SEATTLE — The city was exploring a proposal to cut 50 percent of the police department’s budget to promote racial justice and alternatives to policing last month, but Debora Juarez, the first enrolled Native American on the Seattle City Council, was not yet willing to throw her support behind such a steep cut without a plan for how to carry it out. That was when some of the activists who had been rallying for weeks in the streets downtown decided to take their protest to where it might be heard directly: outside Ms. Juarez’s home. Over several days and nights, activists have appeared on her street in North Seattle, shining lights into her windows, shouting at her through a bullhorn and scrawling messages in the street: “Corporate bootlicker,” one of the messages said. On a night when she had planned to have family members over to celebrate her birthday, Ms. Juarez said, she instead shut herself in a room and turned on a fan to try to drown out the noise.

Source: New York Times August 10, 2020 15:50 UTC