New York Post reporter goes into Seattle neighborhood taken over by protesters who want no police there, describes the terror of anarchy and power struggles of those moving to fill the power void.
Two weeks ago police withdrew from a Seattle neighborhood where protesters then set up barricades and declared the “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone,” or CHAZ, where police are barred from entering.
On Sunday the New York Post published a description by reporter Andy Ngo who spent five days undercover inside the area that is now run by a bizarre collection of Black Lives Matter activists, anarchists and those connected to the Antifa anti-fascist movement.
Ngo was determined to find out what was really going on. Far from an idyllic island of freedom, Ngo described a situation that is terrifying with soaring crime and where at least one murder has taken place.
“I witnessed a continuing experiment in anarchy, chaos and brute-force criminality,” Ngo said. “In order to avoid being exposed as a journalist — several reporters have been barred or expelled — I slept and showered outside the zone,” entering early in the afternoon and then again after sundown.
Since the police abandoned the east precinct building on June 8, crime has surged inside and outside the zone.
A shooting in the zone on June 20 left at least one person dead and a second in critical condition, but those who seized control of the zone refused to let police enter to investigate and took the dead and wounded men to the hospital themselves.
Police said response time to 911 calls from the area surrounding CHAZ has “more than tripled” and with heavily armed civilians patrolling CHAZ, police are not going inside at all.
Ngo described the self-declared head of security in CHAZ as a woman who goes by the nickname “Creature” who runs a team armed with rifles, handguns, batons or knives from a headquarters in the zone plastered with signs saying no photography is allowed.
While television crews who visit the zone during the day see a party atmosphere, after dark “a whole different side of CHAZ emerges.”
Some 30,000 residents live inside the zone but “have no say over their new overlords,” Ngo said. “Gunshots and ‘screams of terror’ at night have been reported.”
Ngo reported that “every business and property inside CHAZ has been vandalized with graffiti,” and the fallout from the zone is closing businesses because of “safety and security concerns.”
The old Soviet communist hammer-and-sickle symbol is part of the graffiti and left-wing groups like the Seattle Revolutionary Socialists are recruiting new members. Extremist groups distribute information pamphlets on the “extremist anarchist-communist agitprop — the political ideology of Antifa.”
The reporter was given a booklet with short essays on why police, capitalism and the state “must be destroyed by any means necessary, including through violence,” and how “our contempt for the media is inextricable from our hatred of this entire world.”
“A masked Antifa militant pointed me out to her comrades and tried to assemble a mob. I left before I could be injured. The following day, a Fox News crew was forced out of the zone,” Ngo reported, saying he tried to blend in by dressing like the protesters because “suspicious ‘outsiders’ … were immediately tailed by security.”
“It is difficult to decipher what CHAZ occupants want. Each faction, whether liberal, Marxist or anarchist, has their own agenda. But one online manifesto posted on Medium demands no less than the abolishment of the criminal justice system,” Ngo noted.
(World Israel News)
