Personal Statement, June 2025
My name is Tarika Powell.
I was involved in a month-long encampment outside a police precinct in Seattle in 2020.
I am being harassed and terrorized by law enforcement.
I am concerned about my safety.
In 2020 I participated in BLM protests in Seattle, including the encampment called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Our protest/encampment was renamed the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) around the time that we lost control of it to infiltrating parties. Violence and chaos were introduced into the space.
If you have heard of the protest, it’s possible most everything you have heard about it is a lie. We never “took over” the police station. They gave it to us, unlocked. White protesters did not kill anyone, as has been the rumor on social media in the years since the encampment.
In the past 2-3 years, I have experienced harassment similar to what the feds have used to “neutralize” Black activists since the 1960s under their “Cointelpro” and “Iron Fist” operations, and the “Black identity extremist” label. These are joint operations between the feds and local law enforcement agencies, in which Black activists are classified as terrorists and treated as such. These programs were daylighted by brave activists in the state of Pennsylvania, by lawyers, and by journalists, when journalism still mattered.
What I have experienced includes isolation from community, smear campaigns, pitting me against other individuals in a way that could lead to personal harm, threatening messages, digital surveillance, and other types of surveillance.
Similarly to what has been revealed about their “counterintelligence” operations against other Black activists, the state has tried to undermine my mental health. They have tried to push me to self harm. They have tried to destroy my relationships. They have tried to pit people against me, and vice versa.
Throughout this experience, they have tried to redirect my attention to activists I had conflict with in 2020, leading me to believe that they were the ones responsible. Indeed, I have had people in my life since that time consistently and unceasingly try to stoke those old conflicts, encouraging me to “go after” people I briefly knew in 2020 or “take them down” for BLM-era fundraising fraud. This, also, is a well-documented counterintelligence tactic the feds use to pit people against each other in a way that may cause significant harm, or worse. I did not understand that this was happening to me until 2023. At that time, I was able to realize the conflict was being instigated, and most likely both sides were being manipulated into escalation and fear. I disengaged.
In some ways, being targeted by the feds for your activism feels like having a deranged abuser whom the government has given money, access, and permission to abuse you. It’s like a very disordered relationship that you never consented to engage in and have little to no agency to get out of.
Presumably, the threat that I posed is that I kept talking about what really happened to us in Seattle. I continued to speak out and correct the disinformation campaign the feds were waging, as I did during the protest. This disinformation campaign has been so successful that today, anyone who speaks on behalf of the protesters at the encampment that summer is labeled a “CHOP apologist,” particularly in leftist internet spaces.
With all due respect, I have nothing to apologize for.
Imagine this: One sunny day in June 2020, the police abandon a police station they have been violently “defending” for two weeks. (So violently that they’ll eventually have to pay the protesters $10 million.) They leave the doors unlocked. They don’t give their officers a heads up nor allow them to remove their personal property. No one will say who gave the order to abandon the building. No one can demonstrate that the building needed defending in the first place.
I believe – and this is just my theory - that we were supposed to go in that building and create scenes that would turn the tide against BLM, which at that time had nationwide and international support. We were supposed to go in there, destroy government property, and create a spectacle. We were supposed to turn the tide from decreasing police funding to increasing it.
Instead, we locked the doors and we camped outside the precinct to prevent people from going in. I was there when the first tents were brought to the precinct. Soon, someone brought a projector and we sat outside the precinct watching movies and eating popcorn. It essentially became a combined encampment and summer festival, with hundreds to thousands of people visiting every day.
We didn’t do the thing. So they did the thing for us. Over the course of a month, they turned it into a nightmare. You would not believe the level of fear, distrust, and stress that developed in the protest. Without hesitation, I would say they used psychological warfare, military-style counterintelligence tactics, and propaganda against us. They treated us like enemy combatants in the fight to get their building back, when the only reason we were there is because they negligently abandoned the building.
Once everything was over, and BLM collapsed, I thought that I could return to my regularly scheduled programming like everyone else. I moved to Philadelphia and have not been involved in any activism since summer 2020. I have had persistent disability issues since the protests that have interfered with employment and building community locally. In the spirit of complete transparency, I was over here doomscrolling and playing Zelda, tending to my health and trying to get back to work, while the opps were plotting my downfall. It is within this isolation that the feds and Philly cops intensified their harassment of me to a fever pitch.
I believe I have been surveilled by the Philadelphia police since the day I moved here, and by the feds since June 2020. Things escalated to more direct harassment shortly after I launched my website and other platforms in the Spring of 2023. The cops parked a vehicle on my street that was covered in stickers associated with white supremacist groups, along with FOP stickers and an FOP license plate. I received a communication on social media that it was “time for me to learn a lesson,” and then I was sent harassing messages across many digital communication streams. It appeared that I was hacked, but over time I realized that the level of sophistication of what was happening pointed to law enforcement. Some of the harassment demonstrated a level of familiarity with my personal history that most people, including my partner, wouldn’t know, much less “activists” who I knew for a few weeks in 2020.
I experienced a great deal of distress and fear around this. I got off my platforms and withdrew, which I guess was the goal in the first place. I spent a lot of time in prayer and prioritized managing my mental health, since that is what was under attack. I didn’t know who to reach out to because I was afraid to rope someone else into the same experience. It was very isolating. I did my best to, as the Apostle Paul said, stand firm in the evil day.
In late 2024 I got back online. Then over Christmas in 2024, the brakes failed on our rental vehicle as we returned home from the holidays. By the grace of God, we were able to get another vehicle that night and get home safely. But I do not believe this was a random occurrence. I believe I am in grave danger.
My family and I need eyes on our situation. Please help us with the below action items. We are not asking for money. We are asking for other types of support.
Action items:
Please copy the URL of this post into a web archival site, so that this post is preserved.
Screenshot or download this post
Share with legal organizations that have worked to highlight illegal “intelligence” operations against activists
Share widely with Seattle-based activists from 2020, in case they are also in danger
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Please pray for us, if you pray, the following: Psalm 77, and Ephesians 6:10-18
