Seattle cops are weaponizing bikes

Bike cops form a thin blue line between nothing and bupkis. (Author)

Sunday, I went to my first protest in more than a decade. When I was living in Austin, I used to be a regular fixture at demonstrations on a range of issues — war, the death penalty, Palestine, private prisons, etc. — but when I moved abroad, I took a long sabbatical from walking picket lines. I’m noticing a lot of changes. This was a rally against a far-right militia group called the Three Percenters and various allied goons such as the Proud Boys. Back in the day, this kind of demonstration was rare. Protests usually had just one side.

The closest thing to a counter-protestor we had was Alex Jones. Before he was a household name, he was just a local cable access weirdo who would show up at anti-war rallies and scream through a megaphone that we were all “agents provocateur of the globalists.”

But with the resurgence of the far-right, low-level political warfare between militant groups has become the dominant form of protest. The Pacific Northwest is a battleground, with these sorts of events happening upwards of two or three times a month during the summer in either Portland or Seattle. With armed opposing factions contesting the state’s monopoly on violence, police respond with shows of overwhelming force.

The protest started at 11 a.m.., but for various reasons, my friends and I didn’t make it there until about 1 p.m. The Three Percenter rally was happening at City Hall while the counter-protestors were a block away jammed onto a sidewalk lined by a wall of cops. Aside from a few who were wielding these menacing wooden clubs that looked like broomstick handles, most were equipped only with the standard police gear—and bikes.

Police form a wall with their bikes along the sidewalk where the counter-protestors are. The street is blocked and participants in the rally are gone, so there is really no reason for them to be doing this. (Author)

Though it was scheduled to end at 3 p.m., the rally wrapped up about 30 minutes after we got there. It was hard to tell what was going on since they were so far away. The counter-protestors began chanting “Na-nah Na-nah, hey hey goodbye!” For reasons that made no sense at all, the police started getting aggressive. Maybe they took it personally that people kept pointing out how they were basically taxpayer-funded bodyguards for far-right militia wingnuts.