The Plague of Police Violence: A Firsthand Account of the Battle in Seattle

by Kate Ryan Reiling, Macalester College student

The violence of the protests in Seattle plagues me. I am not talking about the 45 people out of the tens of thousands of protesters who took advantage of the situation to vandalize the city and who received more news coverage than they should have. I am referring to police violence.

Those of us planning to be among the group of protesters closing down the WTO on November 30, 1999, were strongly encouraged to attend a three-hour, intense nonviolence training. While the riot police were trained and armed (beginning in the summer of 1999) with tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets, protesters were learning the fine art of nonviolent protest based on human chains, lock-boxes and jail solidarity tactics.

So why did the police resort to violence? They did not use violence against the small group of people looting. The looters were left on their own, followed only by the media. In fact, the looters' impact was limited to helping the media frame the event as "violent," thus justifying police actions.

The newspapers state that the police "resorted" to their tactics to stop the violent protesters and this is a lie. Violence was used against nonviolent protesters. Some say that the police were not prepared to arrest this great number of protesters, that they had neither the personnel nor the facilities to do so-as though this justified the violence.

I do not understand this "unprepared" argument. The police had been training all summer and fall for the protest. They had enough riot police, national guards, secret service officers, tear gas, rubber bullets, batons and pepper spray, yet we are to believe that they "weren't prepared" for the protesters?

On the streets of Seattle, we chanted, "We're nonviolent, how 'bout you?" as the tear gas thrown by riot police tore at our throats. While a few of the trade delegates walked through the plastic shields toward the convention center, protesters cried tear-gas tears.

This article was excerpted from a longer article first published on December 3, 1999, by Macalester College's Mac Weekly.