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SEATTLE, WA WTO
"Though there's been a lot of talk about protests and demonstrations, without question these are overblown." -- Seattle Mayor Paul Schell on the upcoming WTO Ministerial Conference, October 1, 1999 * * * The first major protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle happened on my street, Broadway, the major shopping artery of the yuppie-gay-boho-student enclave known as Capitol Hill. It's Seattle's answer to St. Mark's Place, the Haight, Newbury Street, or Portland's Northwest 23rd: a strip of hip coffeehouses, apartments, and a Gap. "The freaks on Broadway" is an everyday part of Seattle parlance, and it's true -- despite the swift yuppification of the neighborhood, street punks and musicians feel at home here. On Sunday, November 30, 1999, I headed south down Broadway to get some Taco Bell and encountered a spirited march coming the other way. The sun was out, and demonstrators in their Seattle best (flannel and jeans) ambled down the middle of the street, waving signs: "Say No to WTO" and "Whose Trade Organization?" A few police were on the scene; at my intersection of Broadway and Roy, two officers and two protesters had teamed up to help direct traffic. "Can you please tell that car to turn over this way?" one protester shouted to a cop, and the cop said, "Sure thing, thanks." I tried to imagine this scene playing out in New York, where my wife Laurie and I had lived from August 1998 to August 1999, and could only laugh nervously. After all, in 1998, when thousands of peaceful marchers took to the streets of Manhattan to unite against the gay-bashing death of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, the NYPD advanced their horses into the crowd, injuring and arresting scores of people. And a few months afterward I, too, was arrested, for standing on the wrong side of a police barricade at a small Times Square protest against the bombing of Iraq. My arresting officer (who, after grimacing over his procedure book for 20 minutes, wrote my citation on the wrong form, invalidating it) told me, "I know this is America and it's a free country, but when a police officer tells you to move, you move." Seattle, of course, has problems of its own. For all its international acclaim as the birthplace of grunge, gateway to the Pacific Rim, and home of great coffee, Seattle hasn't been all that livable recently. Cities have personalities, and the Emerald City's politesse hides something darker underneath: here, everyone is an island. And it's not just the Microserfs who spend 24-hour stretches in their private offices adding new features to Windows 2002. Seattleites cut in line at the bank a lot, and they run red lights. These things aren't done out of any sense of civic malevolence, I think, but because each person spends most of the day believing that there is nobody else living in this town. Occasionally the question would nag at me: would it take something really ugly to bring the people of this town together? Still, it was good to be back. The feeling couldn't have been more different from New York -- hundreds of protesters had taken over a major thoroughfare to deliver a message against global capitalism, and the police were helping! Furthermore, in October when the City Council passed an overly broad anti-noise ordinance that threatened to prohibit megaphones at all demonstrations, Mayor Schell had vetoed it, saying, "This is not New York and I am not Giuliani." To be fair, Seattle has seen its own Rudy-style "quality-of-life" measures in the last few years. The Parks Exclusion Ordinance allows police officers to ban transients, teenagers, and other troublemakers from city parks without a trial. The Poster Ban prohibits people from tacking flyers to telephone poles. And the Teen Dance Ordinance makes it unlawful for a music club to serve alcohol and admit minors -- even if alcohol is restricted to a separate room. This means if you're under 21 in Seattle, your only choices for live music are Sheryl Crow at the Key Arena or 'N Sync at, um, the Key Arena. (That'll be $45, please.) I got lost among the marchers for a bit, enjoying the camaraderie, then made my way into the Taco Bell. The woman behind the counter looked frazzled. She was understaffed, she said, and people kept coming in to use the bathroom without buying anything. "I wouldn't mind," she said, "except that not one of them has had a kind word to say to me." So she declared the bathroom off-limits except to paying customers. A demonstrator wandered in and offered her a flyer. "Just thought you might want to know why we're out there." "I know why you're out there," said the cashier, "and I support you. I just wish you folks wouldn't be rude to me." The guy with the flyer looked horrified. "There's no call for that. You're working hard here. You deserve higher wages and benefits." The cashier smirked. * * * Monday night after work, the night before the start of the WTO conference, Laurie and I went to a free teach-in held at, yes, the Key Arena. The City of Seattle helped underwrite the event. The cynical could argue that this was done to keep protesters in the arena and not out on the streets, but it was one night before the conference had even started and a majority of the City Council had already declared their intention to march against the WTO. Onstage with local politicians was a who's-who of the anointed Left: Minnesota senator/single payer health care advocate Paul Wellstone, former Jane Fonda accessory Tom Hayden, thirty-gallon-hat-wearing Texas populist Jim Hightower, and former Dead Kennedy Jello Biafra. One of the speakers was Mayor Schell, who welcomed the protesters and advised the audience, "Be tough on your issues, but be gentle on my town." The "or else" was only implied. The next morning, by the time I got to the upscale kitchen gadget store where I work, downtown was starting to heat up. Two dozen placard-toting Santa Clauses ("Ho ho ho! No WTO!") poured out of the Pike Place Market. With a massive AFL-CIO march scheduled for around noon, downtown Seattle, which is usually quiet, was noisy and packed. Groups would coalesce, chant for a while, and dissolve to form new groups. Seattle police darted about like insects, watching and hovering. Almost everyone on the street looked like a hellraiser, in the positive Mother Jones sense. One of my co-workers who walked up the street on her break said it reminded her of when she was in high school in the sixties. As a police spokesperson later admitted, it was on Tuesday morning, before windows were broken and many blocks from the WTO meeting itself, that police fired the first tear gas canisters. The popular explanations for this ran along lines that would become familiar over the next few days: protests "threatened to become violent" and police were working long shifts without breaks. (Hey, next time they put me down for an evening shift at the store, I'm going postal with a spatula.) I have another explanation. The protesters were misusing downtown Seattle. Only two classes of people can typically be found downtown: shoppers and the homeless. With the exception of Benaroya Hall (the new home of the Seattle Symphony), all of the development in downtown Seattle since 1996 has been commercial: Nordstrom, Nike Town, Old Navy, the Meridian 16-plex cinema, and the opulent Pacific Place shopping center housing Tiffany & Co., Pottery Barn, Barnes & Noble. All of these new edifices are on the vaunted Pike/Pine corridor, which runs alongside the convention center -- which meant that if people wanted to demonstrate anywhere near the WTO conference, they would have to disrupt Seattle's shiny and officially touted commercial area. Mayor Schell was elected by downtown business interests, and all week long his mantra was, "Go downtown and shop, shop, shop." Now here had settled clouds of humanity with no particular place to go. These non-spending troublemakers would have to disperse. "It is unlawful for anyone to fail or refuse to obey an order proclaimed by me." -- Mayor Paul Schell, Declaration of Civil Emergency, November 30, 1999, http://www.cityofseattle.net/wto/mayorp.htm * * * Civil liberties in this town evaporated on Tuesday afternoon. The Mayor declared a curfew from 7 p.m. to dawn covering every block of downtown. (The curfew, he made clear, did not apply to merchants, shoppers, restaurant patrons, or WTO delegates.) So that demonstrators couldn't evade the escalating barrage of tear gas, he banned the sale or transport of gas masks within the city limits. Finally, he announced that he was calling in the National Guard in "an unarmed capacity." By the time I left work at 5:15 p.m., the streets were in slow-motion chaos. The riot cops, blank and anonymous behind their masks, had multiplied like the spiders they resembled. The uniform consisted of boots, a black chest protector, gas mask with twin filters, a shatterproof plastic visor, and a truncheon. Many officers carried bazooka-like tear gas cannons. Most did not wear visible badges or even, as it was revealed later, carry them. Former police chief Norm Stamper, who would later resign in the WTO aftermath, admitted that in the haste to get officers on the street, scores had been sent out without badges or identifying numbers of any kind. They were issued weapons: in addition to the usual tear gas and clubs, the police were well supplied with pepper spray and concussion grenades, which sounded through the streets like gunshots. The crowds of people being terrorized by these weapons were doing the same thing as those Sunday marchers on Capitol Hill: milling around in the street, although many of those hit never stepped off the sidewalk. The police were not making arrests: they simply deluged the crowd with gas, spray, and shock grenades. I watched a pair of officers high-five as a canister rolled into the crowd. Demonstrators had shown no signs of dispersing as the 7 o'clock curfew approached. So cops began a new tactic: using tear gas to drive the crowd eastward toward Capitol Hill. Protesters were pushed as far as Broadway and Pine, far outside the curfew zone, and the police continued to bombard them into the night. Reporters, demonstrators, and my own observations agreed on one fact: the police had not notified any downtown protesters that there was a curfew, and never ordered the crowd to disperse before letting loose with the gas. I figured that at least the worst was over. Then, late Tuesday night, word came in that the mayor was adding an additional 24-hour "no-protest zone" in the heart of downtown. * * * "This is our NEIGHBORHOOD. This is not BOSNIA. Police go HOME." -- Cardboard sign, Broadway and Roy, December 1, 1999 * * * With the no-protest zone in place, the stage had now been set for arrests to begin. Protesters who set foot into the zone were taken down by riot cops, loaded into vans, and driven to a temporary processing station at an old naval brig at the Sand Point Naval Station, miles northeast of the city center. I made it into work, although I had to walk most of the way since the buses weren't running. The store was entirely barren. The few customers who made it in received great service, but some of them were unable to leave the store in the afternoon because tear gas was flying on First Avenue between Pine and Stewart, half a block from the store. I opened the door around 4:30 p.m. to see what was going on and was rewarded with my first taste of gas. It was like the tears that well up when you chop onions, but the sting permeates the nose and lungs as well, and rubbing the eyes just makes it worse. And I'd gotten only a tiny dose, though that oversight would be remedied soon enough. I left work early to give myself time to walk home up Pine before the 7 p.m. curfew kicked in. My boss asked if I wanted to wear a chef's jacket home. "After all," he said, "who would attack a chef?" At Third and Pine police on horseback faced off with a defiant throng that didn't want to move. (NYPD, eat your heart out.) I stayed a moment to watch, and the cops began lobbing gas canisters. Now I was hit full-on. Reporters around the country have praised the Seattle Police for their "restraint," presumably in not killing any demonstrators. But there is nothing restrained about a tear gas onslaught. Tear gas drops you to the ground, writhing in pain. You are unable to breathe. Indeed, tear gas is advertised this way. "Within seconds your attacker gasps for air, sometimes immediately due to his surprise and the intense burning on his skin and eyes. The vapor, even in small amounts, causes constriction of the throat and tightness of the chest. Your attacker chokes and has difficulty breathing," promises one chemical deterrent wholesaler. Truth in advertising lives. I wondered if my restraint would be celebrated if I released this chemical weapon into a peaceful crowd. A few steps past the intersection, it got uglier still. In a scene that was later replayed often on local TV, a young woman, running from the tear gas, stumbled and fell on the sidewalk. Two people ran over to help her up. A cop, seeing this, stalked over, doused the three of them with pepper spray, and ran away. Eventually I pushed through to the quieter streets of the no-protest zone. (Why I was allowed in, I don't know. I wasn't even wearing a chef's jacket.) In front of the Paramount theater at Ninth Avenue I spied several flanks of Schell's "unarmed" National Guard troops. Perhaps he meant they would not carry firearms, but where I come from, if you're carrying a three-foot oak club, slapping it threateningly into your palm, you are armed and dangerous. On my TV back home, KIRO 7 focused on the last mass of protesters left downtown, an almost stereotypically peaceful group sitting in and singing songs at Third and Pine. Police had introduced a new tactic. Reporters called it the "wild weasel": cops drive around randomly at high speed in an attempt to disorient protesters. It looked liked World's Scariest Police Chases, minus anyone being chased. While demonstrators stood their ground at Third and Pine, the police were assembling their own show of unity at Fourth and Pike, just around the block. A TV reporter said that the police were planning to turn their full force on the protesters when the curfew deadline hit. It was 6:40 p.m. But minutes later, the protesters announced that they had come to a consensus: they would occupy the intersection until 6:45 p.m. and then leave downtown as a group. By 6:50 p.m. the group, several hundred strong, had begun moving north up Third toward Denny Way, the northern boundary of the curfew area. The cops followed a distance behind. The TV news stayed with the marchers as they turned right onto Denny and started the long walk up to Capitol Hill. It was now well after 7 p.m. and Laurie and I went out to get something to eat. Most of Broadway had closed down so that employees would have time to get home. The Gap and Starbucks were tightly locked up and barricaded after the targeting of their brethren by window-breakers downtown. (While the police and press wanted to make it seem like "no one could tell apart the good, peaceful protesters and the violent anarchists," in fact it was completely obvious: the window-breaking protesters were the ones breaking the windows.) As we reached Harrison Street, four blocks south of our apartment, we met up with the crowd we'd seen on TV. The leaders of the march were carrying a large sign reading "We are peaceful," and they were. We hung around with them for fifteen minutes, listening as marchers compared injuries and discussed their plans for the next day. One man, chosen to speak because of his powerful voice, asked the assembly if tomorrow they would join him at the King County Jail to demand the release of the 500 prisoners who had been arrested that day. There was a murmur of approval, and people began to disperse. A voice here and there called for a march on Capitol Hill's police precinct, but most were ready to call it a night. We headed to the Deluxe, a bar and grill half a block from our house at Broadway and Roy, which was still open. As we ate dinner we chatted with our waiter about the day's events. From our table next to the window we looked out onto the unusually quiet street. Suddenly we noticed a few people running up the street with their shirts pulled up over their faces. Tear gas. Then we heard the concussion grenades. We paid our bill and ran out to see what was going on, braving the wash of gas that hit us as we opened the restaurant door. A police helicopter buzzed overhead, and as we looked down the street, a line of riot cops materialized from out of the gas to look back at us. They were three deep marching up the street, flinging countless canisters and grenades at everybody nearby. A pair of armored personnel carriers pushed through, four cops hanging off each side. Capitol Hill is two full miles away from downtown, and at this time, about 9 p.m., not only was there no evidence of civilian violence, but I didn't see any protesters at all. The same corner where, a few days before, the police had calmly directed cars away from marchers had in an instant become a war zone, as the police went to battle against invisible protesters and neighborhood residents. Choking on tear gas, we hurried into our apartment as riot vehicles zoomed by our front door. During the week, the AFL-CIO had been running a TV ad about fair trade in which they said, "When the U.S. deals with repressive foreign governments, our own people suffer," and accompanied this with scenes of the military in an unnamed country (Indonesia? Nigeria?) cracking down on civilians. My street looked much scarier than the scenes in this commercial. Concussion grenades sounded like bombs and flashes of light tore through the darkness. We watched out the windows as the police parked an armored vehicle on our corner and flanked it with officers. When our neighbors started to gather on the sidewalk across from them, we went back out to join in shouting for the police to leave our home. Ten minutes later, the police pushed back down the street, again beating and gassing as they went. The last battery of gas and grenades didn't end until 2:20 a.m. Some of what happened on Broadway that night I had to see on the news. An officer kicked a pedestrian in the groin, stabbed at him with his baton, then shot a beanbag point-blank into his chest. Yes, a beanbag gun. The weaponry kept getting more bizarre. Another policeman proudly displayed his newest instrument, a bomb full of tiny capsules of pepper spray, perfect for drenching a whole crowd from a distance. A man came out of his home to shout, "We are residents here!" He got a heavy dose of pepper spray to the eyes, courtesy of his local peace officer. A cop ordered two art students with a video camera to roll down their car window so he could talk to them, then sprayed them directly in the face. In the midst of all this, I did the first thing that came to mind in an emergency -- I called 911. "I'm at Broadway and Roy and the police are rioting here," I yelled at the operator. "For God's sake, do something." "Good night, sir," he said, and hung up. * * * On Thursday I called in sick and went out to see if Broadway was still there. It was. Like all good instruments of torture, tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades leave no scars, although leftover canisters were quickly scavenged for souvenirs. Since that unusual week in December, life in Seattle has crept back toward what it was like in the pre-WTO days, but not all the way back. The Independent Media Center, a downtown collective of progressive journalists, edited together camcorder coverage from hundreds of sources into a documentary, "Showdown in Seattle." Every showing has sold out. The City Council held a public forum at Seattle Center where people could air their grievances; it turned into the largest council meeting in Seattle history and lasted long after midnight. The Seattle Times took a poll and asked a random sampling of Seattleites who they thought conducted themselves most appropriately during WTO week. Citizens gave their highest praise, well ahead of the mayor, police, or businesses, to the peaceful protesters. So why did the police invade Capitol Hill? I've heard a muddle of reasons, none convincing. One theory holds that a protester kicked a car (in some versions of the story, it's a police car, in others not). The police, for their part, said they'd heard eyewitness reports that people were filling Molotov cocktails at a local gas station and anecdotal reports that people were threatening to take over the East Precinct office. Please. If you were a Molotov cocktail-flinging type (and really, what better way to invoke the image of bomb-throwing Bolsheviks than to introduce Molotov cocktails into the story?), wouldn't you let it fly during the mayhem that ensued? Well, no one did. Police claim that protesters threw bottles, but I didn't see that, either. And as for the intended occupation of the East Precinct, remember: the band of protesters that made their way up Denny was chockablock with TV and radio reporters. A large group dotted with reporters does a lousy job of keeping secrets. If more than one person in that crowd intended to take over a police station (one several blocks from where the protesters ended up marching to) everyone would have heard about it -- and vetoed it -- within minutes. My pet theory? The night was still young on Wednesday when the police cleared downtown. After gearing up for a showdown with the sit-in at Third and Pine, the group had the audacity to peaceably shuffle off to environs outside the curfew area. The cops had a huge arsenal of crowd control weaponry left. They were all dressed up, and the party was leaving. So why not invent some Bolsheviks and raise the specter of a precinct takeover as an excuse to go up to the Hill for some old-fashioned head-cracking fun? I don't have any proof for this scenario, but, then, neither did the police for theirs. As more revelations trickle in, people remain furious. My new hero is Seattle's fire chief, James Sewell, who recently confirmed that he was ordered by Mayor Schell to send firefighters to turn their hoses on demonstrators. Sewell called the suggestion "disgusting" and refused. The mayor backed down. Aside from the moment of terror whenever I hear a siren and the welling up of rage when I see a cop on Broadway, Capitol Hill has come through a better neighborhood for our night of terror. A lot of us are walking around these days proud of each other for not dispersing when told to do so, and sometimes we even butt into conversations between strangers and say hello when we could just as easily avert our eyes and pretend that here in Latte Central, our fates are bare and solitary branches, never crossing. 
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