"The police presence was outrageous. There were hundreds and hundreds of police with tear gas and rubber bullets," a woman with short blond hair said angrily. "[They were] banging their billy clubs on their shin guards, intimidating people."
Marlin Hathaway, a representative of Not in Our Name Seattle (NION), said the cops' "Darth Vader suits" created an "extremely repressive situation." He added, "I have to ask the question, what happened to the First Amendment?"
As far as I could tell, the First Amendment was alive and well all week during the antiwar protests. Protesters controlled the Federal Building's plaza for a week. They were able to march around downtown whenever they wanted, as long as they told cops in advance which streets should be cleared. And they even marched unpermitted a few times--like the night the U.S. began bombing Baghdad--with police quickly escorting the marchers. Only a handful of people were arrested all week, and there were no significant injuries.
In fact, when I left downtown on Saturday, March 22--the day of a police-protester standoff on First Avenue--I had written in my notebook that the police were calm and patient all day long. Yes, there were arrests, but the half dozen that I observed came after people pushed the police or yelled in their faces--and they were arrested with minimal force. And yes, protesters were corralled downtown, but that made sense--after all, the group organizing the day didn't hide the fact that it intended to shut down downtown. The police did their job when faced with an unpermitted march that took the streets unlawfully--they kept it under control.
While protesters have every right to make a statement by marching in the street unpermitted--and more power to them if they strive to shut down the city--they also have to face the potential consequences. The cops might arrest people. That's the whole point of civil disobedience: You break a law (e.g., march in the street without a permit) and you get arrested. Whining about the police later isn't part of the equation.
But protesters are whining anyway. In the wake of Seattle's disappointing protests, the city is caught up in a protester-police conflict. That's off base, for two reasons. First, the police were professional and accommodating--as one officer put it, "We made concession after concession to let these people do things they weren't permitted to do"--leaving the protesters with little to legitimately complain about. Second, squabbling about the police--and holding press conferences about the cops in the middle of antiwar protests, as activists did on March 26--distracts everyone from the real issue, the war in Iraq.
"It always seems like [they] can't make their cause the issue, so they make the police the issue," says police union president Ken Saucier, who called Licata after the hearing to give a cop's perspective on the protests. Take it with a grain of salt if you will, but Saucier's cop analysis seems on target--the activists haven't been very successful at protesting the war (especially since it started: Only 3,000 showed up the day after the war started, while 20,000 marched against war in February), but in the past week they've gotten plenty of attention for complaining about the police.
Unfortunately, many of their complaints are blown out of proportion, such as likening Saturday's police response to 1999's WTO cop crackdown. The way the activists tell it, downtown Seattle was a war zone (snipers on the roofs! police holding crowds hostage for hours!), and the police took every chance they had to brutalize antiwar activists. "We are not the problem. We are the victims," activist Margaret Viggiani told Licata.
Was I at a different protest? The biggest problems I saw were due to the protesters: Saturday's march got messy because organizers refused to compromise and get a permit--a city requirement if you plan to take over the streets and hamper other people's plans, like driving to work.
NION, running Saturday's protest, wanted a permit to wind its way through downtown, close multiple arterials, and muck up traffic. The police, predictably, suggested a neater route with less traffic impact. But NION organizers stuck to their guns, and kept their "snake" plan--even though the cops wouldn't permit it.
Saturday's confrontations might have been avoided if NION had been straightforward with the activists who showed up about how organizers walked away from negotiations with the police and left things on confused terms. Folks might not have taken to the streets if they knew cops were ready to stop NION's plan to shut down traffic.
Unfortunately, most of the crowd didn't know, so a lot of people freaked out and started screaming at the cops who showed up, escalating the situation.
NION has yet to publicly explain the whole story. At Tuesday's hearing, when Licata specifically asked the NION rep whether the plan was to block the streets, he didn't get an answer. Instead, another activist talked about snipers.
Then Tuesday night's discussion degraded into complaints about cops' uniforms and the crowd-control directions police gave (like which way to enter the Federal Building plaza). Some even had the nerve to blame police for the low protest attendance. "Somewhere, a political decision was made to stifle dissent in Seattle, to make it so people were afraid to come out," NION's Hathaway said.
