Posted on 10/18/2020 8:45:00 AM PDT by george76
Friday, a federal district court judge allowed a lawsuit brought by 21 businesses against the city of Seattle to proceed, despite the city's attempt to have it dismissed.
The lawsuit accuses the city of harming local business owners by allowing the existence of Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), a self-declared autonomous zone that was established and occupied by racial justice protestors from June 8 to July 1.
The occupied zone blocked all car traffic, reducing the businesses' access to customers, vendors and revenue, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit further alleges that city police largely neglected the zone, allowing protesters and others to damage business property and threaten business owners without punishment.
Lastly, the lawsuit states that the city provided concrete barriers, medical supplies, washing and sanitation facilities, portable toilets, lighting and other material support, including the use of Cal Anderson Park to CHOP occupiers, and told police to adopt a "no response" policy wherein officers wouldn't arrive unless a 9-1-1 caller reported "significant life safety issues."
...
by allowing CHOP to operate for a month before police eventually shut it down, the city unlawfully took their private property for public use with no compensation, restricted their ability to fully use their property to conduct business and failed to protect the businesses from a danger of the city's own making.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
“Worse than that! Municipalities usually carry large liability policies to protect the muni from financial ruin due to wrongdoing by elected officials or employees!”
Cities that aren’t self-insured that don’t protect their infrastructure, citizens, or businesses, or make large claims, may find it rather difficult to obtain this type of insurance in the future.
Excellent questions.
Here and all over the country to steal ATMs the urban criminals blast into the plate glass windows with a truck, or knock out the front wall with a bigger truck, or attach a heavy chain to the ATM and pull it out.
With no one allowed on the streets but leftists, the BLM and Antifa and "urban teens" could work with blow torches and small explosives. Uninterrupted by law enforcement officers.
Each rioter and their employers should be sued—one at a time.
Biden: You don't deserve to know the answer to that./s
We've said for years-------- When all the guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns. Gun grabbers will make that happen unless they are stopped.
The suburban women who say they are voting against Trump will have one last line of home defense after gun ownership is taken away and the defunded police aren't there: A sign clearly stating This is a Gun Free Zone.
We already pay unimaginable sums of money to King County and Seattle. Our property taxes have more than doubled in the last 4 years. Our friends who live in Seattle are now paying more every year in property taxes than they originally paid for their small house to begin with. Better that it gets diverted to businesses and people who were completely failed by these leftist politicians than the political cronies whose pockets it usually ends up in.
Taxpayers screwed again.
They voted for it. Embrace the suck.
My guess the property owners did not vote for the a holes.
There’s no need to “allow.” They have the right to sue because the mayor allowed, supported and took part in the riots and did nothing to stop them.
It’ll be interesting when they sell out, leave Seattle. See what the CC will do then when there’s no income in taxes.
“failed to protect the businesses from a danger of the city’s own making.”
that’s the one grounds they’re almost guaranteed to win ... government has no duty to protect, but it itself cannot actively collaborate and contribute resources to the criminals ...
“Sadly the idiots that caused this will not literal pay out of their own pockets it will come form the state and city coffers, the tax payers.”
the very taxpayers that elected the idiots ... so they got what they voted for ...
Agreed and the politicians.
These same business owners should also be starting recall petitions for the Mayor of Portland and the Oregon Attorney General that ensures the miscreants in CHOP go unpunished.
If they think that their little law suit is going to change the behavior of these Communist Revolutionaries in Oregon government they are sadly mistaken.
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