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... police. Behind them, the labor parade moved away from downtown and back towards the Seattle Center, unmolested by police. Though Guard didn't know it, the unsuccessful police push was timed to herd people into the parade. However, as had been the case all day, the size of the crowds blocked movement and the police ceased advancing when the now-expanded and enlarged crowd could not fall back any further. As shown by Guard's relatively easy progress to within a block of the Convention Center, the reinforcements strengthened the moving blockade ringing the WTO conference.
The AFL-CIO parade delivered crucial reinforcements to the protesters, instead of sweeping them out of downtown. As marchers left the parade, this completely crushed any police fantasies that the demonstrators would abandon the downtown and return control of the streets to the police. Terrain of the Battlefield A dense, hilly area The police plan to reorganize for an attempt to force the Direct Action Network protesters out of the downtown area and into the AFL-CIO parade set in motion several different actions which had a dramatic effect on perceptions of the Battle in Seattle. In order to understand how these actions converged it is necessary to step back in time to around noon, when Assistant Chief Joiner was turning down requests to declare a civil emergency and cancel the AFL-CIO parade. The repeated attempts by police to establish a perimeter connecting the hotels, the Convention Center and the Paramount Theatre were blocked all day by the numbers of the protesters. The police command retained strategic cohesion, despite the discord at the top and the chaos in the streets.
Tactical orders from the command continued to be executed by the officers in the front line at all times -- they charged when ordered and reformed after each charge. Much attention has been given to excessive violence by officers, the repeated attacks on reporters and the assault by officers on Seattle City Councilman Richard McIver. These incidents were relatively commonplace, but did not involve loss of control by the upper command. Seattle political researcher Dan Junas cites the police ability to regulate the tempo of the street battles as strong evidence that the political leadership remained in control. "As the labor marchers approached, the police got off the gas, " said Junas.
The geography of the WTO conference site played a central role in determining the success of the protests. The accompanying 1996 USGS satellite photo show the field of battle and the significant features. First and most importantly, the Washington Trade and Convention Center is located on the edge of downtown. It is built over the I- 5 freeway and is accessible from only two sides. As a site for a blockade, it is perfect. The area is triangular, with the freeway side inaccessible.
The Direct Action Network blockaded the area along the north and west streets. The blockade was several blocks deep and concentrated on a dozen intersections. Secondly, the sites of two major skirmishes which dominated media attention, Capitol Hill and the Pike Place Market, had nothing to do with conducting the conference or moving delegates between the Convention Center, the Paramount Theatre or the downtown hotels. Likewise, the area in which the Black Bloc vandalism occurred is outside the blockade area and not part of the streets directly connecting the Convention Center with the Westin Hotel or the Paramount Theatre.
Capitol Hill and the Pike Place Market form two poles along the major axis of crowd mobility, the named streets which run northeast / southwest through the downtown. The Market is built on a steep bluff which formed Seattle's original shoreline. The bluff forms a geographic barrier which stops all movement towards the waterfront. Capitol Hill is a dense residential neighborhood -- the densest in the city. Broadway, the main street which forms the backbone of the Capitol Hill commercial district, runs north / south along the crest.
There is a steep change in elevation along Seattle's east-west axis running from the crest of Capital hill to the waterfront. The area immediately to the north of the convention center is predominantly open parking lots and small buildings, compared to the more densely built-up downtown. To the west, the long blocks of the avenues (7 th, 6 th, 5 th, ending in 1 st Ave) in the posh section of downtown form a barrier which channels movement into a few streets (Pike, Pine, Union and University). Blockades on these streets effectively shut off the area. The east and south sides of the Convention Center are cut off by the freeway. The geography of Seattle's downtown favors protesters To maintain effective control of the area, the police would have needed a perimeter roughly on the order of Thursday's "no protest zone. " Given the decision to rely on the Seattle Police alone, this lengthy perimeter was impossible to control with 400 officers.
The additional resources of county, state and federal forces would have been hard pressed to maintain such a perimeter in the face of the approximately 40, 000 protesters, demonstrators and parade participants present on Tuesday. On Wednesday, these additional police forces were available and the number of protesters was approximately halved. Even with this sizable shift in the numbers on opposing sides, the police were unable to effectively control the downtown. Amidst all the criticism -- mostly coming from law enforcement agencies which failed even more disastrously than the Seattle Police Department in maintaining order -- about the police's "lack of preparedness" for the demonstrations, the larger perimeter, increased security troops and suspension of civil liberties which accompanied the mayor's declaration of civil emergency failed miserably in the face of much smaller numbers of protesters on Wednesday. The geography of Seattle's downtown favors protesters. In the last decade, two major civil disturbances -- accompanying first the Gulf War protests and the "Rodney King" riots -- have followed much the same path over the same streets, as did the numerous protests during the Viet Nam war.
Given sufficient numbers and even the most hair-brained strategy, protesters have the ability to dominate the streets of Seattle. The Generals Panic State Patrol, National Guard rushing toward Seattle at top speed From about noon on, the Multi-Agency Command Center in the Public Safety Building began filling with top-ranking officials from government and law enforcement. Federal officials were speaking loudly about the consequences of not regaining control of the streets. State Patrol Chief Annette Sandberg described the federal officials as in a "kind of panicky mode. " The decision -- never seriously questioned by those in charge -- to guarantee the AFL-CIO parade took place had several requirements attached to it. First of all, the declaration of civil emergency was already in motion.
There wasn't really a question of whether it was going to happen, but only if the crackdown would catch the AFL-CIO parade before it withdrew from downtown. At 12: 45 PM, Governor Gary Locke authorized his chief of staff to begin preparing to call up the National Guard. An hour earlier, State Patrol Chief Annette Sandberg had ordered State Patrol troopers in Eastern Washington on higher alert and dispatched a 22 -member Civil Disturbance Team from Spokane to drive the 400 miles to Seattle. Traveling at top speed, they would not arrive before dark.
Shortly after Locke set the National Guard in motion, his office in Olympia received a telephone call from a furious Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Albright demanded the Governor immediately take action to release her from her hotel where she was trapped by the demonstrators. The Governor would later get strong pressure from Attorney General Janet Reno to crack down on the protests. Governor Locke was able to claim that he was taking action -- preparing to call up the National Guard, moving State Patrol troops over long distances and pressuring Mayor Schell to declare a civil emergency -- but all of these things would take time. What he did not do was accept full responsibility and declare a state of emergency. That was reserved for Schell and Stamper.
Locke's staff counsel began compiling a chronology of the Governor's actions for the now-inevitable inquest. Out of tear gas SPD Assistant Chief Joiner prepared more immediate action. The police attacks on the protesters reached a peak shortly before the parade departed from the Seattle Center. According to police sources, nearly all of the available tear gas was expended before the parade approached downtown. [ ] On the police radio, one police leader reported: "We " re surrounded, we " re out of tear gas and we " re withdrawing. " In the preparations for the protest, Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper had laid in stocks of about $ 20, 000 worth of gas.
This was one-fifth the amount recommended by federal officials. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, police officers "took matters into their own hands" to obtain new supplies of gas and pepper spray. More recent information suggests that the new supplies were part of Joiner's "messy" post-parade attack plans. Things quieted down while the police organized new supplies of gas and pepper spray. Officers sped to Auburn, Renton and Tukwila police departments, as well as the King County Jail and Department of Corrections, emptying munitions stores and ferrying the supplies back to downtown.
Other officers bought additional chemical agents from a local law enforcement supply business. Meanwhile, a police captain flew to Casper, Wyoming to pick up a large quantity of gas, "stinger shells" and other paraphernalia from Defense Technology Corp. , a subsidiary of Armor Holdings. The locally-obtained gas and pepper spray were driven as close to the street action as possible. The munitions were transferred into gym bags and knapsacks which were then run through the streets by plainclothes detectives One officer, told more gas is on the way, got on the radio to say: "Lieutenant, I love you now. " Other preparations did not go as well as the deliveries of tear gas and pepper spray. The declaration of civil emergency was delayed until 3: 24 PM, preventing police reinforcements from other law enforcement agencies and the National Guard from being legally deployed until long after the AFL-CIO march had withdrawn. Assistant Chief Ed Joiner's "messy" plan was also thwarted by the flat refusal of the Seattle Fire Department to turn fire hoses on demonstrators, a detail which was not reported in the press until long after the protests were over.
Black Blocs Run Amok The Black Blocs were in Seattle to radicalize the protesters and discredit the AFL-CIO While the police were regrouping and preparing to force the Direct Action Network protesters to join the AFL-CIO parade, several groups took advantage of the lull in the battle. They " ve all been lumped together into a nameless anarchist horde, but the fact remains there were two distinct groups acting out different agendas, not one "organized" anarchist conspiracy as the myth would have it. The first of these groups were the so-called "Anarchists from Eugene, " more correctly known as the "Black Bloc. " The media's tag-line of "Anarchists from Eugene" is one of those lazy half-truths which sums up media coverage of the entire protest. The half-truth is that people from Eugene participated in the Black Bloc, the other unreported half of the truth is that people from Seattle and the surrounding region committed most of the vandalism and nearly all of the looting. The lie was that the Eugene faction in the Black Blocs -- which numbered perhaps 40 people at most -- were responsible for the violence in the streets and that the vastly larger number of anarchists -- several thousand, at least -- participating in the non-violent demonstrations endorsed or followed the violent tactics of vandalism and property destruction which the Black Blocs committed. The message which still hasn't penetrated the media is that the Black Blocs accomplished an international coup of "culture jamming" by selectively targeting a handful of posh retailers for broken windows.
In committing this criminal vandalism, they conformed to pre-established media stereotypes of "violent anarchists" and effectively hijacked several weeks of coverage into a fantasy land which served their propaganda goals admirably. The primary target of the Black Blocs was not the WTO or the businesses whose windows were broken. The Black Blocs were in Seattle to radicalize the Direct Action Network protesters and discredit the AFL-CIO and their allies among the "mainstream" environmental groups. And that is precisely what they did -- with the significant assistance of the other wild card group, the out-of-control police who sought to escalate the violence. Speaking on an anarchist video, "RIP WTO N 30 ", one masked Eugene anarchist explained targeting the non-violent protesters: "Hopefully, we can come out here and give them a shove in a little more radical direction... I'm hoping that we can come out here and get crazy and fuck enough shit up that every city in the world knows that it can't host a WTO conference.
And it better give control back to the poeple of their own lives or else that city is going to get torn to pieces. After the protests, the same anarchist appeared unmasked on 60 Minutes II. He explained the use of masks: "We want to pose a credible threat to the biggest, most powerful people in the world. And if that's the kind of work you want to dao and you want to do it over your whole life, you have to be able to keep doing your work without quickly being apprehended and being sent away to jail for a long time. " It is worth noting that the police who were involved in unjustified use of force or outright criminal misconduct were also very concerned to protect the anonymity of the guilty parties. Undercover FBI agents mixed in with the anarchists At approximately 1 PM, the police temporarily stopped trying to push corridors through the protest area.
The "Black Bloc" anarchists had entered into an understanding with the Direct Action Network that they would refrain from vandalism at least as long as the protests remained peaceful. This is another way of saying that they were loosely following the lead of the DAN organizers while targeting the protesters to take the brunt of the reaction to their attacks. How loosely is shown by the fact the Black Bloc arrived downtown armed with hammers, crowbars, spray paint, M- 80 firecrackers and paint bombs. Their goal was a "propaganda of the deed" centering around vandalizing chosen stores -- Nike, Starbucks, the Gap, Old Navy and others -- which they saw as fitting targets. The Black Bloc was simply biding their time and waiting for an opportunity to vandalize these stores and then get away.
They had been closely monitored by the police and FBI since the preceding day. Early Tuesday morning, the FBI had briefed Seattle Police on the Black Bloc's whereabouts and activities. The close observation of the Black Bloc included undercover FBI agents dressed to blend in with the anarchists, right down to wearing masks to hide their faces. Also present in the streets were members of the Army's Delta Force, a paramilitary counter-terrorist group, dressed in civilian clothes to blend in with the protesters. According to KIRO TV, the Black Bloc rampage started on 6 th Avenue between Pine Street and Olive Way. Vandals smashed the windows of a Starbucks coffee shop in the middle of the block, then moved north towards Olive Way.
Turning west on Olive Way, they attacked the Sea First bank, then turned south on 5 th Avenue. Two or three stores along this block were vandalized. Emerging onto Pine Street, the Black Bloc turned again, moving west and attacking three or four more stores in the next two blocks. Reaching Third Avenue, the Black Bloc turned south and dispersed. The Seattle Times reported that the vandalism centered mail
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