“The Summer of Love” will be coming to an end. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan announced Monday that the city will move to break up the “autonomous zone” after it turned deadly over the weekend.
"The cumulative impacts of the gatherings and protests and the nighttime atmosphere and violence has led to increasingly difficult circumstances for our businesses and residents," Durkan said Monday at a news conference. "The impacts have increased and the safety has decreased."
Three people were shot over the weekend and officers couldn’t even safely access the victims because they were met by an angry mob.
"There should be no place in Seattle that the Seattle Fire Department and the Seattle Police Department can't go," she said.
Durkan said the Seattle Police Department will return to its East Precinct building, which they had abandoned, “peacefully and in the near future.”
“It’s time for people to go home, it is time for us to restore Cal Anderson and Capitol Hill so it can be a vibrant part of the community,” Durkan said. “The impacts on the businesses and residents and the community are now too much.”
But CHOP won’t be broken up by police, she said, but rather by working with “community groups” to ask people to voluntarily leave at night. Let's see how well that works out.
The Mayor of Seattle has just announced that they will dismantle the ‘CHOP’ zone.
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) June 23, 2020
It took someone getting murdered for them to do this.
Disgusting.