Focus: Adults in the Room - We Keep Us Safe: This Ain’t Coachella

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

After police retreat from their precinct, protesters begin occupying roughly eight blocks of Seattle. It's their attempt at a police-free world. But as rumors spread, fear and paranoia take over, setting a dangerous stage for Antonio Mays Jr.'s arrival. We Keep Us Safe is part of Focus, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR network. Get in touch with the team by email at [e-mail]. Support KUOW and projects like this by donating at kuow.org/donate/focus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Maybe you've been here. You're staring down a payment screen at a store. And it's asking you to choose a box for a tip. What do you do? How much should you tip? I'm Claire McRane. I co-host Control F, a KUOW podcast that uses data to reveal the hidden stories in our daily lives. I'm Brandy Fullwood.

I host Seattle Eats, a show about the city's food scene. On this crossover episode, we dig into data on how much we're tipping and why. Listen to Control F on the KUOW app or wherever you get podcasts. Focus from KUOW in Seattle. Heads up, this episode contains explicit language and the sound of gun violence. You'll also hear intense audio of confrontations between protesters and police, including the sound of flashbangs and other loud booming noises. Previously on We Keep Us Safe.

Antonio Jr. left his home for Seattle on June 23, 2020, without telling his dad. He was shot and killed at the Seattle protest less than a week later. You see a shadow outside the passenger door of the white Jeep. Unless you see any shells on the ground, kick those up, pocket them. Take them home. At that time, protests were happening across the country. But Seattle was different. You motherfuckers! Protesters' worst fears materialized.

There was a car that started to accelerate. The violence protesters faced actually galvanized the movement. The police are now moving out. The street is going to open up. That kind of sparked this idea of we should stay. At the very beginning of CHOP, it felt like a giant exhale. The standoff was over.

The tear gas was gone. This spot that for the past week had been a showdown between police and protesters was now a police-free zone. At the heart of CHOP was a big green scene. city park. At night, you could see dozens of tents for people who are staying there. And during the day, thousands of people converged on this space. Protesters painted murals in the streets and set up a stage for speeches and protest songs. Yo, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to be alive right now. Is it not?

My dad in the Philadelphia suburbs is watching the news and is afraid that Seattle has been taken over by radical anarchists. And he calls me all freaked out. And I'm like, Dad, Dad, it's okay, let me FaceTime with you right now. And I walked him through Chop. People had dangled extension cords from windows so protesters living in the park could charge their phones. There were all these tables and tents stacked with donations and bottled water. So when we sing we want our world to change, we have to sing it like we want our world to change.

Right here. Seattle, look! I want my world to change. I want my world to change. It evolved into this community. The community of people that were coming together to serve the area that we were occupying better than the city was doing in our eyes.

This is Rishaila Levitt, one of CHOP's emerging leaders who we met in the last episode. She says CHOP was a place where protesters poured their energy into supporting each other and the homeless population staying in the park. We had soup kitchens.

We started a community garden. There's lettuces over there. Those are it looks like chives, maybe. We were feeding everybody. Local restaurants were donating food. Lots of food and snacks. Again, this is all free. And protesters kept up their demands.

They kept pushing for city leaders to cut the police budget by at least half and invest in social services. And so the demand that I put on the list is that we take some of the $400 million. that we give to the Seattle Police Department every year, and instead we put the money into community services that know how to help people in crisis without brutalizing it.

I really want to stress that for a moment there, it was Utopia. This guy, Atris, volunteered as a medic during the standoff, and then he stuck around to see what this new thing would be like. We're using his code name. A lot of people went by codenames at Chop because he's worried about the professional consequences of using his real name. I sent my wife and son up during the day to check it out because it was, yeah, it was a place of beauty at first. Yeah. I think we showed the world what it could be and that's worth remembering.

But amid all of these sunny feelings, there was already something more ominous growing beneath the surface. Protesters felt this fragile new thing they were building could come under attack at any moment, from right-wing extremists or even the police. Some of them decided they needed guns to protect the camp. Chop existed for three weeks. During that time, a conflict played out between these two aspects of it, the gentler utopian side and the more extreme and dangerous won. By the time Antonio Mays Jr. arrived in CHOP's final week, the utopia had faded, and the more dangerous side had prevailed. From NPR's embedded with KUOW and the Seattle Times, this is We Keep Us Safe. I'm Will James. And I'm Sydney Brownstone. This is episode three.

Maybe you've been here. You're staring down a payment screen at a store and it's asking you to choose a box for a tip. What do you do? How much should you tip? I'm Claire McRane. I co-host Control F, a KUOW podcast that uses data to reveal the hidden stories in our daily lives. I'm Brandy Fulwood. I host Seattle Eats, a show about the city's food scene. On this crossover episode, we dig into data on how much we're tipping and why. Listen to Control F on the KUOW app or wherever you get podcasts. There's a very clear moment that led to a lot of the fear and paranoia that would eventually take over chop.

And it started on the night the police left the precinct and the occupation began. That night, protesters listening in on scanners heard police say armed proud boys might be on their way. We actually got a hold of these recordings through a records request. This confirms a fear that protesters were going to be attacked and this fear spread through the occupation. They just lived through an incident in which a car had driven toward a crowd of protesters and the driver had shot one of them. And that was fresh on their minds as some protesters listened to the scanner that night. Later that night, one protester seems ready to help defend the occupation. This moment was caught on video.

Somebody over there, he's 18 a lot, he's a gun. Hey, I got you, just don't say any names. Raz Simone is a local hip-hop artist. and one of the most recognizable protesters. He was even involved in talks with City Hall. In the video, you can see Raz popping the trunk of his white Tesla, taking out a rifle, and passing it to someone.

Take the clip out and put it back hand. You can hear someone off-screen giving this guy tips on how to handle the gun. They want to know why the guns tonight. Just to introduce this out right now as possible. It might be misinformation, it might be lies. So we're just being ready. This video goes viral.

There are pundits calling Raz a warlord, and it becomes a defining moment at Chop. Pete Hegseth and Tucker Carlson, both Fox News hosts at the time, comment on it. This is a guy handing out assault rifles inside an autonomous zone, taking over as a quasi-police who thinks he's the leader. Raz Simone was an up-and-coming rapper. Now, he's a monarch.

But the proud boys never showed up that night. And then the sun rises on this new occupation. That first day, a couple of police officers venture into this new zone to try to figure out what's going on. What they find is a bunch of makeshift barricades around what seems to be a border of chop. These rows of metal fences, they look sort of like bike racks, are blocking off one of the main roads in the neighborhood.

The two officers walk past the barricades and start chatting with the protesters. At first, it's pretty friendly. I thought I recognized you. It's nice to see again. I'm Jeff. A group of people wearing kind of unusual outfits approaches. One is wearing paws and a tail.

That is quite an outfit. Fucking, thank you. Yeah. I'm like self-appointed safety committee, community watch. Just fucking just... Sure. I've been since 5 p.m. walking around. These people describe themselves as a kind of neighborhood watch for the protest.

One guy comes up and gives a cop a fist bump. And then another person shows up. All you pigs get the fuck out. This is an autonomous zone. No, no, no, no. I'm sorry. We're just having a nice conversation. You can go and ask the mayor to come down here and talk to us.

That's who we want to talk to. The person saying this seems to be a white man. He's wearing all black, black pants, black leather jacket, and he's armed. You can see a gun strapped around his right thigh. Why don't you just talk up there? One of the other protesters tries to calm things down. Let me try to de-escalate everything. We can escort you out of this facility right here.

This is an autonomous zone, and you're welcome to leave it right now. I mean, I want to talk, just like you guys. I mean, we're all pleased. You want to talk? Let's talk. Let's talk up there on the other side of that barricade. Let's go. Happy to walk up there? Let's go.

Could you tell me who I'm talking to? So at least you're talking to a Seattle citizen. The de-escalation, de-escalation, de-escalation, the escalation. The two officers walked away, but this moment helped determine the relationship police would have with CHOP going forward. The Seattle police decided to take a hands-off approach and would only enter the zone for the most serious emergencies. In the days ahead, guns and barricades would become an even bigger part of CHOP. When we ask protesters today why they were so focused on CIPP, securing the zone. The most common answer we get is that it's because of those proud boys

they heard about over the scanner. Omari Salisbury, the journalist who live streamed the protests that summer, never forgot about that chatter. He was still thinking about it a few months after Chop ended. If an officer witness, 30 proud boys, you know what I'm saying, or 30 unidentifiable people with firearms going through downtown Seattle, I said, I want to see the body camera footage that aligns with this radio call right here. Omari filed a public records request, and it turned out there wasn't any body camera footage

of the Proud Boys. This triggered an investigation by Seattle's Office of Police Accountability, and the agency concluded that police officers made it all up. This lie right here, this literally was a lie that went around the world. Police told investigators they were just messing around on the radio, trying to make protesters think they were still using one channel, when really they'd move their communications to a different one.

And they filled that fake channel with random conversation to keep it active so that protesters wouldn't get suspicious. We were just kind of feeding information, more mundane, routine kind of information over the radio. One echo is upset because he lost his vegetarian meal. I checked for disturbance for a male throwing live chickens into the roadway. Units on Tack 3 be advised the cookies are not nut-free. On that first night of chop, in addition to the random chatter, some officers started talking about the proud voice.

Do you feel the goal was to create fear of the protesters who were monitoring the radio? No. I think the majority of the fear was on our side at that time, because we've been overrun on multiple occasions. I've never been attacked by the Proud Boys. I have been at protest by Antifa. So I think that focusing on the Proud Boys is not the right thing here. Seattle's Office of Police Accountability

ended up calling this an improper ruse that violated department policy. Investigators blamed two officers for overseeing it, though they both left the department before any disciplinary action was taken. We still don't know all the officers who participated or why. We asked Seattle police about this, but they declined to talk with us. If the ruse was intended to scare protesters away, it backfired pretty dramatically. Afterwards, CHOP security expanded and CHOP's borders hardened. Throughout CHOP's existence, there were different factions calling themselves security.

They were protesters volunteering to keep CHOP's safe. Some carried guns, some didn't. I think chop was a chaos magnet that just attracted people, some with good, some with bad intentions. Greg Scruggs is a reporter at the Seattle Times. He sits maybe 15 feet away from me, and I'm pretty loud on some of my phone calls, and he overheard me talking about chop, came up to my desk and told me, hey, I wrote a freelance piece about Chop security. I think it was for the Washington Post that I ended up embedding with the CHOP security and writing about that experience. He said, yeah, I'll give you all my tape. My name is Josh.

Josh, you're not in your last name? I'd rather not given the nature of the situation. I'll give you my face. Greg was reporting on CHOP security in its earliest days. We're talking about the first week. So Greg saw the idealism, the free food and the mutual aid. And then he noticed that there were people walking around. looking like they were dressed for war.

Can you tell me specifically, I'm not very familiar with firearms? AR-50. That's an AR-50. If they were carrying a gun openly, that was usually an indication that they were a self-styled security person. Tactical gear, like I might have seen some bulletproof vests. Would that, would be an accurate term to use? Yes, it would.

Okay. And it just covers the vitals, the lungs, and the heart. Right. When Greg approached them, they seemed eager to, talk about what they were doing to show off their gear. Washington's an open-carry state, so it's legal here to walk around with guns in public. So what's that?

This? Yeah. This is a concussive BB grenade. It's not lethal, it just stinks. Uh-huh. I used to play with them as kids, actually. Kind of a rowdy kid. It was like they wanted to be secretive,

but also wanted to be seen. How would you approach a violent crime situation, like somebody, you know, active shooter or kind of like the most extremes. If it was an active shooter, I would try and find someone who could eliminate the situation. What does eliminate the situation mean? Stop them. And options for stopping will include what?

Armed response. There was a saying at CHOP, We Keep Us Safe. This phrase started years earlier with black activists. It was a vision for preventing violence that didn't involve police or prisons. and it's been adopted by many different movements since then. But at CHOP, we keep us safe seemed to take on a specific meaning, like we're going to take security into our own hands. There was one security group in particular that took this mantra to heart,

and it was mostly white. They called themselves the sentinels. This group popped up in the first few days of the occupation and took on the role of guarding CHOP's barricades. They handed out radio, organized communications, and coordinated who was stationed at the borders of this roughly eight-block zone.

During CHOP, most people were introduced to the Sentinels through its most famous member, a figure who went by the code name James Madison. James Madison has transitioned since 2020, so you'll hear us using she-her pronouns. We reached out to interview her, but she declined to talk with us. Protesters back then probably remember

someone who seemed to be a confident, almost brash young man, who had one of the most iconic looks at Chop. She typically wore a face mask, oftentimes tan pants, a bulletproof vest, and usually carried around an AR-15-style rifle. All you ever really saw of James Madison's face was this little sliver of skin around her eyes, like she was part soldier, part ninja. And just a few days into this occupation, this face,

would come to define CHOP nationally. Fox News published an image of James Madison in full gear, photoshopped in front of a totally different image of smashed windows in downtown Seattle. It fed into this narrative that CHOP was a violent takeover of the city. Fox News ended up apologizing for putting out this deceptive picture, but James Madison didn't shy away from the attention. She kind of reveled in it.

At the height of CHOP, she talked for more than, than an hour with a podcast called Yeah, but Still. I'm sure you've seen the photo of me running around the news, the Photoshop job. That's me. In these interviews, Madison brags about having this really hardcore military experience. I did door-taker things. I did the stuff that our government doesn't speak up. James Madison says this type of experience is necessary to defend the protesters at CHOP.

A lot of people out here think this is awesome. It's a nice little, like, summer street care kind of thing. thing. That's the vibes we get here during the day and stuff. But it is a powder cake. But not even a powder keg because of the people here. The enemies of this group of people, it is the racist. It is the fascists that still live in this country. This image of CHOP security that James Madison puts out there appeals to a lot of people. At its peak, the Sentinels had dozens of volunteers. But while volunteer security focused on the borders, CHOP medics were watching something else change from the inside.

They needed as many people with actual medical skill as they could get. Aaron was a medic at CHOP. We're using his middle name because he fears the repercussions of what speaking out publicly would do both for his career and his personal safety. So I popped down there and was wandering around and I found a little medic tent and they're a bunch of untrained civilians doing really, really basic festival care, band-aids, broken fingers, that kind of thing. I was like, hey, I'm fully trained.

You guys need some help. And they're like, yeah. What Aaron calls festival care, these are the injuries people sustain generally when they're having fun. They're throwing around a frisbee and they spray in a wrist. They take some ecstasy and forget to drink water. These kinds of injuries may have started happening more at CHOP because, as time went on, it started to feel less like a protest and more like a festival. It's like a block party, similar to something like Coachella.

Thousands of people had converged on the protest zone. It's kind of like Burning Man. It's freaking chill and awesome. There were live streamers everywhere. This stuff everybody. There was also, as time went on, they started inviting the homeless population in. There was this facet of child. that overlapped very heavily with Seattle's street population.

So unsheltered people, marginal people, very poor people. Seattle at the time had the third largest homeless population in the country. And more of those people were out on the streets because of the pandemic. Shelters had quarantined or had shut their doors completely. And then CHOP appeared and it had all this infrastructure like tents and food and medical care. So people in need started going there. And that population requires a ton of medical intervention and resources. In many cases, used really dangerous street drugs, synthetic drugs,

and or had serious mental illnesses that caused psychosis. We started having to worry about overdoses, and then the overdoses evolved into assaults. And along with drug use comes crime. A Seattle Police Intelligence Report, said gang members were flooding into chop, dealing drugs, carrying guns, running into rivals, taking advantage of the absence of police. For protesters heading into their second week of occupation, this meant that as safe as chop

might have felt during the day, it was a very different place at night. Do not walk around by yourselves. Do not walk around in the dark. It is unsafe. Very, very unsafe. That's after the break. On the latest from Pocket Science, a Seattle team is creating a diagram of the brain's wiring. They took 100 million pictures, mapped half a billion connections, all from a speck of mouse brain the size of a poppy seed.

We visit the lab to see what it takes to capture the almost unimaginable complexity of the brain and how it could lead to progress against diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Listen to Pocket Science on the KW app or wherever you get podcasts. On June 19th, 2020, Antonio Mays Jr. was still three or four days away from leaving home. So he wasn't there when the vibe changed at Chop. We've talked to dozens of protesters, and many of them say this day was a big turning point in the story of the occupation. June 19th or Juneteenth was a big party. This is a holiday that commemorates the end of slavery, and we're at an occupied Black Lives Matter protest.

so lots of people wanted to celebrate. That night, sometime after 2 a.m., two teenagers in the area who had a history ran into each other at Chop. One of them pulled out a gun and fired, and the other teen was hit. His name was Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr. A lot of people knew him as Lorenzo. He was 19 years old. Come on, come on, man. Let him through. Let him through. As Lorenzo lies there wounded, the scene around him grows.

unruly. Dozens of people gather around to see what's going on. Some of them pull out their phones and start calling 911. 911, what is your emergency? I'm looking at a man bleeding out on the street right now. Meanwhile, others are trying to control the crowd and keep people back. Mark Anthony, part of CHOP's circle of leaders, was there that night and says the whole time. We had medics. They pulled them over to the medic area. They tried to resuscitate him. Chops volunteer medics are working desperately on Lorenzo trying to keep him alive. And people getting increasingly distressed and anguished as they realize the ambulance is not

coming to get him. 9-1, that is your emergency. Chops, somebody's dying here. They're fucking bleeding out. Hello? Hello. Can you hear me? No, we need a fucking ambulance, man.

Fuck. If you see the... Um... Ambulances won't enter the area of a recent shooting without a police escort. And police haven't arrived. I actually watched Lorenzo Anderson bleed out. Well, we had to knowingly witness an ambulance sitting right around the corner waiting until they just realized we got to get this man in the hospital or he's going to die.

So they threw him on the back of a truck, tried to rush him over to the hospital. By the time police in riot gear marched into chop, protesters had already driven Lorenzo away themselves. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. Years later, his dad would win a $500,000 settlement from the city. After suing over the city's handling of chop and his son's shooting, we asked Seattle police to explain their response to the Juneteenth shooting. They declined.

To this day, a lot of the city. A lot of people in Seattle mix up Lorenzo and Antonio Mays Jr. They were both black teens. They were both killed at Chop, only nine days apart. But there are major differences between what happened to Lorenzo and what happened to Antonio. Lorenzo's killer has been caught and pleaded guilty, and we know that he was motivated by a personal dispute, whereas so much of Antonio's death remains a mystery. After Lorenzo was shot, protesters gather on the playfield right across the street from where he had just lay dying.

It's the middle of the night, and stadium lights shine down on the field. Rashila Levitt, one of the people who's risen up as one of the leaders of this movement, takes a megaphone. And at first, her message to the crowd is, this tragedy will not derailchop. Are you guys? We're there. We're going to come back to the sun.

and we're going to continue the dialogue. We're going to continue to lift up the black voices. But then the stadium lights cut out, and the tone shifts. The reality of what just happened seems to sink in. This is a safety precaution. Now that the lights are off, it is imperative. That if you do leave this area, you travel in a pair. Do not walk around by yourselves.

When we're done here, I advise you to go to your tents, where you sleep in, and to stay there. Do not walk around in the dark. walk around in the dark, it is unsafe. The megaphone gets passed around to other protesters, and it's clear some resentment is brewing. One of the protesters blames this violence on the people who've shown up to party.

Yo, come on, man. Shit, I've been telling you guys, day after day after day after day. Take that party and sit to the party. It's ain't the party, bro. It's ain't Coachella. Before Lorenzo's death, it had still been possible to,

ignore the signs that Chop was spiraling out of control. But now that someone had died, no one could deny that Chop had changed. The whole space felt darker and angrier. A lot more just, hey, this guy tried to stab me and I've got this bad cut. Or, hey, I just got beaten. Or, hey, I'm just scared, can you help me? A lot of people, like Aaron, the medic we heard from earlier, remember Juneteenth as the moment many of the more casual protesters finally bailed from

chop. It was also when a lot of the more experienced security and medical volunteers decided it was time to leave. A lot of the warm and fuzzy groups that were peaceful quickly departed and it was a lot more militant. The chop that saw thousands of people streaming in during the day, that was over. But there were still dozens of people staying at night. Some of them had nowhere to go. For others, maybe they wanted to take advantage of the chaos. And maybe some just couldn't let this experiment fail. About a week after Lorenzo died, Roshaila was still there. I slept there.

I ached there. Showered when I could. But her relationship with the movement had changed. Early in the protests, she'd been willing to call out violence and property damage. She'd talked to the media. She'd sat across from the mayor in negotiations. And this came at a cost. More radical protesters came to see Rishaila as not hardcore enough, even kind of suspicious.

And this was happening all over chop, protesters turning on each other, accusing each other of being ops, of working for the police or the city government. I had personally started to hear people calling me a rat and saying that I was a police sympathizer. Some of them gave Rishilah the nickname Boots. And at first I thought it was just because I was always wearing my boots. I have combat boots that I wear every day. Somebody had let me know that they were calling me that because they were calling me boot liquor. And I'm seeing here like, bro, what? Rishaila's response was to focus on protecting chop,

to keep trying to make this experiment work after so many others had bailed. I mostly just, you know, helped keep that area safe. She started working with CHOP security on the de-escalation team. If we're going to have security, then we need to have people out there that are good with people, that can talk to people, that can talk somebody down from a frustrating situation that can de-escalate the situation. Nine days after Lorenzo's death, Richelah says she was making the rounds with her de-escalation partner. And they came across two teenagers getting into a fight on the playfield. They moved in to break it up. Rashila's partner took one teenager aside, and Rashaila took the other.

other. I talked to him like I talked for my nephews, to be honest with you. I was like, how could you handle that situation differently? You know, what triggered you to react the way that you did? Roshayla didn't remember what this kid was upset about, but she says he was worked up. He was angry. He's like, I get frustrated sometimes, and he's like, I'm not really sure how to, like, handle it. I remember him saying something about, like, his friends and not wanting to seem like a pussy or whatever, something like that. And I told him, I was like, you have to not get a fuck about what other people think about you. Rashila had just lived through something like that herself, fellow protesters accusing her of being a rat.

She knew firsthand how much other people's opinions can destabilize you. We talked about different ways that he could channel him his own inner peace and try to find that quiet space within himself when he does get frustrated. I had, like, grabbed his hands when I said that. I was like, if it doesn't matter here, and I touched his chest right here. And then I reached him, I grabbed his hand, I felt it shouldn't matter here. She was saying, if it really doesn't matter in your heart, it shouldn't affect how you act.

Rishaila encouraged the boys to shake hands, and they walked away. And that was it. Rishilah had no idea that the boy she'd just talked to, Antonio Mays Jr., would be shot dead just a few hours later. So what happened when Antonio got to chop? How did this teenager who left home to fight for the cause end up fighting with other people?

That's on the next episode of We Keep Us Safe. Check out a map of chop and listen to a recording of Seattle Police Radio Chatter. You can find that on npr.org slash chop. 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 Traeus and Laura Grenius, with support from Katie Simon. It was produced by Abby Wendell, Sarah Wyman, and Dan Germa. Our senior producer is Adelina Lansianese. Additional reporting by Greg Scruggs and Omari Salisbury, who contributed recordings to this project. and live streamer Joey Weiser. Research and fact-checking by Danya Solomon and Miyoko Wolf.

Robert Rodriguez mastered the episode. Music by Audio Socket, Conor Moore from Seymour Sound, Romteen Arablewee, Susie Anologue, Tom Pyle and Running Dog Music, and Universal Music production. On the latest from Pocket Science, a Seattle team is creating a diagram of the brain's wiring. They took 100 million pictures, mapped half a billion connections, all from a speck of mouse brain the size of a poppy seed. We visit the lab to see what it takes to capture the almost unimaginable complexity of the brain and how it could lead to progress against diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Listen to Pocket Science on the KW app or wherever you get podcasts.