Almost four years ago, tens of thousands of Seattleites took to the streets to join the Black Lives Matter uprising against police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The protesters were met with a heavy-handed response by Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers, who readily deployed tear gas, blast balls and pepper spray against them.
The events of the spring and summer of 2020 had ripple effects across Seattle and its political landscape, sparking a grassroots movement to divert funding away from SPD — an effort that was ultimately defeated. Police recruitment plummeted, and hundreds of officers have since left the force. Nevertheless, right-leaning politicians capitalized on the backlash and took control of the city council and mayor’s office in the 2021 and 2023 elections.
According to the Seattle Police Monitor, more than 19,000 complaints about police use of force during the protests were submitted to the Office of Police Accountability, resulting in 145 separate misconduct investigations.
SPD actions also resulted in multiple lawsuits against the city — the most high profile of which was settled on Jan. 23, 2024. In the settlement, the city of Seattle agreed to pay $10 million in damages to 50 protesters, journalists and other community members who were injured by SPD during 2020. However, in a Jan. 24 press release, Republican Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison admitted “no wrongdoing” despite the hefty sum of money paid to plaintiffs.
During a press conference that same day, Karen Koehler, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case and a senior managing partner of the law firm Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore, said Davison’s statement showed a shameful lack of remorse.
“They should have admitted that they did wrong,” Koehler said. “They should have admitted it, because their own experts agreed that they didn’t follow their own protocols, that they brutalized these peaceful protesters. The wound is open. [The city of Seattle] could have gone so far to restore some sense of faith and hope and maybe peace. But to say that they don’t admit fault here is a huge slap [in the face].”
Real Change reached out to Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell to ask if he would apologize for the city’s handling of the 2020 protests but did not receive a response as of press time. When approached by Real Change, a spokesperson for Davison said that an apology from her would not be “appropriate.”
In a press release also published on Jan. 24, Koehler’s law firm described some of the injuries plaintiffs sustained during the protests. The Stritmatter firm said one person went into cardiac arrest from a blast ball thrown directly at their chest, while another experienced a seizure and coma after they were pinned to the ground by officers. The firm claims that the protesters suffered serious physical and psychological injuries and trauma at the hands of SPD.
Koehler said her firm and plaintiffs underwent a grueling three-year-long legal battle in an attempt to not only receive monetary compensation but also effect meaningful change in SPD’s approach toward protesters. She described the lengthy discovery process, where lawyers reviewed thousands of hours of bodycam footage, public records and other documents. The city deposed all 50 plaintiffs and demanded they undergo psychiatric examinations. Seattle also hired the top legal firm K&L Gates, which Koehler estimated cost the city tens of millions of dollars.
The case had been expected to go to trial in May 2024 after three rounds of judge-ordered mediation, during which time, Koehler said, the City Attorney had refused to offer a settlement. However, at the end of 2023, the two parties reached a breakthrough in negotiations. While it was a difficult decision, Koehler said the plaintiffs weighed the risks and benefits and collectively agreed to the settlement.
Renee Raketty, a Seattle-based journalist, was one of the plaintiffs. On July 25, 2020, she was covering a rally and march of about 5,000 people. At the time, she was a contributing writer for Seattle Gay News, a paper she’s worked with for more than 20 years. Raketty recounted that she had been photographing and filming the tense confrontations between police and protesters. Hours into the protest, SPD officers began throwing blast balls at the crowd in an attempt to push it north on 11th Avenue East in Capitol Hill.
Raketty decided to take a break and sat on the steps of a fire escape on the side of a nearby building. She was a considerable distance away from the crowd when one police officer threw a blast ball directly under her. Raketty remembers bracing herself for the impact.
“I was really disoriented and confused,” Raketty said. “It took a few minutes to just orient myself to what was going on. And then I was in fear. I couldn’t leave the fire escape because I was afraid I would get attacked.”
Later that day, Raketty posted a video to Facebook of the incident, where the cop can be seen throwing the blast ball in her direction. Raketty said the explosion caused permanent hearing loss in her right ear, forcing her to take a break from reporting to recover from the trauma. She added that she joined the lawsuit in order to stand up for journalists’ First Amendment rights.
“I’m really proud of what I did as far as standing up for journalists,” Raketty said.
Justin Ward, a researcher and editor of the police watchdog blog Divest SPD, compared the events of July 25, 2020, along with the other protests that year, to a massacre.
“To me, this was a massacre in the sense that you had one side with vastly superior weapons unloading on an unarmed group,” Ward said. “In a lot of these cases, [the crowd was] fleeing, moving back or, at the most, just standing and yelling.”
Ward said that in his research, he hasn’t seen an improvement in the behavior of SPD at protests. Instead, he believes the main reason for the department’s reluctance to brutalize protesters is a lack of personnel.
As part of the lawsuit, Koehler interviewed Clifford Stott, a social psychology professor at Keele University in the U.K., who was hired by the Seattle Office of the Inspector General to investigate SPD’s actions during the 2020 protests. In the video interview, Stott was highly critical of the department’s conduct.
“I’ve never seen that level of intensity of use of munitions in as confined a geographical location in any other democratic state,” Stott said of SPD’s response to protests on May 30, 2020.
That day marked the first major Seattle Black Lives Matter protest of the year, which police classified as a riot and in response instituted a curfew. Stott added that SPD’s approach at the time led to a massive escalation, turning a peaceful protest into a violent confrontation.
For Ward, the settlement result was an unsatisfying conclusion and in some ways a missed opportunity. He thinks that a well-publicized trial could have better shifted the popular narrative about the 2020 uprising and how SPD used overwhelming force against protesters.
“I would have … rather there be a more drawn-out process, an actual trial where this footage could be displayed, in which we could go back through and look at the 2020 protests and have this public airing of what the actual truth was,” Ward said.
Koehler said she hoped the $10 million settlement would send a message to the community that SPD recognized its wrongdoings. However, Davison’s statement made her question Seattle’s commitment to learn from its mistakes.
“$10 million is an acknowledgment of you kind of screwed up,” she said. “$10 million means that we can begin to heal. $10 million means that they learned they’re going to do better.
“It’s pretty demoralizing to realize that they’re going to come out with their fists flying to say, ‘Oh yeah, we paid $10 million but we didn’t learn our lesson; we’re not responsible for what happened.’”
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the Feb. 21–27, 2024 issue.