Seattle approved $3,650,000 to recompense businesses that took legal action after the fatal 2020 Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) detrimentally affected their businesses, and assets and neglected their constitutional privileges.
The organization had first requested $2.9 million.
The city must pay the amount by March 3, as was declared in the settlement announced last week. Court documents reveal that $600,000 of the sum will be allocated to the legal fees of the over a dozen plaintiffs.
A federal judge just recently imposed penalties against the city for erasing thousands of text exchanges between ex-Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police chief Carmen Best, and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins during the armed occupation of 6 blocks of Capitol Hill by Antifa and BLM rioters.
In response to the death of George Floyd, which occurred while he was in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, 2020, and the subsequent riots that followed, Seattle police were asked by police leadership to abandon their East Precinct and consequently, activists created the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, also known as CHOP or CHAZ, on June 8, 2020.
The residents of the zone denied the police access, resulting in a 250% increase in the level of rapes, robberies, and murders within the 6-block area during the occupation. On July 1st, 2020, the police were eventually able to break up the zone, which had lasted for three weeks, after two fatal shootings and riots damaged the residence of Mayor Durkan.
Court documents indicated that proprietors claimed that the unprecedented action of the local government to shut off and leave behind a 16-block area of the community caused businesses, workers, and inhabitants to endure substantial harm to property, and security risks, and prevented them from entering their properties.
After the occupation ended, it was disclosed that certain Seattle representatives such as former Mayor Jenny Durkan, ex-police chief Carmen Best, and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins had purged thousands of text messages from their city-owned phones that were concerned with the zone, which included conversations with the controversial "warlord" of the autonomous area, Raz Simone.
Judge Thomas Zilly of the US District sanctioned the city, thus allowing the jury to utilize the missing evidence as an impediment to the city. In his writing, Zilly declared, City officials deleted thousands of text messages from their city-owned phones in complete disregard of their legal obligation to preserve relevant evidence. Further, the city significantly delayed disclosing that thousands of text messages had been deleted and could not be reproduced or recovered.
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