• @sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 hours ago

    Am from Seattle.

    Yep, this happened in Seattle and Portland multiple times, just basically black bagging people into unmarked vans by… presumably, plain clothes / “off duty” / half kitted out, face obscured, no visible ID cops.

    They typically did this black bagging to people who had not actually broken any laws, but were so effective at keeping protester morale high, and/or were simply causing overwhelming masses of people to defend them from, in many cases, literally entirely unprovoked police assault/brutality.

    Most of these were the people they wanted to removr but knew that no charges would actually stick because they had nothing, and then release them 24-72 hours later.

    Sometimes they’d black bag / white van people who had actually crossed the threshold into doing something they could actually charge you for, but most of the time, nope.

    I know that in Portland the cops actively decided to act as body guards for fascists, and look the other way when they attacked people.

    In Seattle, … the cops intentionally started so much shit, assaulting nonviolent people, well we uh… we literally forced them to abandon their major police office in Capitol Hill.

    As in, we seiged them. Surrounded the building for days. Eventually they burned a bunch of records and made a stealthy withdrawal in the dead of night.

    That police center is only a few blocks from where the ‘CHAZ’ would be set up.

    Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

    As in, we literally drove out the local police and are thus now autonomous.

    … We’ve still never seen the all the actual communications between the police chief and mayor, other internal police records… because the police destroyed them. They destroyed them because they almost certainly outlined numerous violations of the law in terms of orders issued, tactics used, illegal arrests/detainments, bullshit ‘overtime’ overpayments and other financial shenanigans, crimes committed by the police and probably all the way up to the police chief and mayor engaging in a criminal conspiracy.