Remnants of CHOP at Seattle Cenral (Image: CHS)
There will be no rebirth of the CHOP occupied protest camp on Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College campus.
School officials say they will not allow a small camp of tents to grow on the college’s south lawn.
“We are currently working with the City of Seattle Police Department and navigation team to relocate the people camping on our property,” a spokesperson for the public community college told CHS Thursday.
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The small camp has formed in the ten days following Mayor Jenny Durkan’s order to raid and sweep the occupied protest and camp from E Pine and Cal Anderson. CHS reported that many of the homeless and unsheltered campers were seen dragging their belongings through nearby streets in the minutes following the police raid and sweep despite city efforts to offer outreach and resources.
As at CHOP, the group of campers formed at Seattle Central includes a mix of people experiencing homelessness and activists. Small groups of protesters have been gathering on the school’s plaza for marches and rallies in the wake of CHOP’s break-up but crowds are much smaller than the nights of protest that followed the main camp’s clearance.
Nine years ago, the Broadway at Pine campus became home for a time to Seattle’s center of the Occupy movement with a camp that lasted along Broadway from Halloween to near Christmas. After moving to the school campus from downtown, Occupiers were forced to clean up and move out in mid-December 2011 following a legal battle resulting in an emergency rule banning camping on campus. In 2012, the college further moved to restrict protest and camping. The college system also dropped a proposed revision that would have limited groups exercising First Amendment rights to specific areas of campus.
Overnight Thursday, some campers were reported moving from the Seattle Central lawn though other parts of the small camp remained.
UPDATE: Converge Media is reporting that Seattle Central will install a fence around the south lawn. Omari Salisbury and Justin Carder discussed the CHOP 2 camp on Friday’s Morning Update show.
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Fascists!
Well, let’s all remember how the last campout at Seattle Central COMMUNITY College ended..
People poop in the streets all the time not just during occupied movements, sorry it was in front of your beloved rental…
You all are prepared to excuse anything aren’t you – people do not poop in the streets “all of the time”…. nor should they. There are reasons we no longer have rampant cholera, no longer have people blinded by trachoma, aren’t all chronically suffering from hookworms, tapeworms and other parasites or lose a large percentage of our children to diarrhea….
Yes, the beloved rental they pay money for and have a reasonable expectation that such behavior will not be tolerated or encouraged. I find you actually have to say that now in this town lest such wisdom be lost forever.
I get the point about it not being unique to a protest but we should all be ASHAMED that we’ve failed to demand the city provide proper relief facilities so NO ONE in this rich city EVER needs to go anywhere other than a proper restroom. Humans suck and our so-called leaders are often even worse.
@x.g – the person in the video could have walked less than 3 blocks over to the bathrooms at Volunteer park and pooped in a toilet…. not to mention that there were a large number of porta-potties on site…
I agree that we’ve failed people who are mentally ill and addicted, but giving them more bathrooms is not the solution (the city actually tried – remember the self cleaning toilet debacle…. they were almost immediately trashed) getting them off of the streets and into treatment is. Until we stop denying that people have problems that aren’t solved by supporting their lifestyle on the streets, we’ll never get anywhere.
How quaint that seems now.
The other week I was in QFC and an affluent looking person had their dog in the store, at the register. The dog took a giant shit on the floor and the owner tried to walk off. Someone called him out and the store employees had to clean it up. Half the store was reflex gagging the smell was so bad. So…. tell me how the problem of feces where it should NOT be is unique to 1) people 2) occupy and/or 3) people without housing?
Not sure why one would excuse the other?
I personally wish QFC would enforce their own no pet rule (outside service animals). Security is consistently positioned near the entrance ways, and there is plenty of staff around to notify the customer of the rule or to escalate to a manager. This would be a good question for their management team.
CD Neighbor, you must mean Cal Anderson, not Volunteer, which is way more than 3 blocks away. Cal Anderson bathrooms are often shut, btw. And, I agree that the mentally ill who can’t manage themselves need to be in care but that whole portable bathroom fiasco was all about supreme idiocy on the city council’s part. OF COURSE public rest rooms get trashed. So do those in clubs and restaurants. Some people suck. That is NO REASON TO NOT HAVE A GOOD PUBLIC RESTROOM SYSTEM. You hire well-paid, nazmatted crews to clean the things and sell sponsorships or ad space to pay for it all. Have you travelled outside the USA? There are plenty of places that do a much better job of this. Seattle should be a leader, not an idiotic follower of the USA’s worst practices. You wash your sheets after a while, yes? You unmake your bed every night and remake it most (if not all) mornings, yes? Just as we employ street sweepers (and fines, theoretically) for litter, you clean up and service public restrooms regularly. It’s amazing that humans even got this far, really.
Yeah – slip of the fingers, I meant Cal Anderson – and if that was closed there were like a dozen porta-potties less than 50 steps from where he was taking a dump in the street… My point is he wasn’t doing it out of need, but out of being off his head enough to take a shit in a busy street in full view of everyone – he didn’t need a bathroom – all the bathrooms in the world weren’t going to help him, not grottiest of public urinals in Paris or the slickest automated butt cleaning, noise cancelling potty in the Tokyo subway. He needed the kind of help that we are unwilling to provide.
It’s not quaint. There are several protestors living in the encampment harassing people in the Broadway Building. They have a PA, megaphone, Microphone & generator. It’s non stop speaking all day and all night. It’s CHOP 2.0 as Omari Salisbury calls it from Converge Media. These people were in the park when it was swept. They have been out there since then. Only one person had a megaphone until three days ago. Yesterday they got word the police would be coming at 10pm per one of the protesters speaking. That didn’t happen. A fire truck and an ambulance came late in the evening to take someone away. Not sure why?
The college is a meeting place for the march downtown twice a day. This is not the problem. I suppose #BLM and am darn pissed off the police are targeting said protestor & streamers.
As the days go on the movement will grow. More people will occupy the lawn at the college. That is why during the Occupy Wall Street encampment the college changes the rules. They do not allow encampment at the college. The protesting is another matter.