We’re the filmmaking team behind the new documentary, WTO/99, a film that examines—purely through archival footage—four days of protests in Seattle during 1999 against the World Trade Organization (WTO). We’ve spent over two years living in the footage of the largest US demonstrations since the Vietnam War captured by protesters on the ground, the Seattle Police Department and local and national new crews. We’ve reviewed roughly one thousand hours of footage that followed protesters, police and governmental officials as they participated in what would later become known as the “Battle of Seattle”—the week in 1999 when over 40,000 people took to the streets to shut down the conference for the newly established WTO, who had gathered on American soil for the first time. The parallels between the WTO protests and what we’re seeing across the country today cannot be ignored.
The “Battle of Seattle” the media brought into millions of homes across the nation is suggestive of a two-sided violent conflict. But if there were two sides to find in the footage, they are the Seattle Police Department (SPD)—armed with clubs, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and chemical weapons—and 40,000+ demonstrators armed with signs, banners and chants. Listening to the tapes of police radio comms from that week, we heard officers warning one another of protesters wielding chains and pieces of wood with nails sticking out—the footage shows neither. Reviewing the footage that the officers captured themselves, we can see their POV from the police lines, and these cameras capture not one weapon. After the police deploy tear gas and an arsenal of projectiles just four hours after the protests began, a camera captures a single person in the crowd spraying something back at the police. Much of the property damage the police later used to justify their attacks wouldn’t occur until after this initial police escalation. Footage from that week shows unarmed civilians being beaten and shot at point blank range with what the SPD deemed “sub-lethal projectiles” over the course of four days. Officers tear-gassed non-violent, seated individuals. They used so much tear gas on the very first day of the protests that they had to go out of state to restock that night.
The police and national guard response to the WTO protests ushered in the state of policing we see in the 21st century. Shortly after these protests in 1999, the SPD went around the country teaching their suppression tactics to other police departments. Kettling (the act of encircling a group of protesters within a limited area to prevent escape) was used in the US for the first time in Seattle. It was the first large-scale use of pepper balls against American protesters…