No cops at White Center Pride’s annual street festival (WCP) tomorrow.

“We’ll get right to the point,” the non-profit’s board of directors wrote in an email to its community Thursday night, “we heard you, and there will be no cops at White Center Pride. Our mission is to create spaces that are safe, joyful, and affirming for our entire LGBTQ+ community — especially for those who have historically been marginalized, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, disabled, and youth voices.”

WCP also posted a version of the statement on Instagram. (Share away).

 

The change will be minor compared to years past. White Center Pride Committee President Eliot Hills says officers have never been posted up at White Center Pride. But historically, Seattle Police Officers and King County Sheriff’s Deputies have walked through the event and checked in with its security team. They won’t be doing that this year.

Two law enforcement booths have also pulled out. SPD’s Community Service Officer Program and The Seattle Office of Police Accountability voluntarily withdrew when the White Center Pride Committee shared concerns from the community.

Hills says emails about cops, and cop behavior at the right-wing Christian supremacist rally at Cal Anderson over Memorial Day weekend, started trickling in a few days ago. By Thursday, the emails were flooding in. 

“All saying similar things,” he says: People felt unsafe and that a police presence conflicted with White Center Pride’s mission to create an “inclusive space for all.”

The shift comes after police violently cracked down on protesters outside of an anti-LGBTQ Christian Supremacist rally on Capitol Hill. Extremism experts and academics who study the Christian right told The Stranger that the Mayday USA #DontMessWithOurKids rally on May 24th was part of an intentionally provocative strategy to use conflict with the local queer community as evidence of “anti-Christian bias,” one of President Donald Trump’s pet issues. 

After it lost control of the crowd, SPD defaulted to violence against protesters. Officers arrested 23 of them at the first rally at Cal Anderson, and another eight at the rally at City Hall. Seattle Police Officers Guild President Mike Solan blamed SPD mismanagement at Cal Anderson on staffing and portrayed the conflict as the inevitable consequence of letting a “peaceful group” demonstrate in Cal Anderson Park, which he called “Antifa land.”

At tomorrow’s street festival, WCP’s Hills says public safety is still an important concern. White Center Pride has hired a trained “community-based safety team” of unarmed LGBTQ people and allies experienced in deescalation, accessibility and support. It’s coordinated with the Seattle Fire Department in case of a medical emergency. White Center Pride also has a rudimentary first aid tent (for boo-boos, not emergency care).

“Things like band-aids,” Hills says. “We’re not applying them. It’s just, ‘You need a band-aid, here you go.”’

WCP also has a “Resources & Resistance” area for non-profits, community organizations, and mutual aid programs, including Queer Trans Combat Arts Seattle, Ingersoll Gender Center (with guides for name and gender marker changes in King County), Queer Scouts Seattle, Entre Hermanos, the Fair Work Center and Courageous Constellations, which provides resources for family planning and second parent adoption.

Vivian McCall is The Stranger's interim Editor-in-Chief. In her private life, she is a musician and Wii U apologist. If you’re reading this, you either love her or hate her.

13 replies on “No Cops at White Center Pride Saturday, Board Says”

  1. We saw a lot of videos, but not one has been singled out as showing SPD violence against the Mayday protestors at Cal Anderson. Please provide the link if I’m wrong.

  3. “After it lost control of the crowd, SPD defaulted to violence against protesters.”

    I’ve heard this complaint percolating since the event; what exactly should the police have done to “keep control of the crowd”? Also, do the violent protestors have any agency or responsibility for their actions? I’ve not yet heard that the police “started” the violence.

  4. At big public events, cops are like porta-potties — nobody has anything good to say about them until they really need one

  5. The Seattle police’s actions at the Cal Anderson rally were nothing short of heroic. Let’s be grateful they put themselves on the line to support everyone’s right to free speech—not just one “team”.

  7. I seriously doubt this action represents the views of the majority of the community. Once again a loud and vocal minority activists have bullied an organization into making a decision that actually does reduce public safety for their event in the name of performance virtue signaling. I pray that nothing bad happens at the event because if it does the harm caused will solely be laid at the feet of this committee and they should be sued for everything they own for caving into a bunch of boorish miscreants.

  8. They do realize that White Center isn’t in Seattle, right? No, I didn’t read the article. My eyes rolled so far back in reaction to that headline that it took me a few minutes to recover.

    I am just thankful my days of involvement in Pride events are long over. The endless stupid arguments and dramas bring out the worst in people.

  9. @3 — “Also, do the violent protestors have any agency or responsibility for their actions?”

    According to The Stranger, whose longstanding editorial position is that those who engage in criminal behavior should always be prioritized over the law abiding, no. This presents a bit of a problem when you have an utterly corrupt administration in DC who is constantly committing crimes, but The Stranger resolves it by deciding that the people that they don’t like should be held accountable by the legal system but the people they do like shouldn’t. Which is identical to Trump’s position.

    Horseshoe theory in action.

  10. Considering the not insignificant risk that some fundamentalist yahoo will want to attack the pride festivities I don’t understand how keeping the police away helps make the event “safe, joyful, and affirming for our entire LGBTQ+ community.”

    Without the police there it seems this just becomes a target rich environment for some religious wacko like Mohamed Sabry Soliman.

  12. @10 Oh don’t worry, they’ve announced “a trained team of LGBTQ+ folks and allies will handle safety, focusing on de-escalation”!

  13. A bunch of MAGA red hats showed up apparently from what my friends said and walked around but nothing bad happened.

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