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| SEATTLE AFTERMATH | |
 January 18, 2000 
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A look at the political climate in Seattle after last month's protests against the World Trade Organization.
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MIKE JAMES: Seattle residents want an accounting for the riots and
protests that disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting in December.
Street life is normal again in the downtown core of the city. Merchants
replaced their shattered windows. Shoppers are back in the stores again.
But memories of that week of tear gas and violence are still vivid,
and so are these numbers: SPOKESPERSON: I wanted to emphasize that the purpose of this meeting is to hear from all of you, to listen to your testimony, and to begin the process of healing that this city so desperately needs. |
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| Hearing from the public | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MIKE JAMES: In almost 20 hours of hearings, council members heard from residents, merchants, police, and protesters.
SEATTLE RESIDENT: We entrusted our businesses, our communities, and, yes, our lives to your keeping and protection, and you failed us. MIKE JAMES: The council investigation is just beginning, but there's already a major casualty at city hall. Chief of Police Norm Stamper resigned, and admitted in this interview that the city vastly underestimated the scale and intensity of the anti-WTO protest.
MIKE JAMES: Critics are asking now why the city didn't take a tougher stand from the beginning-- establish a protective perimeter for WTO delegates, reroute protest marches, and display a greater show of force from the first day. But Mayor Paul Schell, interviewed in the days after WTO, said that's not the message he wanted to send.
MIKE JAMES: Police commanders now say they met frequently with protest
leaders in the weeks before WTO. Officers thought they had an understanding
that PROTEST LEADER: Whether they thought it meant colorful signs and some very clever chants, they were very, very wrong. The civil disobedience and the direct action network succeeded in their goal in shutting down the World Trade Organization. |
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| Shaking Seattle's sense of self | ||||||||||||||||||||
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DAVID BREWSTER: We see a city that is very ambivalent about its charmed prominence in the world. It wants it, but it doesn't want the costs that go with that. It is trying to decide whether to go forward into the kinds of things that produce turbulence and disputes and bitterness, and cost politicians their jobs, or to be a much more comfortable, cautious place. MIKE JAMES: In that "comfortable, cautious" camp is Art Thiel, one of the city's popular sports columnists, who wrote a scathing piece about Seattle's "folly" in taking on the contentious world trade meeting.
MIKE JAMES: Thiel touched a local nerve. That column, he says, got more e-mail reaction than anything he's ever done. ART THIEL: I knew what I was saying was validating a number of people that I'd talked to, but the breadth and the depth of the response, I have to say, was astonishing. MIKE JAMES: One of the civic leaders singled out by Thiel is Port of Seattle Commissioner Pat Davis, a key player in bringing the WTO meeting to Seattle.
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| Protests scared shoppers away | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MIKE JAMES: But not soon enough for merchants in the city. Shoppers simply abandoned downtown the week of WTO. Alberta Weinberg, owner of a small specialty shop, lost six days of business just three weeks before Christmas-- a huge loss in the most important month of the year.
MIKE JAMES: The mayor of Seattle is taking a look, but the moral he draws from WTO Week, from an experience several national newspapers now call a "fiasco," is not to turn away from global affairs. MAYOR PAUL SCHELL: I hope that we don't just become safe and self-satisfied and count our money, but have the courage to step out and offer something to the community. Whether we take on mega-events like the Olympics, I think it will be a long time before this city is ready to do that. But whether we take on risky projects, or we take on efforts to help understand the world we live in, I think we're part of the world, and we need to do that as well. MIKE JAMES: Mayor Schell, looking back, is ready to share Seattle's painful experience with other cities around the country.
MIKE JAMES: Seattle residents seem to agree. Local pollsters found them faulting the mayor's judgment about WTO, for allowing the protests to overwhelm their downtown, but most residents here don't want Seattle to give up its status as an international city. The lesson from WTO, as one local columnist wrote, is "not to give up the game, but to learn how to play it." |
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WOMAN:
I want to know why our mayor isn't here, and the chief of police! (Crowd
cheering) 
More
than 500 arrests, $17 million in lost pre-Christmas shopping revenue,
nearly $3 million in property damage. In the end, the city dropped most
of the unresolved charges against protesters for lack of evidence, but
some lawsuits are still pending. A city council investigation began
the week after WTO.
SEATTLE
RESIDENT: I'm going to make this nice and sweet. I've had a lot of people
tell me that you should take a bath on this, Mayor Schell, and go ahead
and resign (Cheers) because there's too much going on, and you're not
paying attention. 
NORM
STAMPER: I believed that we were ready. I think I need to openly acknowledge
that. I believed that our city was ready, and in fact we were not. We
weren't ready for the depth of anti-WTO sentiment that was being expressed.
We weren't ready for the very large numbers of individuals, representing
a minority of all protesters, who were bent on destruction or violence.
MAYOR
PAUL SCHELL: I wanted everybody to be heard, that we weren't going to
trample on free speech before the fact-- everybody to be heard and nobody
to be hurt. And I wanted the ministerial to go on. They have free speech,
the right to assemble as well. And at the same time, I felt we have
a tradition in our city of allowing and, in fact, encouraging people
to express themselves. And it was no more complex than that. 
demonstrators
would not shut down the streets. But anti-WTO leaders say they told
city leaders and police time and again that they meant to disrupt and
to shut down the WTO meeting. One protest leader said it again at the
council hearing. 
MIKE
JAMES: The deeper wound, for some, is that the WTO experience shook
Seattle's proud sense of itself as a city known for its coffee culture,
tolerant lifestyle, and high-tech economy. David Brewster is a longtime
publisher of a local weekly newspaper. 
ART
THIEL: Somehow, our civic leaders have gotten this notion that unless
we're bigger and better, we're nowhere-- and that is not any part of
the sensibility of the Seattle that I've been around professionally
and personally for most of my life. 
PAT
DAVIS: I don't think we were "proving ourselves." I think
we were just saying we are an international city, and this is an appropriate
place for a meeting like this. If we have any hubris at all, I think
it's about the fact that we're nice here. We don't do things like these
people did. So I suppose in a way we've learned a lesson that way, that
we have to guard against that kind of behavior. They're not all people
who act like we do and behave like we do, who sort of get along, and
I guess we're a little bit smug about that here. And maybe we've grown
up a little bit. 
ALBERTA
WEINBERG: People - you know - want to promote Seattle as a top-flight
top player, and I think Seattle isn't. It isn't a New York, a Chicago,
or an LA, and I didn't think it wanted to be. So I think there's some
schizophrenia here about what it really is, and what some entities want
it to be-- and probably need to step back and take a look at this. 
MAYOR
PAUL SCHELL: In fact, we already are, with Los Angeles and Philadelphia,
who are hosting the big nominating conventions this summer, and some
of the same people are going to be visiting their cities-- and so, how
to manage this in a way that doesn't preclude before it begins a free
and open society having a free and open debate about issues people care
about. If we give that up, we give up something far more important to
the health of our society.