GEORGE P. HICKEY
Police nab another protester.
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"WE KNEW this would happen," said Reclaim the Streets organizer Kenny Cryst as Seattle police corralled the event's remaining protesters together just before dispersing them once and for all last Saturday night. "But we didn't expect it to be this big. We didn't expect it to be this aggressive."
Cryst and others had tried to bring together anarchists and people from the goth and rave communities to march to an undisclosed location and block off traffic for an unpermitted street party with DJs and dancing. The group sponsoring the event, Reclaim the Streets, is part of an international movement that began in Europe to create a "festival of resistance" to a consumer and car culture that organizers believe overly dominates urban public space.
But the party never happened, as over 90 police corralled roughly 200 protesters into a meandering march that almost never left sidewalks or crosswalks. Instead of "reclaiming" a public street, the event ended up at the same park where it began hours before, dispersed by a police department whose behavior was praised by the mayor but condemned by participants, who claimed that they had done nothing wrong.
The night of the protest, Mayor Schell said the police reaction showed that "We're not going to tolerate unlawful conduct on our streets—period." But Schell failed to offer much detail about what the city's zero tolerance policy had looked like that day.
According to National Lawyers Guild legal observer Legrand Jones, while the police response didn't surprise him, "it was definitely heavy-handed."
Witnesses claim that police arrested jaywalkers and sent one to jail overnight for obstruction because he argued about his arrest; physically interfered with photographers documenting arrests; confiscated videotape taken of the event; repeatedly pepper-sprayed marchers who were complying with police orders; deployed pepper spray without warning to clear sidewalks; and forced the entire group on a long march out of downtown back to Denny Park by surrounding them with bike cops and then pushing them forward with horse-mounted policemen. A couple of windows were broken at downtown chain clothing stores and 18 protesters were arrested, but no injuries were reported.
Among the group marching back to Denny Park at sunset was Frank Zucker, a protester carrying the same 10-foot-high puppet—named "Sunny"—that he had begun the evening with. But Sunny hadn't fared so well in the march and was now headless as Zucker carried him along. According to Zucker, Sunny was decapitated by a mounted policeman who objected to the slow pace with which the crowd had been leaving downtown—a victim of Seattle's declining tolerance for street protests.
Trevor Griffey
info@seattleweekly.com
