The home of Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best was surrounded by Black Lives Matter protesters over the weekend, demonstrating against her rhetoric on the recent riots in the city, according to Breitbart.
Chief Best described the incident in a letter to the Seattle City Council, dated August 2nd. In it, she explains how approximately 200 protesters parked their cars along the road where her home was located in Snohomish County, and began protesting, chanting, and waving signs outside her home. Best, a black woman, notes that the vast majority of the Black Lives Matter protesters were White.
Further reporting from the local paper Lynwood Times describes the increasingly invasive and borderline violent tactics used by the protesters, including “shouting profanity and insults at neighbors, taking license plate information on vehicles, taking pictures of homes, and asking little kids who lived in the neighborhood what schools they attended.”
When protesters attempted to actually approach the house, some of Best’s neighbors stepped in and physically blocked them from entering. One neighbor believed that such a protest will “happen again,” since they did not achieve their goal of actually attacking Best’s home, saying “They never made it to her house, we stopped them. So I think they will be back.”
Another neighbor pointed out how unusually organized the protesters were, noting that they “had radios, talking to each other,” and “had numbers they used to decal all their cars for who knows what.” The neighbor added that “they came with a mission. They were out here intimidating us.”
Chief Best, who was not actually home at the time of the incident, gained prominence for her strong criticism of Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D-Wash.)’s handling of the race riots in the city. She was especially critical of Durkan’s handling of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) that was set up in Seattle, as Durkan largely allowed the chaos and lawlessness to continue for political expediency, even though the autonomous zone ultimately led to a series of shootings in rapid succession that left two black teenagers dead and another four black men injured.