Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan has been accused in court documents of manually deleting texts related to the lawless CHOP zone set up in the city during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.
According to a new forensic reportt performed on behalf of business owners and residents suing the city over its botched response to the riots, Durkan manually deleted nearly 200 text messages in July 2020, around the time CHOP was created.
The Anti-Police Zone, set up in the ritzy Capitol Hill neighborhood, stood for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and was also known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone).
It was touted as a peaceful utopia free of police violence, but quickly descended into anarchy, with a teenage boy even murdered.
Local businesses watched in dismay as customers stayed away for fear of violence – while Durkan vocally supported the hellish enclave.
In response to a Donald Trump tweet condemning the area, she tweeted: ‘The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist uprisings – it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and desire to build a better world . Given his track record, it’s not hard to believe that Trump is wrong, once again.’
She was previously found to have deleted over 5,000 messages from the time she changed her settings to automatically delete messages after 30 days.
The new report also concluded that the texts of several other key officials were destroyed by manual phone resets in July 2020, a month after Black Lives Matter protesters took over an area near Capitol Hill and the East Precinct and set up their own barriers.
At first, protesters called the area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but that changed to the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or The CHOP, which lasted for weeks.
During the week-long riot in June 2020, a teenager was killed and several others injured in three other shootings.
Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan has been accused in court documents of manually deleting texts related to the lawless CHOP zone set up in the city during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots
Black Lives Matter protesters took over an area near Capitol Hill and the East Precinct in June 2020 and set up their own barriers. They originally called the area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but it changed to Capitol Hill Organized Protest or The CHOP
Now, a group of residents and business owners are suing city officials, saying they ‘intended to deprive plaintiffs of crucial evidence’ by deleting their text messages about the riots, though it remains unclear what was said in those texts.
They accuse City Hall of ‘spoliation of evidence’ and are asking a federal judge to find the city liable for the crimes committed at CHOP or by advising a future jury to infer spoliation, according to Seattle Times.
However, city officials have asked the judge to throw out the case — with City Attorney Ann Davison’s office accusing some of the plaintiffs themselves of deleting their own texts about CHOP.
They claim the city government under Durkan tried to de-escalate the protests rather than neglect them, as the plaintiffs allege.
And a spokesman for Durkan, who did not seek re-election after the CHOP riots and was replaced by current Mayor Bruce Harrell, told the Times that she ‘believes strongly in the public’s right to know what their government is doing.’
But she called lawsuitfiled in the Western District of Washington last week, ‘a deliberately inaccurate and misplaced “Hail Mary” attempt to save a case that lacks merit.’
Within a few weeks, shootings broke out at the lawless encampment near the Capitol
Durkan’s text was initially revealed as missing to the public by whistleblowers in her office in early 2021, an apparent violation of the Public Records Act, which requires that certain texts be preserved.
Anyone who willfully destroys a public record that is supposed to be kept is guilty of a felony under the law, punishable by five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.
But an earlier forensic analysis, commissioned by City Hall in response to questions about how officials managed the protests in June 2020, found that Durkan’s phone was set the following month to automatically delete texts after 30 days, resulting in the loss of 5,746 texts.
It also indicated that Durkan’s phone had been set to delete text messages stored in the cloud at around the same time.
She has since blamed the city’s information technology department, saying it gave her a new phone on July 9, 2020 — the period when her text storage setting was changed to 30 days.
But the city department said it is not part of its practice to change text storage settings, and both forensic analyzes have identified July 4, 2020, as the date her phone was set to delete texts stored in the cloud.
Durkan has said in a deposition that no one else handled her phone that day, the Seattle Times reports.
The new report now shows that in addition to the more than 5,000 text messages that were deleted from before June 25, 2020, 191 more were lost later, between June 25 and November 16.
It concludes that the text messages were deleted manually.
Durkan now claims that problems arose with her phone after she dropped it in a tide pool on the Fourth of July.
Her spokesperson told the Times that the texts are ‘mostly innocuous and irrelevant’ and ‘are completely consistent with her public statements at the time’.
Questions have swirled in the wake of the government’s response to the riots
Meanwhile, the Seattle Times reported more than a year ago that texts from a number of other officials — including the city’s fire and police chiefs — were missing or had not yet returned from the period when police fired tear gas at protesters and left the East Precinct.
At the time, the newspaper reports, the city attorney’s office said texts from Durkan, then-Police Chief Carmen Best, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, Assistant Police Chief Eric Greening, Police Chief Strategy Officer Chris Fisher, Emergency Operations Officer Kenneth Neafcy and Public Utilities Officer Idris Beauregard were missing.
According to the new report, their phones were each reset in October 2020, resulting in more than 27,000 texts being deleted from Best’s phone and over 15,000 being deleted from Fisher’s phone.
Best has since admitted that she periodically deleted her texts.
And the city has defended its factory reset on its phone because the officials were ‘locked out’ of their phones.
It’s still unclear what the text messages that were deleted said, but the forensic report prepared by Leatha Consulting LLC says the deletions ‘each resulted in a loss of text messages that the city had an obligation to preserve.’
It also said the technology issues could have been fixed without resetting the phones and losing the texts.