>
> 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.
This may have added to the reasons for their overreaction, but this is completely off base when it comes to the root reason why the cops were understaffed. Seattle demonstrated that police departments across America didn't take activists seriously and as a result were undertrained and unprepared when real direct action was thrown at them.
> 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.
Bullshit. Seattle was mostly a combination of civil disobedience, attacks on corporate property, and a general riot. This was something that fell outside the usual protest-as-usual that had dominated American activism for decades. The no-business-as-usual dissent was what put Seattle on the map, not the banner drops and the union march.
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 cops may have gone around doing drills, but that doesn't change the fact that they didn't employ enough officers in the streets. This was because they didn't take activists seriously. The J18 riot in Eugene was on the minds of the Seattle police, but apparently not enough for them to plan accordingly.
> The young anarchists on their own break a few
> windows at most.
We're not just talking about a group of young anarchists. The anarchists that made up that black bloc were older than some leftists want to admit. That black bloc had also been planned very carefully--I've seen some of the planning maps for the Seattle black bloc.
> 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.
Again, you are completely wrong about this. The Seattle police got out of control when they were trying to deal with *nonviolent blockades*. The police were pepper-spraying and beating up the folks who were doing civil disobedience in the streets. The cops were too preoccupied with spraying pepper spray at people that they didn't have the manpower to go deal with the black bloc. Their overreaction against the protesters ended up pissing many of protesters off enough to the point where they ended up participating in the riots that night.
Chuck0