A Police Defunder Has Some Regrets

I’ve been following with rapt attention the new NPR/Seattle Times podcast, “We Keep Us Safe” which investigates the murder of 15-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in 2020. This summer, we’ve been looking at what it takes to make community work. This new investigation of CHOP highlights the challenges of building a society from scratch apart from traditional institutions like the police. What Was CHOP?For those of you unfamiliar with CHOP, it was a protestor takeover of Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park and several blocks around it after the Seattle Police Department abandoned its East Precinct station in June of 2020 after several days of protest after the murder of George Floyd. The media portrayed CHOP, varyingly, as either a Summer-of-Love-type sit-in or a lawless hellscape. Anxious to cut through the hype, I visited CHOP and witnessed both its promise and problems first-hand. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.There were many positive things happening at the park: tables offered free food and water to anyone who wanted them. There were medical personnel on hand and teach-ins using the “human microphone” technique many folks learned during the Occupy Wall Street protests. People were exchanging ideas and vigorously debating how to create the post-racist, just society so many of us were crying out for in those dark days.But while there were many in the park there to learn and vision together, the vibes weren’t exactly peace and love. Homeless people, some behaving erratically, had also streamed into the encampment. And as my friends and I sat eating tacos on the baseball field, we witnessed a group of masked men surround someone who was recording video. The group began shouting at the videographer, threatening violence. I’d seen enough and decided not to stick around past dark. Four days after my visit, 15-year-old Antonio Mays, Jr. would be murdered and his friend gravely wounded right in front of the abandoned police station. Questions remained: who killed Mays and why? And how had this protest against racialized violence ended up taking the life of a Black teenager?The InvestigationIn the days after Mays’ murder, rumors swirled: he was a gang member or a troublemaker, there to cause mayhem and possibly harm CHOP protestors. Having witnessed the various groups of people filtering in and out of CHOP, I all too easily accepted this explanation, figuring we’d probably never get the whole story. But reporters from our local NPR station and The Seattle Times were able to reconstruct a timeline of the murder using hours of security camera and livestream video scraped from social media. This, combined with eye-witness interviews, led to some startling revelations about why Mays was at CHOP and who likely killed him. The whole podcast is available now; I won’t spoil the conclusions for you because I think it’s worth a listen.The AftermathThe podcast begins and ends by interviewing Antonio Mays, Sr. As much as his son’s death has been held up as a symbol for this or that movement, we ought never forget that Mays was a kid. He was a musician, an aspiring BBQ pitmaster, a son, a brother, a classmate, a friend. As a parent, I can’t help but put myself in his family’s shoes. How awful to lose a child, how awful to not know why. Mays, Sr. wants justice for his son. No one has yet been arrested for the murder. Given the many errors in the criminal investigation, it’s unclear whether his son’s killer will ever face legal consequences.Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the push for police reform: it’s not all or nothing. While political polarization and media sensationalism painted the sides of the debate as either “the police are great, they can do no wrong” or “abolish all police,” many would-be reformers are just regular people like the Mays family who want the police to investigate serious crimes while not abusing their power to harass or harm people of color.Was Defund the Answer?I attended multiple Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. We were fed up with biased policing and with the government-sanctioned murder of unarmed civilians. We dreamed of a world where people experiencing mental health crises were met with a helping hand rather than guns drawn. One of our main chants during this time was, “Defund the police, 50% at least!”During this time, I tried to be careful about what I said in front of my kids, not wanting to overwhelm them. Still, they picked up on more than I realized. My eldest, then 8, saw a newspaper headline about the protests. He asked, “So they’re goi