About a week ago, a bunch of my friends sent me the link to an article in the Seattle Times, about a kid named Antonio Mays Jr. who was shot to death in the CHOP/CHAZ protest zone in 2020. They sent it to me because, in my not-Internet life, I talk about the case a lot. But I almost never write about it in public. When I got the article, my own silence started to bother me, again, as it has for years. So I’m going to write about it a little bit. This essay won’t have a big wind-up. It’s a little bit about policy, but mainly it’s about my personal feeling of [silence=complicity] in something I found intensely morally troubling. But…
First, A Disclaimer:
I’m not good at people. The ways this manifests are sometimes subtle and hard to define. Other times, they really aren’t. One of the through-lines is that I often don’t understand why other people do (or don’t do) things. I have to learn the rule matrix very consciously. I have to take notes. I sometimes screw up spectacularly because I just forget some detail of the enormous decision tree of norms I’ve assembled after decades of careful observation. Anyone who knows me for a while will see me do it at least a couple of times. If a normal social faux pas is just “putting your foot in your mouth,” then the thing I do is like putting my foot in a cannon and shooting myself in the face with it so it snaps my leg off at the hip, blows out the back of my head, and peppers people half a block away with bone shrapnel. Except it happens in slow motion, usually over the course of about 3-4 minutes (that will feel like 3-4 years). The broad rule of thumb I’ve inferred from past face-explodings is that the best way to avoid them is to avoid, as much as possible, expressing anger, frustration, or disagreement with anyone I know, or anyone they know. The way I do that is apparently not okay. But a thing happened in my hometown, in the neighborhood where I grew up, in a community where I have a lot of ties. So you might be about to see me shoot myself in the face with my foot. Sorry. I promise, I’m doing my best.
Part One: Say Her Name…
In 2017, an African American woman named Charleena Lyles was shot to death by two Seattle cops, in her apartment in North Seattle. She was a pregnant mother of four. Her children witnessed her death. The cops who shot her did a number of pretty stupid things that culminated in killing Lyles. They were found not to be criminally liable under Washington State’s now-repealed actual-malice law, but the Department paid out $3.5 million in compensation to her family. I’d already moved out of Seattle when all this happened, but my FaceBook feed was full of activism around the tragedy: vigils, fundraising, pressure campaigns. And lots of angry denunciations. Lots of them. Very, very angry.
I couldn’t bring myself to be quite as angry as most of my friends were — partly because I didn’t think the case was as clear cut as they did. Lyles was a little, tiny woman, but she did rush the cops with a pair of kitchen knives. I’ve been on the receiving end of that maneuver twice. Both times, I disarmed my attackers without hurting them because I had a massive physical advantage, and I judged the risks to be acceptable. But what I expect from myself, and what I think it’s ethical to demand of anyone else are two different things. A knife is a deadly weapon. One thrust to certain parts of the body can kill almost anyone. Even a much smaller, much weaker person coming at you with a knife has some capability of ending you. The year before cops killed Lyles in her apartment, a white officer in West Virginia was fired by his department for refusing to shoot an African American man armed with what turned out to be an empty handgun. The cop didn’t know for sure the gun was empty. He read the tone of the situation and made a judgment call that turned out to be right. Two other officers showed up and killed the suspect, then the cop who’d held his fire was terminated. The culture of policing in America not only doesn’t encourage restraint; it punishes the officer who takes a risk to keep an armed suspect alive. None of which is to say that I think the SPD officers did the right thing with Lyles. I do not. But I also didn’t think that the killing of Charleena Lyles was quite as clear-cut a case of abject police misconduct as what happened to Eric Garner or Philando Castile.
I also thought that there was very little point in expressing that opinion publicly. The SPD cops might not have been Garner/Castile incompetent, but they killed a woman they probably could have saved if they’d exercised even a modicum of good judgment or courage. The anger wasn’t invalid — it just seemed, to me, not to reflect the legal and cultural nuances of the thing. But how much nuance do you need when a woman who called the police for help ends up shot to death by those same police? And anyway, what do I know? I’m bad at people.
Part Two: …But Not His.
On June 29th, 2020, I watched a video released by Omari Salisbury through Converge Media, showing the immediate aftermath of a shooting in the CHOP/CHAZ protest zone near the Seattle Police Department’s recently abandoned East Precinct. Tensions had been high in the protest zone since reports had started circulating that armed Proud Boys were coming to Seattle to confront the BLM protesters. These reports were later shown to be lies fabricated by the Seattle Police Department and intentionally broadcast to protesters. The story I had been seeing from reporters on the scene was that CHOP/CHAZ “security” had responded to “an active shooter,” with lethal force. But the idea that it had anything to do with Proud Boys was almost immediately contradicted by reports that the “active shooters” were African American teens. Later that day, when I looked at Salisbury’s video, a few worrying details immediately stood out. I mentioned them in a FaceBook post I published to a limited audience that night:
So... I'm looking at video in the immediate aftermath of the shooting at CHOP last night, and I have a few questions.
If the kids in the car were carrying out a drive-by, why is the passenger side window of the car rolled up?
Was one or more guns recovered from the kids at the scene? If so, what happened to those guns? I assume the chain of custody on those firearms is totally trashed, so they'd be useless in a trial, but I'd still like to know if they exist.
Did SPD homicide do a paraffin test on the hands of the kids who were taken out of the car, to determine if they'd been discharging a firearm?
One person in the Converge video asserts that the Jeep was "stolen." But the keys to the car are in the ignition, and they're clearly attached to a keychain with multiple other keys on it. So how do we know it was stolen?
I wasn't there. I could easily be misreading the scene. The driver's side window appears to be rolled down. Maybe the driver was doing all the shooting, or the passenger was firing out the driver's side window, past the driver. When Mr. Salisbury stuck his camera into the car I saw bloodstains, but no spent brass. But of course that's inconclusive, given the quality of the video, and the fact that people had clearly been doing things inside the car since the shooting. Possibly the spent brass was on the floor of the vehicle, or maybe someone already removed it from the car (though I can't imagine why they would do such a thing). Maybe the kids in the car had a revolver, or the gun was held outside the car while firing, and there were no ejected shell casings in the car at all.
But. I see in this video one bullet hole, right through the windshield, just above the level of the dash. So that's one shooter in front of the car. The shape of the hole seems to suggest the bullet went straight in, rather than hitting the window at an angle, so the shooter may have been standing directly in front of the car. I see holes in the side and back of the car. I can hear people standing in front of the car as Mr. Salisbury approaches, making jokes about being out of bullets. One of the kids who was shot was 16. The other one was 14. I have no trouble imagining that whoever was driving wasn't great at controlling the vehicle, especially under fire.
The 16-year-old, Antonio Mays Jr., died on the way to the hospital.
I compare Mays to Lyles because both situations have some nuance. They’re both unambiguously unjust outcomes, but the circumstances surrounding them are a little murky. We didn’t care about the murk when SPD killed Lyles; when I do a search on FaceBook, for posts from people I know about Charleena Lyles, I get four pages of relevant results. When I do the same search for “Antonio Mays” I don’t get a single hit. Not one. As it happens, “not one” is also how many vigils I saw announced on social media, demanding that the people who shot Antonio Mays Jr. be brought to justice. It’s the number of protests I saw regarding how his death was handled by SPD (let alone the people in CHOP/CHAZ). It’s the number of witnesses who publicly identified the people who shot Antonio Mays Jr. It’s the number of articles I saw in the Stranger, demanding a full and transparent investigation into the shooting. It’s the number of public statements I saw from the activists who had been early spokespeople for the BLM protests in Seattle, demanding a full investigation into what looks like — let’s be honest — essentially a lynching. And maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe the circumstances surrounding the shooting amount to a tragic mistake. But we don’t know, because we didn’t ask — just like nobody asked, for decades, when cops killed Black people all over the country.
This is where we get into my disclaimer. Because I’m not good at people. So when the communities, institutions, and leaders I’ve been told for years are the moral conscience of the left; the political outsiders; the ideological extremists who alienate the compromised establishment by demanding an admirable but impracticable degree of doctrinal purity — when I see those people ignoring the killing of an (almost certainly) unarmed Black teenager at a Black Lives Matter protest, I assume I’m the problem. I assume this is another case of me not fully grasping the social rules, or some subtlety of the situation that everybody else can see, that would make this make sense. But after five years, with not one word from anyone about justice for Antonio Mays Jr. (or Robert West, the 14-year-old who was in the car with Mays) I’ve begun to suspect that, perhaps, my initial take on this wasn’t wrong.
Maybe two unarmed teenagers were gunned down by paranoid idiots who brought handguns and assault rifles to a protest — almost certainly in the hopes of an armed conflict with Proud Boys, or some other right-wing paramilitary group. And maybe nobody from the left demanded justice for the Black teens, who were shot at a Black Lives Matter protest, because… doing so would have made us look bad? It would have made us look like the hypocrites we… apparently are?
Yeah. I think that might be what happened.
Or maybe it’s worse than that. If we think Luigi Mangione should be free and Kyle Rittenhouse should be in jail, we don’t really have ethics; we have a team. We have an “us,” that we define as “not them,” and that’s all we care about. Which means we have the same moral framework as a MAGA follower, just with different values plugged in for all the nouns. It’s like a game of Madlibs. We believe all the same stuff the MAGA people believe; we believe in political violence, and we hate the government, and we want to tear everything down and have a revolution. We think it’s acceptable to break eggs for an omelette. The only two meaningful differences between the armed leftists at CHOP/CHAZ, and the armed rednecks who flocked to Snohomish to square off against antifa are, (1) the armed rednecks supported MAGA instead of Occupy, and (2) the leftists actually killed someone. Otherwise they’re the same kind of people, afraid of the same imaginary enemies, and meeting those fears with the same guns, the same violence, and the same stupidity.
And the rest of us on the left let it happen.
Here’s a quick gut check: someone in your FB feed re-posts something that calls Kyle Rittenhouse a hero. Do you challenge them in comments? Yes? Great. Now, same scenario, but the meme says Luigi Mangione’s a hero. It’s not worth it, right? It might cause a little row that would lose you some points with your friends? Why get into it? FaceBook isn’t real life. And so on. When people with guns and masks showed up to protect a Texas drag show in 2022, all I saw about it on my social media feed was people cheering them on. We should do better, we don’t, we didn’t, and Antonio Mays Jr. is dead. Because when the leftists with the guns showed up, everybody else didn’t leave. They didn’t say, “This isn’t what we’re about, and either the guns go, or we do,” and there was no massive online outcry to force the issue. So it’s a little bit on all of us. But mainly it’s still on the guys with the guns, who shot two kids.
Part Three: The Enemy of My Enemy Can Just Be Another Enemy. We Can All Be Enemies. Look, There’s Another One.
Most Democratic voters don’t trust most Democratic politicians, in part because most Democratic politicians can’t (or won’t) say what they’re for; they can only list the things they’ll (probably) support. Mainstream Democrats don’t have beliefs; we have interests, and alliances. We talk about social justice, but we’re willing to “reform welfare” and “get tough on crime” if it has enough political upside. When the country is faced with a fascist dictator who wants to destroy democracy, the retort of the DNC is basically, “Vote Democrat! We also have no ethics, but at least we have norms!” The message ends up being that Democrats aren’t so much less corrupt than Republicans, as that we’re much less ambitious. We don’t want to destroy democracy. We just want to manipulate and subvert it to pay off our stakeholders, and ignore, minimize, and marginalize problems and constituencies that don’t come with campaign contributions attached. I recently joked to a friend that the GOP slogan should be: “Vote Republican! We might lie to you, but at least we won’t gaslight you about it.” Democrats will keep the lights on while we sell you out. And we won’t stop you from voting. We just won’t give you any candidates worth voting for. The fact that prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still telling people that the goal of opposing Trump should be a return to something like the political status quo of the 1990s, and Obama’s first term, demonstrates a commitment to mediocrity and denial deeper than the most cynical speculations of the Nader campaign.
All of which is pretty alienating to the average voter. But it’s positively infuriating to an engaged voter with anything resembling a civic conscience, or a drive for wider social, economic, or ecological justice. The radical left presents itself as the alternative to all this compromise. Their pitch is something along the lines of, “We may not get anything done, but if you’re going to be on the losing side regardless, wouldn’t it be nice to be on the righteous losing side? The moral losing side?”
There are two big problems with this narrative. First, it’s just not true. The far left doesn’t have a moral framework. They have a collection of prejudices and epigrams: no one is illegal on stolen land; from the river to the sea; whose streets, our streets; four legs good, two legs bad. And they condemn anyone who challenges them on those axioms, just like the MAGA snowflakes we all supposedly stand against. As soon as they get a little bit of money, or a little bit of power, the leadership of the radical left does the same shit everyone else does, and the rank and file are full of the same kinds of self-righteous bigots that populate the far right. The similarities aren’t even terribly obscure. Kshama Sawant publicly expressed admiration for the tactics of the MAGA Freedom Caucus in Congress. “Where the Freedom Caucus comes in is that they are using this tactic of refusing to compromise. How about the left actually having that courage and really fighting hard for what working people need?” Later, she campaigned against Kamala Harris in Michigan (which I’m sure has been super good for working people), with the avowed purpose of putting Donald Trump in office, supposedly because Harris wasn’t taking moral responsibility for what was happening in Gaza. Which is iffy reasoning to begin with — but also I didn’t see Sawant tripping over herself to take moral responsibility for what happened in Seattle in 2020, in spite of the fact that she was both a leader in the BLM protests where Antonio Mays Jr. was killed, and an elected member of the government that had jurisdiction when it happened. In fact, my recollection (confirmed by a little light Googling) is that she’s never said anything about Antonio Mays Jr. at all.
The second problem with the far-left virtue narrative is that it creates a destructive feedback loop, providing social approval, then political power, as a reward for attacking the center. MAGA leaders score points by “owning the libs.” The far left scores points by… also “owning the libs.” The more the center gets torn up, the less effective it can be, the more the fringes have to complain about. The path to political heat death, in three simple moves. As is probably obvious, I’m not super happy with mainstream Democrats myself. But I bet that if we asked everyone in Gaza, or the people in Ukraine, or the shirtless deportees at the U.S. government internment camp in El Salvador, they might say that the Democratic Party, unlike the Republican Party, at least has the potential to be reformed.
I don’t know if we can save ourselves in the face of what’s coming, but if we do create a movement that will pull us out of this spiral, I know it will have to start in the middle. It will require the expertise and the participation of the technocrats, and the apparatus of government. When COVID hit, federal, state, and local governments shifted spending and policy to support essential workers and deliver services. They extended unemployment payments, issued significant tax credits, and improved access to medical services while improvising, on the fly, a completely new study-from-home model for public schools. We converted our entire consumer economy to delivery and carryout. We all started tipping to show essential workers we valued them. Everyone who could work from home did work from home. It was one of the most radical social and economic transformations since World War II, and it all happened because political leadership recognized an emergency, and acted accordingly. They told the machinery of state to create massive change, and the subject matter experts and experienced bureaucrats sprang into action to make it happen.
The halls of power are full of people who have the practical knowledge and experience necessary to quickly and competently restructure our entire system of government, and many of our social institutions. We’ve all been fed this narrative for decades, that “the system” isn’t flexible — that it’s hidebound, and that it fights change out of laziness, and narrow self-interest. But when COVID hit, the whole thing turned on a dime. They shifted trillions of dollars in spending and programs, and they did it nearly overnight.
We don’t need a revolution. We don’t need to tear everything down and start from scratch. The machinery of change is already in place. What we need is an electorate that will unify behind competent leadership, and candidates who fit that description. We need objectives and goals. Trump and the MAGA elite struggle against the so-called deep state because they’re trying to force the machinery of government to destroy itself. The “resistance” they keep getting isn’t so much a conspiracy as it is the loss of momentum one naturally experiences when trying to drive a bus through guardrails, and over a cliff. But an optimistic political movement, constructively using the expertise that already exists, could take us to better places we haven’t dared to imagine. It could move mountains.
Right now, today, none of this may matter very much. We are where we are. But the institutions that have protected a political consensus in this country for the last 60 years are collapsing in flames. More commentators from the center left are calling for a complete restructuring of Democratic priorities. If the MAGA people don’t manage to irrevocably damage the country, Democrats may have an opportunity to forge a new mission. And when I try to picture starting something like that in Seattle, or New York, or San Francisco — a jobs program, or a housing program, or whatever — one of the things I see in my mind’s eye is Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford grabbing the mic away from Bernie Sanders at a rally in Seattle in 2015, to protest on behalf of BLM.
And, hey, sidebar: guess who else I get zero hits for when I Google their names, cross-referenced against Antonio Mays?
We can do better. We have to do better.