- The Stranger
- Who is this guy? He wouldn’t say who he was, and when I tried to take a photo, he jutted his elbow at me and ran.
On the night of December 8, a band of 15 protesters marched two blocks, from Niketown to Westlake Park in downtown Seattle. One man’s cardboard sign read “Shut It Down,” and some protesters said they were out to draw attention to the “intersectionality of capitalism and racism.”
When the group arrived at Westlake, a man wearing a Seahawks jacket and an orange cap approached them, joking with police officers as he did so, and began taking photographs of the protesters. Was he a cop? If so, he would presumably be familiar with Seattle Police Department policy, which reads: “If demonstrators are not acting unlawfully, police can’t photograph them.”
There’s a reason for this regulation. In 1979, Seattle became the first city in the country to pass a “police intelligence ordinance” that prohibits information-gathering on law-abiding political protesters…