Police Attack N30 Protest, Shut Down Evening Concert

For the last two years, activists in Seattle and around the world have considered November 30--that glorious day in 1999 when up to 70,000 people shut down the World Trade Organization here--as a permanently special day. Now, we know what was only somewhat obvious last year: the City of Seattle, and the Seattle Police Department, feel the same way. And when they celebrate the holiday, the constitution isn't invited.

Organizers for a daytime march and rally had fought the city for months to get a permit for Westlake Park. Finally, on the afternoon of November 29, they won--in the words of organizer Vanessa Lee, "We kicked the city's ass." That's because when N30 activists applied for the permit in July, they were denied on the grounds that the city had already granted a weeks-long permit to the Downtown Seattle Association (a trade group of big downtown businesses) to operate its holiday carousel in part of the park. Only one problem: the city lied. They hadn't issued the permit at all, and on the basis of this treachery, Thursday afternoon the federal judge ripped the city a new asshole to replace outgoing mayor Paul Schell. The permit was granted.

That should have been the end of it. Wrong. A crowd of some 400 gathered Friday afternoon at SCCC to march downtown--an act of protest done ritually in Seattle at least once a month, and one that in fact the same organizers and most of the same activists had done, with no permit, only three weeks previously when the WTO's Qatar meetings opened on Nov. 9.

That event was a peaceful march and rally casually monitored by a handful of bike and traffic cops. On Friday, the same protesters were outnumbered by hundreds of riot cops and bike cops, helicopters, paddywagons, and a heavy concentration of badly dressed undercover cops. And a completely peaceful event turned very, very ugly when police refused to allow the group to march in the street or on its planned route.

Instead, protesters were funneled, by rows of bike cops, onto the sidewalks, and forced down Pine Street and downtown, with routine intervals in which police would push roughly into the crowd for no apparent reason. (I've been going to these sorts of protests for 25 years, and I have never been pushed around so often by the police--and in this case I was an inert observer, clearly marked as a mainstream media reporter.) In a bizarre twist, the city then gave marchers a permit to move up to Town Hall after their rally (a rally ringed on all sides by a lot of cops in riot gear brandishing weapons). And then, at Nike Town, they pushed into the crowd again, shoving them entirely off the sidewalk; one officer snarled that "you have a permit for the street; you're not allowed anywhere else." Anywhere?

In all, "only" 13 people were arrested, entirely in ones and twos, often on ludicrous grounds. In one case, two peacekeepers separating the cops from the enraged crowd were pulled back by cops, thrown to the ground, and hauled away. In another, someone who paid to get on the carousel held up an anti-WTO sign, and was promptly arrested. Other sidewalk marchers pushed around and then arrested were charged with "pedestrian interference." (Think about it.) In another case, two anarchists burned a plastic U.S. flag and were arrested. The Supreme Court, you'll recall, in Johnson v. Texas, ruled such acts legal--the plaintiff in that case, Joey Johnson, was a personal friend, and I was there for the case. But court rulings didn't matter a whole lot to Seattle's "finest" on Friday. Neither did the Bill of Rights.

City leaders, SPD, and the DSA, predictably, hailed the day as a policing success--few arrests (compared to last year's en masse roundup of marchers at day's end, for which all charges were later dropped) and no property destruction. But it could easily have been a bloody riot; such a fate was avoided not because of the cops, but in spite of them. Heroic organizers, peacekeepers, and other protesters repeatedly defused situations involving incensed people who thought they lived in a nominally free country. The cops were itching for a fight, and to prove their manhood. They lost on both counts. Next time, given the rage they engendered this time, they might be less lucky; at least a few people last Friday probably would have started shooting if they'd been packing.

The city's bullying tactics during the day were at least somewhat covered by local media. However, what wasn't covered was that SPD pulled the same stunt, with far less justification, in shutting down a celebratory, anarchist-sponsored punk rock show that evening at Secluded Alley Works near Seattle U. Mea Culpa was on stage, and fewer than 100 people were in the crowd, when police came in at 10 PM, threatening to arrest promoter Matt Leonard and confiscate all equipment unless the concert was shut down and the crowd disbanded.

At least one cop made clear that there had been no noise complaint, but SPD officers, even at the invitation of Mea Culpa's lead singer to come up onto the stage and explain themselves, would not say what their justification was. They didn't need to; a scout soon reported back to the crowd that there were, in the words of singer Vanessa Veselka of the Pinkos (the headline act), "six unmarked vehicles, each full of three or four cops as well as two SUVs with tinted shades, each full of a whole bunch of cops, circling the front very slowly ... eight paddywagons parked in the school parking lot, as well as other police cars parked around the corner ... and about 60 cops around the corner heading our way." It was no noise complaint.

For the daytime demonstration, the city at least had a few fig leaves for its behavior: there was no march permit, the event had a previous history (in a much larger crowd later in the day last year, when organizers could not plan due to lack of a permit) of property damage, and downtown businesses wanted protection. None of these excuses justifies denying people freedom of speech or the right of assembly, but they're more than SPD can use to explain the music show shutdown. Noise was not a problem; capacity was not a problem. The politics of the people in the crowd was the "problem," just as it was during the day. "They shut it down for political reasons," Veselka says flatly. After having survived the tense, hour-long march down Pine Street, Peace Action's Fred Miller put it another way: "We have an outlaw city."

"We have less intelligence than ever before."

Expect more of it. Even as cops were using their bikes as weapons against tightly packed, furious, impotent protesters, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was advocating "relaxing" restrictions on FBI spying upon (and, presumably, law enforcement harassment of) groups targeted for their religious and/or political beliefs. A "Security Alert" sent out before N30 by the DSA summed up their quandary: "We have less intelligence than ever before."

If the statement refers to data, not IQ, "they" don't, of course; they have files on everyone in the country a mile long and a hard disk wide. And in SPD's escalation of previously ugly tactics unveiled at August's Reclaim the Streets demonstration and last year's N30--but completely absent on Nov. 9--one thing was made abundantly clear: the city does not give a fuck about the courts, the constitution, or your rights. Seattle considers itself the arbiter of whether to consider you covered by the "freedoms" of this country, depending on who you are, where you are, what day it is, what you look like, and whether you think that being covered by the city's idea of "freedom" requires a good shower to scrub off the dog shit.

SPD was able to engage in these tactics solely because they could outnumber protesters. The obvious solution, for those of us concerned about our freedoms of speech, assembly, and so forth, is to assemble and speak, peacefully, clearly, and in much larger numbers. Whether it's for a local version of the tentatively scheduled large springtime national anti-war rally, or for N30 2002, we need to gather in much, much bigger crowds to stand up for our rights. And a sizable number of us should come fully trained in nonviolent civil disobedient tactics, expecting arrest and prepared to stand our ground in any confrontation.

After all, as we've heard repeatedly, we're in a war.