A rising and falling citizen journalist from the Seattle Autonomous Zone.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Seattle police swept the organized protest off Capitol Hill, clearing the “autonomous zone” near the city center that has been described as a dedicated protest movement, a radical utopian experiment o an anarchist conflict zone. , depending on one’s policy.

CHOP (formerly CHAZ, for the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) emerged during anti-racist protests against the death of George Floyd. On June 8, police left the Seattle East Precinct building after receiving threats. Protesters then entered the building and declared the surrounding area to be a police-free zone. The area expanded to six blocks and included Cal Anderson Park.

CHOP had no official leaders, and for nearly a month it was filled with tents, cooperative tents, community gardens, and memorials to victims of police violence. Evicted people gathered, along with protesters and artists. The scene became a tourist attraction, with some describing it as a huge street party. But the mood changed on June 20, when a man was wounded in a shooting. Other shootings followed, resulting in the deaths of two black teenagers. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan made the decision to clear CHOP on Tuesday, and the next day police arrived with riot gear to end the experiment, arresting 31 people.

Tessa Hulls is a visual artist and writer who documented CHOP’s rise and fall as a citizen journalist through videos, social media, and primarily her comics. (Hulls is currently working on a nonfiction graphic novel.) Hulls, who tells me he “accidentally embedded himself” in the protest, has lived in the area since June 12, just four days after police left the compound. To better understand what CHOP really was and what it meant, Slate spoke to Hulls about the complexities of a leaderless movement, the violence that changed it, and what the future is for its activists. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Blackboard: How did you end up assuming this role?

Helmets: I lived four blocks from CHOP for five years. It is a community and a neighborhood that I know very well. Actually, I’ve been living in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula for the past two years, but when the tipping point between the police and the protesters started to happen, and there was a huge disconnect between what the people I trust me I was saying and what I was seeing in the media, I felt compelled to go in and use community networks and my understanding of the space to see if I could give some clarity.

How would you define what CHOP was?

Obviously it arose from the murder of black Americans by the police. What happened was a kind of accidental accident: when the original protests were happening downtown, protesters were still being led down Capitol Hill. And so, this great protest was taken outside the Eastern Enclosure and found a barricade. It was an accidental place. I think that is something that has been lost in the broader history here: protesters never attempted to claim the compound. It was only because they ended up being found with force that it became ground zero for this confrontation. When the police left, the protesters who were on the ground took the barricades, turned them around and accidentally started this experiment in mutual aid.

Did you see the different versions of what CHOP was?

It changed enormously. At first, it was this really amazing experiment where no one was really reclaiming the space. All these different groups came in, and there was more free everything I’ve seen. Anything you could want, from a sandwich to medical supplies, books, and clothing, was simply offered free of charge. And that created tension, because some of the protesters who had been on the front line and who saw that this was something that arose from police violence felt that the space was co-opting and becoming a farmers’ market or street fair. That was always a very interesting tension within the space, these very disparate groups occupied it for different reasons.

Who were those groups that occupied the area?

In the time I was there, I saw a group of new black voices emerge. They started teaching and working with many indigenous activists in Seattle to make a day of “indigenous voices” where tribes from all over Washington and Oregon entered. There was always an overlap of people who were there because they encountered police violence on the front lines, people looking for education, and people looking for the East Precinct to become a community center. The only thing constant about CHOP was the fact that it was always changing and that there was never a consistent party line. Who was dominant, or who was seen as the one who controlled the larger narrative, would change. And once the shootings started, it was really when it turned into a very different space with a very different feeling. Violence began to appear in the void left around the edges, and it became almost impossible to treat it as something that could still be defined.

How did people think and talk about these shootings?

It is really complicated, and there is no consensus. One thing that I think is very important to note is that Capitol Hill, and particularly that area, has always been a place where there has been a lot of violence and shootings. And that generally begins to happen during the summer. I am in no way trying to excuse the fact that people lost their lives there. But I do think that context is something that is left out of the conversation.

Are there other things you think are missing from the CHOP discussions?

I think it is very difficult for outsiders to understand that this is a place without leadership, and that the voices that grabbed the microphone and stood in front of the camera are seen as leaders, although there may be nothing to back that up. Outsiders really don’t understand that what they see on screen or in print is just a random person who has had his journalist flip his glasses or notebooks.

What was it like to see how CHOP was cleaned after so many days?

I was at Cal Anderson Park for that sweep. When the police entered, the population of CHOP had really shrunk, so there was not a large presence to fight, even if they had wanted to go in that direction. The police entered with a huge exhibition force, with more than 100 officers, some of them heavily armed. And they just formed a line through the entire park and went through people’s stores, shaking them up. They pushed us all across the park. A protester with a green megaphone was saying all the time: “Keep it peaceful, keep it peaceful, don’t let violence undermine what we are trying to do here.” So it didn’t turn into an active violent confrontation. But I think that’s more because the show of force was so strong that you could see that there was nothing to be gained by trying to resist it.

Was there always a feeling that CHOP could end so quickly and so easily?

There was a time when there was a beautiful feeling of hope that the pressure exerted by CHOP’s physical occupation would really make the city overturn the East Precinct as a community center. But that did not last long. And I think anyone who is realistic about the complexities at stake understood that this was not going to last. There was a population of homeless people who had been living in Cal Anderson Park, and that population continued to decline. And I would say that for the last week, maybe more, of CHOP as a physical space, there was no longer that feeling of optimism.

Why do you think it couldn’t last?

You ended up with a space that was supposed to be about freedom, but because the underlying discrepancies in power had not been addressed, you were doomed to failure as a real experiment.

What do you think is the legacy of CHOP?

There is a group of black leaders that came out of the top called Black Collective Voice. They decided to accept the idea that CHOP was a concept rather than a physical place. The three lawsuits that were filed were to devalue the Seattle Police Department by at least 50 percent, invest it in the community and release protesters without charge. And those three demands are the idea of ​​CHOP. The group of black activists is taking that message and moving forward with programming and educational events. I hope that we can think of CHOP as something that really caused a lot of pressure and focus on the underlying issues, and that spawned a new generation of black activists.

What do you do next

I still haven’t completely left the space. I have been camping in the offices of a non-profit organization that is two blocks away. I’m still sleeping on the floor there, and I’m trying to decide when I’m going to come out completely. Obviously I can’t keep up with this feverish production rate. I entered what was clearly an unmet need and felt a sense of moral and ethical obligation to continue to provide these news updates. But now that CHOP as a physical space has come to an end, I step back to focus more on the underlying issues that led to CHOP. I will say that my first act when I can really get away from this is that I am going to be a backpacker for four or five days and finally think about all this. I still haven’t had time to think about it.