May 1: Eyewitness Report of May Day Mêlée

author : Eyewitness topic : Police

by Eyewitness Report

May 1: Eyewitness Report of May Day Mêlée

Just before Works In Progress went to press, we were given the following account of the events that followed the downtown Olympia May Day Rally.

Most people know what to expect from May Day in Olympia. Music, dancing, marching (usually without a permit). Food Not Bombs serving from a big tub of soup. A festival, both to celebrate Beltane, and in honor of those who died so we could have a weekend, overtime pay, and an end to child labor. In recent years, this has been complimented with May Day’s additional focus as an immigrant rights day, and with it a focus on multilingualism and the ongoing ICE raids.

All went as expected for most of the day. Indeed, there was music. There was dancing. There was marching (with a legal permit, this year). There were invited speakers, talking about things ranging from the Longshore work stoppage, to the proposal before the Olympia City Council to establish Olympia as a Sanctuary City for war resisters and immigrants.

At about 2 p.m., the crowd marched from Sylvester Park to the Capitol Building, with police never far behind. The exorbitant number of State Troopers at the Capitol Building, however, couldn’t stop a few individuals from tagging the interior walls with anarchist graffiti.

The vandalism was an immediate source of contention within the group. Open and at times heated debates were held, right there in the State Capitol Building, in front of State Troopers and bystanders. Some defended the actions of the vandals, pointing out that the desecration of government property in no way compares to the violence carried out by that government domestically and abroad. Others, on the other hand, suggested the behavior turns people away, and cited it as the reason the immigrant community no longer comes to May Day in Olympia.

The march continued, first to City Hall, and then down 4th Ave. Upon reaching U.S. Bank at 4th and Capitol, a contingent of marchers began hurling rocks at the unsuspecting bank. Two windows were broken, despite the lone security guard’s fervent attempts at shouting down the crowd. Since the action was totally unexpected by everyone around, the march simply continued along its planned route, and none of the rock-throwers were identified.

The march turned down 5th Avenue, which runs between Heritage Bank and Bank of America. Once again, people from somewhere in the crowd threw rocks toward BoA. This time, several bank windows were broken.

By now, OPD had mobilized, and soon after the window smashing at BoA, several cops swarmed in. But their strategy was not to find the people actually throwing the rocks; They had arrived a moment too late to do that. Hence, their strategy was apparently to grab anyone who looked (to them) like they could have thrown rocks, or more precisely, anyone they could pin this vandalism on. People were singled out of the crowd, dragged into the street and arrested. Not even staying on the sidewalk kept people safe. Cops on bikes swarmed around the crowd, nearly running people right over. Undercover police emerged, pointing their pistols at unarmed protesters. In the end, six people were arrested.

As the remaining crowd made its way to OPD Headquarters to await the release of the arrestees, the Olympian was hard at work using the riot to further its own agenda. An online article posted at 4:30 pm on the Olympian website made a point to connect the rock-throwing with some of the guest-speakers invited by march organizers - specifically, the guest-speakers asking people to attend the next City Council meeting to persuade city government to adopt the Sanctuary City proposal. Witnesses report seeing Olympian reporter Christian Hill asking several people outside OPD headquarters if they thought the “violence” at the banks would reflect badly on the Sanctuary City proposal. The Olympian also characterized the march as "disrupting traffic," even though organizers had actually gone through the system this year to acquire a legal permit.

This should not be surprising, as the Olympian is routinely nothing more than an unpaid P.R. firm for OPD. Solicitations for information involving the Valentines Day riot at Evergreen are routinely placed on the front page, despite their insurmountable bias and non-existent news value.

People will undoubtedly be talking about this May Day riot for years to come, both in our peace and justice community, and in the Olympia community at large. Much of the discussion in the greater community will, sadly, be mediated by the Olympian, at the expense of those who would stand up to imperialism, corporatism, and police brutality.

Indeed, there is no justification in comparing the violence perpetrated by these outposts of imperialism and capitalism, both domestically and globally, and a few smashed windows. Nor is the smashing of windows (i.e., attacks on corporate property) a justification for police to attack innocent bystanders (to speak nothing of their failure to bring BoA to justice for its crimes).

But does any of this mean smashing windows at a May Day protest is strategically sound? Asking 20 different people from the local anti-imperialist community will get you 20 different answers. Some will rightly point out that tactics need to be escalated if we are to do more than spin our wheels endlessly, while others will point out that needing to do something does not mean that all action is wise. Some will point to the bad press this will undoubtedly bring on all our efforts in the fight for social justice as evidence that May Day 2008 was a fiasco, while others will point out that anybody who is swayed against our cause by seeing people fight back was never bound to be on our side in the first place. Some will see this as an outburst of privileged people unappreciative of the danger they bring on those around them, while others will see this as anti-imperialism stripped of its white middle-class comfort zone. And finally, people will ask, “Was it worth it?”

Perhaps, some day, we will as a community decide on an answer.