A confrontation between protesters trying to block the arrest of people who had been locked together inside the Capitol Hill Chase bank turned violent as Occupy Seattle and SPD clashed on Broadway.
Protesters outside the bank were attempting to block a police van from leaving the scene around 3:30p to transport a group of people who were being taken into custody. The protesters had reportedly chained themselves together inside the bank earlier Wednesday afternoon. As police and protesters in the street clashed, officers used pepper spray and the shoving and pushing continued to escalate. SPD says that five people were arrested for trespassing. No ambulances were called to the scene.
Adding pictures to this Flickr set — should be seven or eight by the time upload completes.
We all know this is going to end in ugly violence, it just sucks that those of us who live in the area will have to deal with the inevitable spillover and mayhem. I am so done with this “movement”
Chase doesn’t actually conduct any banking operations at Broadway & Thomas. They just keep that space open as a decoy branch to attract idiot protesters.
Quit ruining our neighborhood. Go back downtown if you want to be idiots!
Chase is the invader in my community.
Barack Obama accepted $808,799 from Chase and Chase senior execs in 2008, and is continuing to take hundreds of thousands of dollars from them as I type this. If the people at OWS voted for Nader, Barr or McKinney then bravo.
My gut feeling, however, is the majority of them voted for Obama in 2008, and will do the same in 2012. In that case their protest is a silly, pathetic, useless, hypocritical “Look at ME!” episode by the class drama queen.
same here
there are 80-90 people rolling around in their own filth at SCCC … on any given day one could find 10x that number attending meetings at the convention center and we don’t get blow-by-blows on those
it’s not just for-profits that can ably manipulate the media with shallow publicity stunts
couldn’t agree with you more!
The 2008 collapse was 30 years in the making. Wealth hording/wage stagnation, job outsourcing, for-profit “healthcare”, de-funding education and access to education, under-funded housing, predatory lending, money-controlled-government, astronomical “defense” spending are all still in place.
Things must get much worse for the West and all empire-minded governments around the world. Violent Capitalism hasn’t fully run its course, but we’re getting close.
I’ve seen that cop van parked in their lot on 12th for years and I figured it was parked there and forgotten about. I’m glad to see it still runs.
Clueless idiots. Every last one of them.
And this is why we never should have allowed this attention whoring bullshit into our neighborhood. Mark my words. With the anarchist/loony commie /socialist /anti cop contingent in charge as they are now, this will only get worse.
Recently introduced to: “Occupiese” from the Colbert Nation ( http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/40109).
There’s not much consensus on campus for your presence; again, it’s time to move on.
Do we not remember WTO? Swift action should be taken, this has gone on long enough. Rain! Rain! Rain!
As soon as they moved it to Capitol Hill, it cheapened the whole movement. In many people’s minds, it’s now just another garden-variety lefty Seattle protest, easily tuned out and ignored. Should’ve stayed downtown.
im pretty sure trespassing at a chase branch does not constitute as a catalyst for social and political change.
Yeah, I tend to agree. I had more sympathy for the protesters (and was down there a few Saturdays), but now that it has moved up to the hill I just think that the “clientele” has changed. I no longer think it is really those teachers, students, etc… I think it is a different species altogether. Yes, still the 99%, but more than likely the anarchist types that had a large hand in the WTO. We will see if ladies will begin to get peppersprayed in their cars by KC sheriff’s deputies soon. Grab a bag of popcorn people!!
“…those of us who live in the area will have to deal with the inevitable spillover and mayhem.”
Yes, the spillover and mayhem. How will you ever deal with it. Your fedora might get jostled!
“…there are 80-90 people rolling around in their own filth at SCCC…”
Oh my, the filth. Where’s my nosegay?
“There’s not much consensus on campus for your presence; again, it’s time to move on.”
Since when does freedom of speech require consensus? And as far as that goes, recent polls show many more support Occupy than oppose, and I bet that holds for the SCCC community.
As a Cap Hill resident I say more power to Occupy. Like the proverb goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We have a long way to go to reverse the corporate coup d’état in the US, but Occupy puts us on the right path.
I say more power and more pepper spray. They are the 1% of the 99%. Occupy is not putting anything on the right path in Seattle or on Capitol Hill.
Watch the second film. When everyone is getting a bit crazy and the cops are over stepping their bounds. Look for the officer who is on the outside tapping people on the shoulder and talking to them, asking them to step back. Never once reaching for his club. This group may seem angry and they are. But they are not going to hurt the police. This gentleman may have not been the only officer there that understood this but I just want to thank him for being the one on the scene that I noticed handling his job in a way I would hope every member of the police force will take a cue from.
You may be right on the first account. Many of us were fooled into voting for him. Just like I’m pretty sure you got fooled into voting for McCaine. However on the second account you are dead wrong. Only maybe 10% of the movement still supports him. He was bought out just like most of the other politicians. We had hopes since he was newer to politics he might take the high road. Sadly we were wrong and we are still in the same place we were when the deregulation started. Tax major corporations the same we you tax the public and regulate Wall Street again. It benefits all but the 1% who have gotten rich off of all of our hard work. If the job creators actually created jobs with the money they saved from tax breaks and deregulation it would be different. But they haven’t so their free ride ends!
The cops never over stepped their bounds. Please give an example if you feel they did. Kudos to the one approach of the particular officer you mentioned.
If it were WTO all over again it would have already turned violent. Study your history a little closer please. This is nothing like WTO. Also, 54% of the nation now supports the movement. Sorry you are in the minority and with how progressive the hill is I’m guessing it’s a rather small minority.
I feel the pepper spray was a bit much. Especially with how wide the spray was. Police are only supposed to use force when they are physically in danger. They did not have to push through the crowd at that time. They wanted to flex there muscle and push people, when the people wouldn’t be pushed, they sprayed them. The people did not come at the officers aggressively. They were tapping on the van and saying thank you to the others for being arrested for the cause.
Watch how this unfolds. There is a type of person, usually a young male, who thrives on battling the police in the street, smashing windows, starting fires and spray painting buildings. It’s not political, it’s all about the adrenaline rush and fulfilling antisocial, criminal impulses. If the SCCC camp is not shut down it will become a mecca for these troublemakers coming in from all over WA and OR. They are pawns and footsoldiers for the far left ideologues who are behind the Occupy movement.
Chase Bank may seem like a deserving target to many on Capitol Hill, but it is a part of the Broadway Business District. An attack on one is an attack on all. The busy holiday retail season is coming. Anarchist graffiti and tear gas clouds are not welcome sights for shoppers. Good luck Capitol Hill merchants. If the anticapitalism protesters had their way your businesses would be confiscated by the state.
If you think that is an exaggeration just talk to a refugee from Vietnam, Cuba or any other communist country.
SCCC requested a good neighbor agreement with the protesters which has been ignored since day one. Maybe it’s time for the rest of the neighborhood to ask SCCC to be a good neighbor. They allowed this encampment and are therefore responsible for the consequences.
What would Gandhi do?
When you do your holiday shopping do it at local business rather than major corporate stores. Do not frequent a mall that doesn’t give mom and pop shops a fair shake in favor of having only Umbrella corp. type stores. In order to get our local economy going we must support the ones who are doing things with in it rather than shopping at a box shop that has 500 locations nation wide and pays no taxes on the money they make off of you.
How untrue! Most of the shops up on Broadway are exactly the type of businesses that the occupy people support and wish to thrive. Just because Chase is a black spot on Broadway along with a few others, doesn’t mean we want them all to fail. We want Chase to do fare business. Please stop lumping all the Occupiers into the group with anarchist and anti capitalists. Most of us are simply anti greed. Maybe if you read the facts rather than what the mainstream media reports you would have a better grasp of what is going on. As of now you just sound ignorant.
Dude! Seriously? It’s ok for wussy officers to deploy pepper spray whenever there’s a protest? F!
If that’s how you feel you should really consider a move to Orange County, you law-and-order goon.
Sorry, but in Seattle there are still enough smart people to know that what’s going down with occupy is that a bunch of courageous folks ( most clean, some dirty, some sane and a few slightly less-so) are doing OUR dirty work of getting shit back from the brink. We should be thanking them, lughead.
CHS Blog, though I appreciate all of their hard work, is increasingly becoming a forum for Microsoft-y suburbanite transplants to Seattle thinking it’d be “neat-o” to live in the city and enjoy all it has to offer, without any of the energy, activity and turmoil that every real city deals with everyday.
Tasers, nightsticks, pepper spray, etc. should only be used as tactics of last resort, not as go-tos for wimpy, oppressive cops. And, no, I don’t hate the police -just the bad ones.
Pih-friggin’-please.
Whocareswhatmynameis,
Where exactly are you from to be all high and mighty?
Everybody loves the move to the suburbs argument. It’s so easy.
Lol a fine example would be that I in no way was touching or attempting to get in the way of any officer. Out of nowhere that trigger happy douche maced the living shittttttt out of me, and it turns out mace REALLY REALLY REALLY sucks, a lot. Fucking idiot. However I’m not going to condemn all of spd over it. They have bad and angry cops, we have antagonistic dumbass protestors but that shouldn’t reflect those entire groups. Smart people already know that.
Actually, if you go to the school’s website, there is a public letter explaining that even though they tried, legally there is nothing they can do to remove the protesters. That does not mean SCCC invited them or condones the behavior, they just can’t do anything. Its ridiculous. I was an OWS supporter till the movement started to interfere with my school. Facing possible shutdown because of the growing violent behavior which will cause me to not be able to finish all my prereqs before fall quarter. So thank you so much OWS protesters, for being inconsiderate assholes and turning on your fellow struggling 99%. Thanks for that. Punish those of us who can’t afford a 4 year unniversity by getting our community college shut down and forcing me to live in poverty an extra year. Unfinshed prereqs equates to not being able to attend Nursing school in the fall. I can only imagine how many other SCCC students are facing the same type of consequences because of this movement. It has turned from a positive message into something hurting those who once supported it. Great job. -Trying to be a functioning, positive member of society
@kval, I am very sure lots of people got maced because of actions of the select few that were antagonizing the cops and that sucks balls, however, when you hang out with a group you are going to be lumped in with that group and have to suffer the repercussions. The best thing to have done would to leave before it escalated or watch from afar. I knew this would end badly before it even started. It’s called mob mentality.
Checkinit: Police as a group do not suffer any repercussions when the few “bad apples” engage in misconduct. Worse, they refuse to denounce those among them who engage in misconduct.
At this protest, when a couple officers squeezed into a tight crowd and started shoving people around with large metal frames, then a third stepped in and used a chemical weapon against the peaceful, unarmed, demonstrators, there were no repercussions for any of them. There was no riot. There was no aggression aimed at other officers.