But the current template for protest — to show up in full riot gear on day one — goes back to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Initial reports suggested the protesters were violent and out of control from the start, and that the city was woefully unprepared. In truth, while the protesters did engage in civil disobedience, they were overwhelmingly nonviolent. There was some property damage, but even the vandals, looters, and anarchists never turned violent. There were no fatalities, and fewer than 100 injuries. The most serious injury was broken arm.
If anything, the city may have been over-prepared. The cops had been given hundreds of hours of training, and may have gone into the event with the mindset that violence was inevitable. A Seattle City Council investigation later found that the police who handled the event were panic-stricken from the start, and had been put on edge by exaggerated crowd estimates and unfounded rumors, such as that protesters were throwing Molotov cocktails. (This wasn’t true.) In 2004 the city of Seattle paid out a financial settlement with 157 protesters who had been illegally arrested. In 2007 a federal jury found that the city had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of 170 more.
For my book, I also interviewed Norm Stamper, Seattle’s police chief during the WTO protests. Stamper now calls the crackdown one of the worst mistakes of his career. “We gassed fellow Americans engaging in civil disobedience,” Stamper says. “We set a number of precedents, most of them bad. And police departments across the country learned all the wrong lessons from us. That’s disheartening. So disheartening. I mean, you look at what happened to those Occupy protesters at UC Davis, where the cop just pepper sprays them down like he’s watering a bed of flowers, and I think that we played a part in making that sort of thing so common—so easy to do now. It’s beyond cringe- worthy. I wish to hell my career had ended on a happier note.”
