A class action lawsuit was filed October 3 on behalf of all the 600 or so people arrested during the WTO conference. The suit seeks damages from the city as well as a declaration from the court that the city's actions during the week violated the constitution.

The suit charges that the arrests of hundreds of people both within and without the no-protest zone on Dec. 1 and 2, 1999, was "a concerted and illegal effort to stifle free speech and assembly." After the "day of widespread and active, but largely peaceful protest against the WTO," Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper "decided that the city's image was being jeopardized."

Mayoral Proclamation of Civil Emergency No. 3, and its revisions over subsequent days, are at the heart of the suit. The no-protest force field it ordered "was intended to create insulated zones inside which no form of unwanted ideological expression would be allowed." The police were not simply encouraged to violate civil rights, they were instructed to.

A police radio transmission, included in the complaint, illustrates what a bizarre nexus in the Seattle Process that was.

"Let me get this straight [officer on radio] we're just supposed to arrest all the protesters?"

"That's affirmative."

The Constitution was declared void to protect the Mayor's perception of an image problem. The City "hunted, accosted, and incarcerated hundreds of individuals who had gathered to speak their minds in a public forum." Then it released them several days later. After procedurally jerking the arrestees around for a few weeks, the prosecutor dismissed almost all charges. Just like that. The arrests were never an attempt to enforce anything but the City's delusions of grandeur.

Besides citing violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, the suit cites violations of Article 1, Section 4 of the Washington State Constitution: "Every person may freely speak, write and publish on all subjects." Freely speaking on all subjects would generally include speaking on the WTO's trampling of local laws and human rights--but not when the WTO has been invited to town. The whole episode threatens to explode with irony.

The mayor will call the suit a "distraction," if he hasn't already, that interferes with the "real business" of being mayor. But this is real business. If the mayor cannot abide by the basic precepts of the constitution, he should not be running this city.

Various citizens will complain, if they haven't already, that the "lawsuit is costing us even more after we've already paid so dearly for the WTO itself." They will be angry. But the anger ought to be focused where it's due: on the mayor who first cajoled the activists, then turned on them when they didn't play his unwritten script. The same mayor who first undercut police desires for event staffing, then ordered to them clean up his problem at all costs. The same mayor who engineered the WTO debacle in the first place.

The City Council acquiesced to everything, including martial law, by not taking any action. The council cited the emergency itself as an excuse not to meet and discuss the emergency.

This isn't a distraction, it is a wake-up call. If the City can't muster up the discipline to live within its democratic means, it deserves what it gets. We're not Singapore quite yet.

This episode of suborning democracy in the name of business opportunity was not an isolated incident. The complaint is incorrect on one point. It says that N30 was "the first time in the City's history peaceful protesters or citizens wishing to use the streets were subject to arrest merely for being present in a public place." It has happened before, in February 1919, when a general strike by the city's unions shut down the city for five days. The national guard was called in and set up sandbagged machine gun emplacements downtown. UW students were deputized and armed to quell the disorder of the citizenry peacefully saying no. That time, too, the mayor and the police decided what free speech meant. The city's civic hammer is not a new invention. The city should pay attention to the lawsuit. It just might learn something.

If you were arrested during the WTO protests and want to join the suit, contact Hagens Berman at 206-623-7292. Trial Lawyers for Public Justice is at www.tlpj.org.