Apparently ChuckO's "debunking hat" is a little tight. He writes:
"Overstressed police officers? This is the first time I've heard this theory! In fact, the police over-reaction was caused by an inexperienced police force which, like many police forces across the country at that time, didn't take activists seriously."
No indeed. The police forces in the Puget Sound region went completely mental before the protest. Cops were deployed from every regional department and many cops had been working days of eighteen-hour shifts before the marches even started. If anything, they over-deployed. You would have thought it was an Al Qaeda convention they were being asked to police.
ChuckO continues:
"The police had enjoyed a long period where activists actively cooperated with them, or simply organized protests so tame and predictable that the police didn't take them seriously."
Seattle was, overwhelmingly, exactly that kind of protest. The planned acts of non-cooperation (draping huge banners on buildings, stopping traffic on I-5) had practically been rehearsed, for Pete's sake. The cops had been running around doing drills for days. Of course, in the actual event the cops ran around like mad trying to stop that stuff but what the cops were really afraid of - and what they over-reacted to - was what they had seen in Oregon when young, local anarchists acted up and ended up encouraging a bunch of kids to riot. The young anarchists on their own break a few windows at most. The cops' over-reaction and inability to effectively deal with rock-throwers and the like not only failed to stop the spread of violent behavior, but inflamed it.
Chuck writes that "Seattle was a culmination of those factors, plus the militarization of police forces which had been happening throughout the Clinton years."
I completely agree with the point about militarizing of police forces. The attitude and tactics were purely military and not policing at all, thus useless. The Seattle cops even recapitulated their mistake of useless military-style overdeployment and failed to control a Mardi Gras gathering that turned into a riot in which a young man was killed. Far, far larger crowds are policed by far fewer cops per capita all the time. The real experts are in England but New York, New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale and the small departments that handle yearly events like the Sturgis rally and Bike Week can handle crowds very well. "Inexperience" is no excuse when there is plenty of time for planning, crowd control methods are well-understood and training is available. Official Seattle said they "weren't ready" for WTO. Truth is they prepared and failed miserably.
When I say:
> I believe also that the coming adoption of the euro had something to do
> with the WTO protests. The anti-globalization protest movement is really
a
> European phenomenon, by and large, and the European protests were a model
> for the Americans in Seattle.
ChuckO says:
"What a bunch of nonsense. The EU may be a motivator in protests since N30, but the J18/N30 protests of 1999 came out of several national struggles, most importantly the anti-roads campaign that spawned Reclaim the Streets."
Well, first of all, RTS is primarily a European group - certainly it started in Europe - so my point obviously stands. Second, apparently you don't understand the meaning of the words "had something to do with" and how they are different from "caused".
peace,
boddi