Seattle Police investigated reported gunfire on the edge of Cal Anderson overnight as the clean-up effort is slated to continue following Friday’s sweep of protesters and homeless encampments from the park. Meanwhile, a medical emergency in the park earlier this week had a tragic outcome, police say.
According to East Precinct radio updates, police received reports of multiple shots fired and three vehicles speeding away from the area of 11th and Denny early Sunday around 1:30 AM. There were no reported injuries or property damage and it is not clear if police found any evidence of the shooting at the scene identified by at least one witness.
The reported gunfire follows Friday’s SPD and Seattle Parks sweep of Cal Anderson to clear encampments, and the city said, address public safety issues around the park. Officials say they are beginning efforts to “bring activation efforts of art, music, ongoing connection to social services, community work parties, and recreation opportunities to the park, along with installation of community supported lighting” in hopes of addressing long-standing issues with the busy park.
Sunday’s gun incident took place near the location of a reported drive-by molotov cocktail attack that burned a vehicle parked at Cal Anderson in the early morning hours of Friday before police entered the park. The burned vehicle was destroyed but there were no reported injuries. SPD continues to investigate the incident.
The park was also the location of a tragic incident early Thursday morning. CHS previously reported the incident in which Seattle Fire was called to the park for a person in their 20s reported to have been found unconscious and unresponsive on pavement at the park. According to Seattle Fire radio updates, crews performed CPR on the patient and administered Narcan for a possible overdose. The patient was transported in critical condition to Harborview, SFD says. In a brief on the incident, SPD says the patient “is being kept alive by mechanical life support devices but is clinically deceased.”
Seattle Parks says more work will follow the three-day clean-up in Cal Anderson currently underway and that it is beginning plans for neighborhood and community-led work sessions after New Year’s to try to reactivate the park and establish ongoing social services work there once it is officially reopened.
UPDATE 8:00 PM: A group that decided to hold an “Antifa soccer” match on Bobby Morris field ended up being cleared from the turf by Seattle Police in an incident that included seven arrests and one person taken to the hospital after medics said they couldn’t determine what if any injury the patient had sustained.
SPD deployed a large number of officers to Cal Anderson in response to what was described as a "Game of Antifa Soccer." Multiple arrests, and one unresponsive person taken aware by Seattle Fire. Shortly after, dog walkers returned to the playfield. pic.twitter.com/71R0ygLo2P
— matt (@mmitgang) December 21, 2020
Police told CHS that the 4:30 PM incident began with officers responding to complaints of the group in the closed park. SPD said that an officer was reportedly spat on as they made contact with the group in the gathering that was being livestreamed.
As police took the alleged spitter into custody, SPD says a group tried to free the person being arrested. Police say six more people were taken into custody as a large crowd formed. Seattle Fire was called to treat the downed person and take them to Harborview where they were reported in stable condition after having been unresponsive after being taken down by police at the field.
SPD said Sunday night the Force Investigations Team is investigating the reported injury.
The weekend brought more than 30 arrests related to activities at Cal Anderson including 25 on Friday around the initial sweep. The Puget Sound Prisoner Support group, a volunteer collective that has been assisting those taken into custody during protests and related actions, said over the weekend that all 25 arrested Friday were released by Saturday. “We witnessed rapid releases of ppl held on misdemeanor charges from the jail,” the group posted. “Proving what we knew all along-the hours and hours arrestees have spent in custody while slated for release is an intentional cruelty dealt out by jail staff.”
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I am sure this will be a controversial statement, but we also need a continued police presence in and around the park to prevent another takeover of public property by “protesters and allies” and to break the cycle of violence. During CHOP and in recent months having Cal Anderson Park as a no go zone for police has resulted in a very dangerous power vacuum. I am a strong supporter of reform to end systemic racism in policing and am not calling for a police state, but we need a reasonable level of police support that is comparable to other neighborhoods in Seattle. I am not an attorney, but it seems to me that the city would be liable for assaults and murders in the park given their public statements regarding not entering the park unless a violent crime is (already) occurring.
100% Agree!
I was just thinking that the other day as I witnessed one of the assaults in the park. If I was the person seriously assaulted in broad daylight, I’d at least think about suing the city.
Personally I really disagree that we need an armed police presence constantly there… but might be an opportunity for the new Community Service Officers or ideally a more neutral community organization.
The core problem isn’t really the camping itself IMO – it’s that the protesters claimed to be able to build and maintain a safe community there, and ended up doing the opposite.
Your suggestion is not at all controversial. It is obvious that the SPD must somehow prevent re-occupation of the park, by whatever means necessary. It would be ideal if this was done by Community Police Officers, but that might not be sufficient.
Yes, as long as necessary. I think most people assume that in a couple of weeks the camping will resume and in a month it’ll be back to where it was before. Im sure the black bloc and drug addicts as betting on this. As soon as the graffiti is cleaned it’ll be back in a matter of days. If the community gets involved we can eventually not need police.
I’m not sure how “community involvement” (other than using the park) would do anything to prevent the far-left criminals from doing their thing at every opportunity. For some time, if not forever, we will need the police to enforce our laws.
I’m pretty open minded and understand that the violence and creation of the CHOP was the result of external forces and as a society we need to accept that there will be reactions that we may not necessarily agree with but understand why they are happening.
What I cannot understand is why there is no political will to begin to return some level of order and sanity to the streets. Nobody can camp in shared public spaces. Seattle cannot be magnet for people from all of the region and country to come and slowly die on our streets to heroin, meth alcohol and other drugs.
Other have said this before, but the issues in Cal Anderson are not “longstanding”. Six months ago, the park was a safe and welcoming place for all to enjoy, including occasional homeless people.
One of the problems plaguing the homeless is lack of money. I wonder if some of the hard feelings about clearing the park might have been reduced if the City of Seattle paid the former residents to do the clean up?
Yes, it might have cost a bit more, and I am sure there would have been union grumbles. But earning 3 days pay at minimum wage would have at least given the former residents some pocket money to help them find another place.
That seems like an easy solution in theory. However, most homeless simple don’t make good use of money, because the situation is so miserable. Money is generally used to buy a moment of “happiness”. Long term planning of a better situation is mostly a pipe dream.
Another place where??? In the U.S.? People need homes and opportunities, not three days wages.
Talk to homeless people. They need help with a few very important things. They need an address, a safe place to store their stuff, a place to get clean, to stay dry, enough money for first and last months rent and a job. We need to focus on people in the margins that are trying to get out. The huge amount of money that the city spends on the homeless needs to target these problems.
Repeat offenders with mental health problems or drug addiction need to be placed in institution to get them help. heroin addicts being allowed to slowly die in a public park is not compassionate.
I agree with your last paragraph. Is this going to happen? Very unlikely, unfortunately.
Looking online the city of Seattle spent $80m on the homeless in 2020, the estimates for actually housing the 12,000 people is about $6,700 per person, for the entire year. So clearly that’s not going to work out well for you. The estimates to actually house everyone seem to range from $1-4bn, or $83,000-$333,000 per person per year. I’m assuming the estimates include additional services beyond housing. At the end of the day it’s just about money, that’s literally it. It’s not complex.
Pretty sure that’s city money only and doesn’t include county, state, or federal dollars spent within the city limits. Which is most of the money.
Yes, I believe the total is something like $200 million.
“…to reactivate the park and establish ongoing social services work there once it is officially reopened.”
What the hell does this mean? Is Cal Anderson to become a permanent social services venue? If so, it will continue to be a magnet for the homeless and the far-left radicals. Bad idea!
Bad idea
The black bloc soccer players claim that they are being unfairly profiled. Nobody is going to believe that they just wanted to have an innocent soccer game. The black bloc hate the police and get their kicks by antagonizing and provoking the cops and when the cops retaliate the anarchists will yell they’re being innocently singled out by the fascists. This tactic has been working very well for them for the past year.
I have no love for SPD or cops but I’m at the point where I think local residents need to inform the blac bloc theater troupe that they are not welcome under no uncertain terms. There are more of us. We just need the will to send them on their way.
The problem is they don’t care what local residents think. They don’t care what the cops think. They don’t care what BLM or the homeless think. They just want to burn down the system as it stands today.
Short of local residents breaking the law by physically attacking these “activists” I don’t know that there’s much that can be done to dissuade them from coming here. Our laws just don’t have the teeth to provide a significant disincentive to trespassing, resisting arrest, or violent protests.
Especially not when their upper-middle class, suburban parents can easily bail them out of jail.
Thank you for the clarification regarding the most recent arrests. On social media, people were trying to spin it as an unprovoked attack on soccer players by an out of control police force. In reality, it was an attack on officers by the same group of mostly suburban white kids playing dress up that created chaos in the neighborhood for months.
Living in a public park is privatization of shared public space. Nobody can claim all or a part of a public park as their own. Seattle is getting trashed and we have to clean it up. Permissiveness is not compassion.
I live across from Cal Anderson. No one should confuse homelessness with what is happening here, and I hope the city gets this. I completely agree with CHqueer. I am concerned about homelessness, but mostly those you canot see – like families living in cars. IMHO Cal Anderson is a holdover from CHOP who hide behind legitimate, serious issues like BLM and homelessness. It does not serve the interests of these issues, but will bring backlash. The city needs to finish what it started when closing down CHOP.
How dumb can this all get. I would like a refund for my police department please. Please credit my regressive 10.9% sales taxes and $8000 a year vehicle tabs. No one needs a bunch of violent losers re-living their Afgan occupation glory days by pushing around a bunch of 20 somethings in a public park.
$8,000 a year in vehicle tabs? Your vehicle would have to be worth something like $727,000 to owe that much, in which case, it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount to me. Moreover, the motor vehicle excise tax, or MVET, is probably our most progressive tax, since those who can afford more valuable vehicles pay more than those who have cheaper cars, or no cars. Plus, the money raised is being used to build our light rail transit system, which will help those who can’t afford cars get around more easily; it is not used to fund law enforcement.
I get that you don’t like the police and don’t want to pay taxes to fund them, but without having some group of people whose job is to enforce laws, all our laws would soon become meaningless in practice. And while you may disagree with some laws (most of us do), I seriously doubt you would really want to live a lawless society.
all of our laws have so much meaning in practice at this moment yes.
@The Ghostt Of Capitol Hill
As a matter of interest just how long have you lived in Seattle?
From you constant stream of snarky and rather asinine comments you remind me so much of the type of person very common around Capitol Hill over the decades. Someone who moved in from elsewhere, has been taking credit courses at Seattle Central College for years but never seems to graduate, and who never had a real job or else has a small private family income. Because people who have real jobs, real obligations to families and others, neighbors and coworkers, left that off-putting rather juvenile snark behind them years ago when the stopped being adolescents and grew up.
In the other comments here I read the real concern and real worries by people who are horrified at what has happened to a once wonderful neighborhood. A situation very deliberately created by people with very destructive and nihilistic attitudes to everyone but themselve. People who are overwhelmingly either outsiders or peopel who are recent arrivals and if the past is any guide will depart sooner or later leaving a trail of destruction behind them. These peopel care little for Seattle or its people. The park, the city, is just a stage in which they can act out their utterly narcissistic little psycho-dramas. They are directly responsible for the deaths of a bunch of blacks kids but do they care. Of course not. Because as I discovered deacdes ago, scratch a radical activist and you will almost always find a sociopath of some form or other. And sociopaths never take responsibly for anything, its always other people fault. Always.
I remember the time twenty / twenty five years ago when Seattle had very effective programmes to help street people get off the streets. I’ve watched them being dismantled and destroyed by people with opinions and attitudes just like yours. Because you people need people living on the streets. So you can vent you self righteous opinions while you live here. Becuase it makes you feel good. Nothing more addictive than that surge of self-righteousness. Meanwhile too many people live and die on the streets rather than being guided into the sort of programmes that will actually get their lives together and not continue the destructive cycle they are currently in. Which is all the current “homeless programmes” do. And everyone else who makes Seattle their home has to live with the public squalor, crime and destruction of all public spaces that has been the result of the last 10/15 years of a failed and quite simply stupid public policy.
Seattle was once a wonderful city. Such a fanatic place to live. Its people just like you who destroyed it and made it what it is today.
I would wager that @GOCH doesn’t even live on Capitol Hill.
My guess, 20-something, white, most likely male, living in the suburbs but would so LOVE to live on Capitol Hill (but mommy and daddy won’t subsidize an expensive apartment here). Spends their day alternating between smoking weed in the backyard (because mom doesn’t want it in the house) and playing COD (or some other such shoot ’em up title) until the sun goes down; then it’s time to LARP their video game fantasy.
Pretty off on ur assessment there doc… that’s some good hate for imagined archetypes you’ve got swirling around inside of your head though. If you had half a brain at all you’d be well aware that the tides of poverty rise and fall. While we’re in the middle of this high tide.. Please refrain from cheering on the police. This is my only mission in these comments.
You thought car tabs cost 8K. That’s not an archetype, that’s you. That means you not only don’t pay for your own tabs, but you don’t pay for anything and never have. You are a bored child of rich parents far away from Cal Anderson. I won’t go so far as to say you do drugs or even play COD, but I would put my money on an active Reddit account, where you learn all about poverty. How much does a banana cost Michael, $8?
“Antifa soccer” That’s how dumb. You should slow down on the spin. You’re little bobble heads will fly right off. Comparing antifa’s militant behavior with any war where US solders were involved shows your absolute ignorance to reality.
“No one needs a bunch of violent losers from the suburbs living out their LARP fantasies of “revolution” by pushing around an entire community via occupation of a public park.”
Fixed your comment for you.
They’re not on my payroll.
“Proving what we knew all along-the hours and hours arrestees have spent in custody while slated for release is an intentional cruelty dealt out by jail staff.”
Hoooo boy.