, actually. And so them blocking off the highway means losing a lot of money. And that's, I think, ultimately the point in this situation. Now, the situation may be very different in other cities, but in Seattle specifically, that's the point. So what are there other major brigade groups in Seattle besides Car Brigade? And how do they differ? From what I can gather, there isn't any competing groups to car and bike brigade. Things may be different as the summer heats up.

Without naming names, is Car Brigade like fairly well organized? Is it have a logistics infrastructure? Somebody is presumably like running Excel spreadsheets somewhere. Yes. I don't know who in particular does it, but they do have meetings. They do have private telegram conversations. They have basic playbooks. So when they're on their radio, because there's obviously there's different kinds of

intersections, they will tell you what they'll tell the drivers, okay, we're making this formation, which we learned at the meeting on this particular thing. And it can be related to, okay, so if there's a threat, we're going to all move this way. So there's a decent amount of organization there. Yeah, I'm just looking at the, like how to turn into intersections is like a whole little block here. Block off both the unused directions with three to four cars each. Use bikes to redirect traffic. keep two rows of cars in front of incoming protesters while blocking upcoming intersection. This includes the wrong side of the road. If this isn't possible from a sideguard line with cars, form a sideguard line with cars alongside marching protesters,

crowd as you push forward. It's just, it's just interesting to see how well organized all of this stuff has become, like the communities need to protest has become so formalized that you have a group that is specifically just about supporting and protecting the people that are doing the protesting. I think that's interesting. I worry about a country that feels like, or a city maybe, that feels like people will pull the levers of power that are available to them, and people feel like this is the lever of power they have to pull.

And I think that's interesting. Okay, so where did these brigade tactics come from? Have we seen them anywhere else before? What is the origin of this stuff? You know, truthfully, I don't, I haven't seen a lot in anarchist scene literature regarding Carpergate. I think this is actually a very recent development because I've been, because there's a lot of anarchist literature about tactics used during the WTO riots, which by the way, this is a point. I've noticed the mainstream media does not notice, but for most millennial Pacific Northwesterners, the WTO riots was our first. big political memory because I think I was like eight or nine when it first happened. And it's a very

dramatic political memory. And the millennials are obviously like for the most part, the elders in these situations because zoomers are only like at oldest, what, like 25, 26. So for millennials like me, we're the people who are leading this front. There are other defensive tactics that are more applicable to like active demonstrations that I think come out of these anarchist scenes. But I think I think Car Brigade in particular is a newer phenomenon, just because as like we have seen terrorism evolve, I think our human beings' response to it has changed. So we've seen that car terrorism has come up in the last five to ten years. And so consequently, Carbergade has developed. You actually just lighted on something that we didn't do prep on at all, but I'm curious about.

Can you talk about, can you do the basics of the WTO riots for the audience? Because I do think that's super important. I mean, I think probably a lot of our younger listeners have no idea what you're even talking about. Yes. So in 1999, down in downtown Seattle, there was something basically known as the Battle for Seattle. And so the battle for Seattle was to protest basically the giant world trade organizations conference in downtown Seattle. Or yeah. And so basically, anarchist groups had organized against the growth of international globalist trade and in particular issues that they had with labor policies with many groups in the WTO. And this was, God, it was like, was it a whole month? Yeah. The large scale of the demonstrations estimated at no fewer than 40,000 protesters,

was larger than any previous demonstration in the United States. I think this is the beginning of where we saw Black Block. So Black Block is not, was not designed by Antifa. It is a much older tactic than people realize. And so these were very violent protests. Downtown Seattle was basically shut down for a month. There was a couple million dollars done in property damage. The police were seen of tear gassing protesters that were sitting on the ground. There were anarchist squats in available buildings.

There was a whole complex, organized structure to this very violent, intense protest in downtown Seattle. There was actually two movies. about it. One that is terrible. It is. Yeah. There was like one that's like a romantic drama, which I'm like, why would you do that? And then there's like all their documentaries about it. Yeah. I think the romantic one is called Battle in Seattle. Yeah. It's like reality bites, but somebody actually cares about something, basically. Is how I imagine that. Charles is in this movie. So is Woody Harrelson. No, no, thank you. It's really funny because I think of I think when we look back at all of this stuff decades from now, God willing, we will identify, like, that particular protests and all of those trade agreements as like a big inflection point for a lot of the stuff we're dealing with now.

Even if it's just a dry run for things like Black Block, et cetera, and people learned a lot from that event. I think both police and Antifa. The other thing that's new that we've seen in the last few years is the increasing militarization. of both sides of these protests? Can you talk about that a little bit? I think the question we've got here is what are police and Antifa both adopting from U.S. military tactics? Sure. So let me pull up my notes here. So I never used to watch football until I started covering these protests. And part of the reason why is that if you understand football, it's basically the same thing as understanding military strategy and playbooks, right? Rites, to some degree, are like a little

formulaic, and it sounds very weird to anybody outside of this, but they have designed formation. So the front, there's like the front line, which we all typically know, those are the guys with shields and the batons and everything like that. Then in the back, there are the guys who do munitions deployment. So tear gas, blast balls, anything like that. And then the line behind them are arresting officers. And then there's like the back support. And so one of the big controversies actually in Seattle is that there's not actually a lot. I have a police officer friend of mine and he weirdly enough knows a lot about international intelligence and riot control. And there's really not that many departments. And so one of the big controversies in Seattle is that the Seattle,

the police department did their crowd control training with the IDF. The IDF does basically one month training program for police departments in crowd control. Interesting. Okay. So that's the thing to know. actually it was the day that chas shut down there was actually a scheduled like anti-IDF protests it just all happened to converge in one place and i was like how did israel get involved in this but that is the truth it always seems to somehow it always boils down to israel doesn't it yeah there's like a cliche in dc all politics is local and i feel like all politics is is real you find out yeah you find out what people believe really fast when that topic comes up i feel like But yeah, so on the other side, Antifa basically sits and watches playbooks on how the police manages crowd control. And so they also form their own units. So they have the frontline guys that have shields. They typically have like deeper armor on. And it's a lot different than obviously police armor, but they have the helmets.

They have the pads. They have face shields. They're on a much lower budget scale. just as equipped. And so they also do things like salute when they are assessing threats. So for people, I assume most of the people who listen to this podcast know, basically that's just a, that's an acronym for assessing threats. They, yeah, they study battle strategies just as much as police officers. All right. So it's April 23rd right now as we're talking. How are things in the city? How are the tensions? What do the most recent protests look like? How are police responding?

What is the state on the state of the ground right now? So the state on the ground is it's a little quiet. I would say it's at a simmer. It's not out of boil. Things aren't ultra spicy. I think a lot of people basically got burnt out from last year. It's not an easy thing to go after every day. After the Derek Chauvin trial, there was a protest.

It was advertised as all police are chauvin. Hopefully I'm saying his name correctly. I have a tendency not to do that. But there was protests about like 50 or 60 people. Biker and Carp Brigade were there. The Seattle Police Department showed up. They came with Alarads. It was really interesting

about what they were saying last time is I've noticed a change in how they address the crowd. So typically they would only really address the crowd if they started noticing property damage and if they were announcing a riot, like basically this is a riot please disperse,

wheel drop munitions, whatever. But what's now how they're addressing the crowd. And I've noticed that they're dropping the professionalism because they're just getting exhausted. As they'll say, we apologize to the community for this disruption. We support your right to protest. It is a protected First Amendment, but that does not include property damage. It can be seen in video.

It's a very odd development. Because I'm from the South, the attitudes and the way in which police in especially the Northwest, interact and deal with protesters is super fascinating to me. There's still cops at the end of the day. They're still going to break a window, pepper spray you and drag you out of your car. But I just think about like when highways get shut down in Dallas by protesters, the police are not telling people that they support their right to protest before moving in. It's interesting.

Yeah, it definitely speaks to a broader culture where they know that. they are not entirely least supported by the community. There is not a robust black back-the-blue movement in Seattle, and the back-the-blue movement is very small. It's basically just older baby boomers and older Gen Xers who own property. And the day of the Chauvin Trail, the Seattle Police Department actually put out a press release. Let me pull it up.

It's very interesting. SBD statement on the Chauvin trial. Seattle Police Department knows that Mr. Floyd's murder was a watershed moment for this country. The eyes of a nation saw in horrible detail what many have been fighting to change. It was soul crushing from that pain, though. Real change has begun. The events of the past year have made clear that the community's expectation of what police work should be. The Seattle Police Department is already making changes to move towards a more equitable model of public safety. We have banned neck restraints, chokeholds, and no-knock warrants.

The SPD requires department-wide, implicit bias, and active bystander training to empower officers to recognize and intervene when a colleague is doing wrong. More recent modifications since George Floyd's murder include, reducing the SPD's visible footprint around crowd events to avoid escalation that may a result from an SPD presence. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I want to, yeah. Yeah, let's just, we can just stop there.

Yeah, no, what does that mean exactly? Does that mean, hey, we won't, the cops won't be showing up because we feel like it would be escalatory in certain situations? And then I would want to know what the specifics of that actually. Like what constitutes a protest that they're not going to show up to versus one that they will show up to? I think that's actually a very deeply philosophical point that they've just made. Is the presence of police an escalatory action? I would think that it is in certain circumstances, I think.

Right. Because when we've seen stuff like the anti-Kerran legislation where you don't call a cop on a petty confrontation, I think that implies that a police officer being involved is an escalation. And that's my personal implicated. I have only called the cops maybe twice in my entire life. And that was once because I literally saw someone get shot in Harlem. Literally. So that was basically the only time I have ever really called the cause.

Because in my view, calling the police should generally be your last resort after everything has failed. Yeah, I agree. especially for stuff like loud neighbors or someone having a mental health crisis, like this stuff goes bad all the time. Typically, they don't need to get involved in these situations. Because you have someone who just doesn't have context for the entirety of the situation and has a firearm. And yeah, it has a monopoly on state violence, which I think also changes the calculation for all parties involved. I mean, it's fascinating.

The SPD explicitly acknowledges that they believe that their presence constitutes an. conflict escalation. That is a very interesting admittance. It is a super interesting admittance. And I don't think I've heard of any other police departments saying, would, I would just, again, Southern brain, like, I just, no one would ever say that here. No one would ever, like even citizens, nobody would want to believe that. And I think that in circumstances, it's absolutely true. How are they, how are, do you talk to cops? Have you interviewed police officers? How are they doing up there with all of that? So I have not been able to specifically talk to SPD officers longer than a five to ten minute conversation.

I once had a conversation with SPD randomly about, this was a completely off the record conversation about Antifa. This was right before I was going to go into a back-the-blue rally. And I noticed at a bunch of them and staged up. And I was like, hey, why are you guys here? And they're like, there's a bunch of black blockers. So things might get a little spicy here a bit. But SBD is bleeding people, bleeding people. So there's this billboard if you drive along anywhere in Seattle or in the Pacific Northwest.

Spokane, which is the other major large city in Washington State, has basically been offering a $15,000 signing bonus for lateral moves for any police officers in the Portland or Seattle Police Department. Because, yeah, morale is just basically at rock bottom. And I have a close friend who is a police officer, not in Seattle, down the south. And basically, he used to be in an urban area. He's moved to a more suburban district. And it's basically said the same thing where it's you can't use any leave. You're constantly overworked. You're in increasingly escalating situations.

And you're in a situations every day where it's either you lose your life or you lose your life is where they're at. And in Seattle, there's not necessarily the culture that supports and creates a way to pressure lever for them. I'm trying to say this really poorly. Yeah, I get you. They don't feel supported by the community in ways they may feel in other parts of the country in Seattle. Neither institutionally or culturally. Right. Yeah.

And that's important, I think. So what are the demands still abolish the police? Let's start over. Is that basically where it's at? Because they've wrung some concessions out of them already, right? They have run some concessions, like no knocks and chokeholds. And they had a pretty significant budget reduction. And they and the former police chief, Carmen Bess, she's out. They are making moves to figure out who the permanent chief is. because Adrian Diaz has stated that he's not planning to be permanent Seattle police chief. So they're looking for who's going to come in. And I think that'll, that's going to spell a lot of cultural changes, whoever they do bring in.

Because Mayor Jenny Durkin, she comes from the public safety world. And so that is consequentially why Seattle police did get the amount of funding that they did did get. Because they, prior to the Georgia Floyd protests, the Seattle Police Department is actually one of the most well-finding. funded police departments in the in in the United States like when you can when you go bones to beans basically when you think about the size of the city it is an incredibly well it was an incredibly well funded department so we're going to see some changes that will come since mayor jenny durkin has not decided to pursue re-election and there's going to be a police chief change we'll see what happens Nikki west thank you so much for coming on to angry

planet and walking us through all of this thank you That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we have a substack, where for a mere $9 a month, you get access to two bonus episodes as well as commercial-free versions of the episodes that you get on the main feed, go to Angry Planet pod.com or AngryPlanet.com to sign up.

We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.