In late June of 2020, the few local media including CHS on the ground at the CHOP occupied protest around Cal Anderson and the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct at 12th and Pine reported on a Friday night meeting in the middle of the demonstrations held at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church and attended by activists, city officials, and then Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Included in the talks as officials discussed addressing demands over equity and police brutality in the wake of the George Floyd murder were ideas around the future of the East Precinct building itself. Five days later, Seattle Police would raid and clear chop under order from Durkan.

New reporting by the Seattle Times shows that the city was already considering options for the East Precinct weeks earlier before the CHOP camps formed that included handing over the building to Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County, an advocacy group that formed during the unrest of 2020 and presented the city with a roster of demands hoped to help quiet the streets after a week of heavy protest in Seattle in early June 2020. Though BLMSKC was not directly involved in organizing the largest protests that week, many activists were also calling for creating a “Capitol Hill Community Center” in the building with mutual aid, health, and care resources.

The city’s end of things never got beyond a draft resolution, emails, and memos.

According to the Times, former Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller in a deposition in a lawsuit brought by real estate owners and developers against the city over CHOP, said the administration dropped the East Precinct transfer possibility after the activists the city was talking to decided they didn’t want the property.

It’s possible nobody does. The East Precinct’s 12th and Pine home is not an ideal headquarters. 100 years ago, it was home to the Willys-Overland Motors automobile company. It has stood through decades of change on the Hill thanks in part to its large x-shaped seismic braces. The purported risk of an arson attack on the structure was used as justification by SPD for its actions around 12th and Pine including the eventual abandonment of the facility and decisions to not respond to calls in the area of the protest during CHOP.

Current Mayor Bruce Harrell declined to address a possible move of the precinct when CHS asked him about it during last year’s campaign but said he opposed the further fortification of the current building with walls and fences. “One thing we won’t do with the East Precinct is leave up unnecessary and uncalled for barricades and fences for months on end, which in addition to being an eyesore and symbol of City Hall’s failure during CHOP, also cost the city thousands of dollars,” Harrell told CHS at the time.

Back to the timeline of CHOP and the abandonment of the precinct by police, Sixkiller also claimed it was a coincident that the draft resolution came the same afternoon police ended up clearing out of the precinct, the Times reports.

Despite Sixkiller’s statement, the new revelations on the timing of the draft resolution put the decision to abandon the East Precinct in new light as high ranking SPD officials signed off on clearing the facility just as Durkan officials were considering the plan to hand over the building to activists.

The talk of property transfers eventually morphed into a focus by Durkan on other properties.

Four days after the communications on the East Precinct transfer reported by the Times, Durkan issued a promise to speed up the process to transfer Central District properties and an old fire station at 23rd and Yesler to Black community groups. Meanwhile, as CHOP was raided and cleared in July, the Durkan administration spun idea of a “transfer” to focus on the community room at the East Precinct used for meetings and press conferences and making the space available as a much smaller facility.

Nothing had come of that proposal as Durkan’s term ended in December.

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