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Trump exaggerated Seattle protest facts

Broken-in glass windows were being repaired on the Whole Foods Market at Broadway and Madison St., in Seattle, on July 23, 2020, after people bashed them the previous night. Authorities say a group of about 150 people broke windows, stole from businesses and started a pair of fires in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood Wednesday night. (Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)

Former president Donald Trump highlighted Seattle in Tuesday’s debate against challenger Vice President Kamala Harris in an attempt to present the Biden administration as weak on crime.

He might have overdone it, however, as he pointed to the Seattle protest in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in which the city lost control of a police precinct and six city blocks.

“When are those people going to be prosecuted?” Trump asked in the ABC News debate. “When are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted or in Seattle? They went into Seattle, they took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle. When are those people going to be prosecuted?”

Seattle is 83 square miles, or around 53,000 acres. The Urbanist blog in Seattle says the average downtown Seattle block is 1.3 acres. So demonstrators held about 8 acres out of 53,000 in the area that protesters called the Capitol Hill Autonomous  Zone . Not to diminish violence in the zone, which included a shooting death, nor the damage done to city property and private businesses, but that doesn’t work out to a “big percentage of the city of Seattle” in any reasonable interpretation.

– Jonathan Brunt