By Devon O’Neil

On December 24, 2020, a local advocacy organization booked 16 rooms at the Travelodge in Fife and invited dozens of its constituents to shelter there on the holiday eve. But as Christmas Day came and went and the group refused to leave, Tacoma Housing Now, which had paid for a single night, informed the hotel’s owner that it was staging a sleep-in: local government would be footing the bill for an extended stay.

The owner eventually called the police, and on Monday evening, December 28, Fife Police Chief Peter Fisher and City Manager Hyun Kim met the owner, Shawn Randhawa, at his property. Randhawa told them he’d had enough; he wanted the squatters—reported by Tacoma Housing Now to number more than 40, including at least one who had tested positive for coronavirus—gone.

“We needed to hear him say that,” Kim recalls. He and Fisher didn’t want to incite a mass arrest or altercation; local media were already covering the occupation, and they knew their actions would be scrutinized in the context of the heightened tension between law enforcement and the public nationally.

Kim and Fisher asked the owner if they could have a couple of days to find alternative housing for the group. Since the only paying Travelodge guests had already left, Randhawa agreed to be patient while the city worked to find a solution. Negotiating over the phone with a Tacoma Housing Now representative named Arrow, Kim also sent a letter asking for cooperation.

“I said, ‘Look, we empathize, but appeasement devoid of accountability is not love; you’re not helping people,’” Kim recalls. “‘Let’s not put a minority-owned business and 10 employees out of business. You’re perpetuating the cycle of homelessness.’”

As Kim and Fisher focused on de-escalating the situation, other city staff scrambled to find housing for dozens at the height of a pandemic. Because Fife had no beds to offer, that meant calling neighboring communities and pleading for holiday miracles.

We need to protect our local business owners, but at the same time, if you look at the national mood when it comes to trusting police officers…we were very cognizant of how we wanted to respond.

The City of Tacoma, Tacoma Rescue Mission, Low Income Housing Institute, and Pierce County Human Services collectively secured the required number of berths at area shelters, one of which hadn’t even opened to the public yet.

On the sixth day of the standoff, hours before the city planned to move the occupants from the Travelodge into other temporary housing, Fisher received a series of startling calls. “The Patriot Guard and others were threatening to go in armed and ‘do our job’ since we weren’t,” he recounts. “So we moved that timetable up quickly to get the situation resolved before people started showing up with guns.”

When police arrived and ordered the squatters to leave, everything went smoothly, although a Tacoma Housing Now representative later disputed that the group’s departure was “voluntary.” (Messages to a spokesperson for the group went unreturned.) Kim knows of just one occupier who took advantage of the alternative shelter that Fife hastily coordinated, and he recalls hearing participants voice frustration with the whole protest. “One gentleman looked at me and said, ‘They really did play us,’” he says.

For their part, Fisher and his 32-officer department exhaled when the job was done. “We need to protect our local business owners, but at the same time, if you look at the national mood when it comes to trusting police officers . . . we were very cognizant of how we wanted to respond,” Fisher says. “I think it was the best possible outcome from what could’ve been a perfect storm.”