Black organizers planned a Black takeover or “Black Out” of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) during Juneteenth. However that celebration of Blackness was interrupted by a shooting that left one Black man dead and another man in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center.
The aftermath of the shooting was captured by Omari Salisbury, whose prolific frontlines video reporting has followed the protest from the blast balls and clouds of tear gas to more triumphant moments recently for protesters. It was CHOP’s own volunteer medic team that provided first aid, and licensed paramedics were part of this response, one medic confirmed.
Police arrived 20 to 30 minutes after the shooting in a phalanx of riot shields, guns drawn. Volunteer medics had already transported the first victim–the Black man who died–to Harborview in a private vehicle by this time. Protesters kept a wary eye on the police and some chanted for them to leave. As Salisbury’s video showed, police roved around for a little while and then left. About 40 minutes into Salisbury’s video, volunteer medics loaded the second victim into a van for transport, likely to Harborview, which is the premier trauma center in the region.
“No matter what happened, I am heartbroken to know that on the one day when CHOP was turned into a space specifically for Black people and Black lives, someone decided to enter that space and kill a Black man,” Seattle activist and bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo wrote in a social media post. “Regardless of what you think happened at CHOP or why, I hope you prioritize your feelings for this life lost and this man’s friends and family, and try to understand the pain and fear of the Black community in Seattle right now.”
Oluo and other Black leaders have raised concerns that White supremacists were the shooters. Armed White militia types have been seen circling the edges of the CHOP in the past week.
“Do NOT let Seattle PD and Pro-Cop Mayor Jenny Durkan twist this story and make it about them,” activist and journalist Dae Shik Kim Hawkins tweeted. “A black man was shot and killed at CHOP after hours of celebrating Juneteenth. We have been getting reports of armed white nationalists threatening to ‘take back the precinct’ for weeks.”
In more conservative circles, calls to disperse the CHOP and crack down on protesters were already being raised this morning and Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) president Mike Solan went on Fox News‘ “Fox & Friends Weekend” to lament the lawlessness, the City’s chemical weapons gas ban, and the lack of “backbone” from Seattle’s leaders. “Violence has now besieged the area known as CHOP,” Solan said. “It’s no longer the summer of love; it’s the summer of chaos.”
Solan emphasized that police were denied access to the area to “locate victims and/or render aid,” but failed to mention that police did not respond until almost 30 minutes after the shooting when the first victim had already been attended to by licensed paramedics and transported to the hospital. Instead, he framed it as a culture war and launched into political attacks on Seattle electeds and on the MLK County Labor Council, which voted to expel the police guild from their ranks on Wednesday.
