The city of Seattle has settled a lawsuit that took aim at officials’ handling of the three-week Capitol Hill Organized Protests and further ensnared the former mayor and police chief, among others, in a scandal over thousands of deleted text messages.
The Seattle City Attorney’s Office filed notice of a settlement Wednesday in U.S. District Court, just three weeks after a federal judge levied severe legal sanctions against the city for deleting texts between high-ranking officials during the protests and zone that sprung up around them, known as CHOP. The notice, which didn’t contain details, gives the parties until March 10 to finalize the settlement.
Neither the private law firm defending the city nor attorneys for the involved businesses immediately responded to messages seeking comment.
The CHOP grew out of protests over the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, a killing that brought about a reckoning in Seattle and nationwide. A series of clashes between Black Lives Matter protesters and police prompted Seattle officials to withdraw officers from the East Precinct on Capitol Hill, and thousands of people flooded the area surrounding nearby Cal Anderson Park. Roads were blocked off — with help from the city — and encampments sprang up in the park.
Meanwhile, complaints arose from residents and from some local businesses that said they were cut off from customers, who were inconvenienced or intimidated by the gathering and lack of law-enforcement protection.
These businesses alleged in the June 2020 lawsuit that their civil rights were violated by the city’s decision not to disband the protest zone and, in some ways, help keep it alive by providing street barricades and sanitation stations.
While CHOP was mostly peaceful, there were instances of vandalism and sporadic outbreaks of violence, including fights, an attempt to torch the abandoned police precinct and at least four shootings that claimed two lives of two teenagers, including a 16-year-old boy whose death led the city to end the protest.
Attorneys for the more than a dozen businesses that sued the city, led by Seattle developer Hunters Capital, sent a series of letters to the city in July 2020 — after another lawsuit over the violent police response to the protests — demanding that any evidence pertaining to the city’s alleged support and encouragement of the zone’s creation be retained, according to the court docket and pleadings.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly concluded last month that officials ignored the notifications, sending the so-called Hunters Capital lawsuit to trial on two of five claims and dismissing three others. In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city for the deletion of tens of thousands of text messages from city phones sent between former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.
The judge found significant evidence that the destruction of CHOP evidence was intentional and that officials tried for months to hide the text deletions from opposing attorneys.
He also ordered the city to pay the attorneys fees for those who showed city leaders destroyed significant evidence about their decision-making during CHOP, including their move to abandon the Police Department’s East Precinct.
“The Court finds substantial circumstantial evidence that the city acted with the requisite intent necessary to impose a severe sanction and that the city’s conduct exceeds gross negligence,” Zilly wrote.
For that reason, Zilly said he’d instruct the jury during an eventual civil trial that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally. He singled out Durkan, saying her excuse for the deletions “strained credibility.”
The Seattle Times sued the city over Durkan’s missing texts, settling the lawsuit for $200,000 and a promise by the city to improve its public records process.
Zilly’s order also sanctioned Michael Malone of Hunters Capital for deleting text messages that should have been preserved — and ruled that the city’s attorneys would be able to present that finding to the jury. Hunters Capital claims it lost $2.9 million in business as a result of CHOP.
In another order last month, Zilly dismissed three of five claims against the city that were filed by the Hunters Capital plaintiffs, including allegations that the city violated their right to due process, allegations of negligence and illegal taking of their property and civil rights.
However, Zilly concluded that the jury should hear evidence alleging the city “directly participated” in creating CHOP through its decision to provide portable toilets, hand-washing stations, dumpsters and other accommodations during the three-week protest.
And he said a jury should decide whether the city’s actions amounted to a “right-of-access taking” by allowing the protesters to interfere with access to their businesses.
