WTO Day 3: Return of the Good Side of the (Police) Force

Continuing with the coverage from Seattle...

THURSDAY (12/2):

A combination of President Clinton departing Seattle and thousands of e-mails, phone calls, and faxes sent to every public official in the state seems to have ended the violence of the past 36 hours.*

Instead of being greeted with pepper spray and arrest, today demonstrators who approached the "no protest zone" in downtown Seattle were given police escort while marching instead of a faceful of pepper spray. Depending on who you talk to, the number of demonstrators downtown today ranged between 500 and 5,000. Peaceful demonstrators policed themselves for agitators, much as they did Tuesday morning before the police began their hugely popular tear-gassing method of crowd dispersal.

Toward the end of the day, the focus of the marchers became the King County Jailhouse on 5th and James where hundreds of protestors arrested Tuesday and Wednesday were being held. For several hours hundreds of people occupied the Jailhouse's entrance and surrounding streets. Police took a "wait and see" approach to managing the crowd, opting to direct street traffic away from the protest and to watch the people from a distance. Leaders of the protest (members of the Berkeley based Direct Action Network - DAN) communicated often with the police officers in charge and both sides even began negotiating the terms of an eventual peaceful dispersal of the crowd.

The only reported moment of tension came when a member of the crowd threw a bottle at one of the police officers standing watch up the street. Members of DAN subdued the individual themselves and ejected him from the protest.