As Todd Herman covered here this morning, Antifa and other groups have taken over a several-square block area of Seattle and declared it an autonomous zone, It’s Going Down: Seattle Surrenders a Police Station and Four City Blocks to Antifa.
One of the groups in the zone, speaking under the banner of Black Lives Matter, has just issued a list of demands.
Here are some of the THE DEMANDS OF THE COLLECTIVE BLACK VOICES AT FREE CAPITOL HILL TO THE GOVERNMENT OF SEATTLE, WASHINGTON (archive in case disappears):
1. The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police. At an equal level of priority we also demand that the city disallow the operations of ICE in the city of Seattle.
2. In the transitionary period between now and the dismantlement of the Seattle Police Department, we demand that the use of armed force be banned entirely. No guns, no batons, no riot shields, no chemical weapons, especially against those exercising their First Amendment right as Americans to protest.
7. We demand a retrial of all People in Color currently serving a prison sentence for violent crime, by a jury of their peers in their community.
13. We demand the abolition of imprisonment, generally speaking, but especially the abolition of both youth prisons and privately-owned, for-profit prisons.
3. We demand free college for the people of the state of Washington, due to the overwhelming effect that education has on economic success, and the correlated overwhelming impact of poverty on people of color, as a form of reparations for the treatment of Black people in this state and country.
1. We demand the hospitals and care facilities of Seattle employ black doctors and nurses specifically to help care for black patients.
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Although we have liberated Free Capitol Hill in the name of the people of Seattle, we must not forget that we stand on land already once stolen from the Duwamish People, the first people of Seattle, and whose brother, John T. Williams of the Nuu-chah-nulth tribe up north was murdered by the Seattle Police Department 10 years ago.
Black Lives Matter — All day, Every day.
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