Despite all the rumors flying around the Occupy Seattle camp tonight, the Seattle Police Department sure didn't seem as though they were about to show up in riot gear and start cracking heads. As with last night, there were two police cars parked on either end of the park, and they made occasional announcements about trespassers in the park being subject to arrest. That van full of riot-gear clad cops, according to a handful of histrionic reports, was waiting around the corner, waiting to launch the attack at any moment. When I asked protesters to identify where they saw this van, they were unable to. I couldn't find it, after walking around the immediate area.
The spectre of (apparently nonexistent) riot cops was the most obvious symptom of an Occupy Seattle camp that's experiencing quite a bit of drama tonight. In response to the General Assembly that Brendan reported on, in which 84.3% of the protesters voted to take Mayor McGinn up on his offer to move to City Hall, other Occupy protesters later in the evening had a smaller assembly in which they rejected, by a less convincing margin, the move to City Hall. The protesters who rejected City Hall then tried to convince Occupy Seattle's media team that they represented the will of the movement, and that the media team should post a statement on their website that the offer has officially been rejected. The media team tried to reason with the anti-City-Hall contingent, but discussions quickly turned into an acrimonious standoff, with those ghostly riot cops used by the anti-City-Hall Occupiers as leverage to suggest that the city wasn't good to its word.
Everyone at the Occupy camp right now is tired, wet, and unhappy. Many of the protesters are looking forward to moving to City Hall, where they'll be able to sleep in the relative comfort of tents. Many others think the movement is about to be sold into irrelevancy. There wil be healthy debates tomorrow; I suspect that the majority will stick with the decision to move camp to City Hall at night and continue the protests at Westlake during the day. But I also don't think that tonight's band of fear-mongering rabble-rousers should be employed as a symbol by naysayers to "prove" that the Occupy Movement is fracturing, or losing its focus. I think it's just proof that they're human beings in a tremendously stressful situation. Everyone down there needs to get some rest; all these problems will seem a lot less insurmountable in the morning. The important thing is that they're still there. Nothing else matters.