Beware of boosters chasing cameras. "For months, we'd been getting news reports and FBI warnings about what to expect in Seattle," says Greg Conko, a delegate from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "If we all knew to expect rioting and the like, why didn't the Seattle government?" An Australian delegate posed exactly that question to a police officer toward the end of the meeting, with Conko present. The officer replied, "The mayor and governor just heard what they wanted to hear."
They sure did. Like many mid-sized metropolises, Seattle is cursed with an elite hell-bent on making the town a "world-class city"-- a code phrase for pouring public money into downtown amenities. Some Seattleites are upset with the cops, some with the protesters, some with the trade organization. Todd Matthews, managing editor of the biweekly paper Real Change, is mad at Mayor Schell and at Patricia Davis, the president of the Port of Seattle Commission. "I was pissed because they brought it here," he says -- "it" being the trade conference. "It was complete ego that they brought it here, the chance to be on the cover of every newspaper as the mayor of the city that was hosting the WTO." By inviting the conference and dismissing the chances of violence, Matthews argues, "the commissioner and the mayor put the citizens at risk to advance their political careers. It's a personal snub to the citizens of Seattle."
That doesn't quite explain everything: The police certainly knew that violence might break out during the conference, and they issued warnings to that effect to the very same downtown stores they failed to protect. Together with the conference's other mysteries, that inconsistency has fueled a lot of conspiracy theories, mostly to the effect that the vandals, or their leaders, were agents provocateurs, and that police higher-ups wanted a riot to break out.
A likelier possibility, though, is that the city's political authorities simply ignored the police department's warnings. They just didn't want to think about riots, lest they spoil Seattle's militantly mellow image. In Matthews' words, "These guys put the ass back in world-class city."
With political leaders unwilling to think about their pet projects' consequences and police unwilling to make the most basic distinctions between guilt and innocence, the turmoil was almost inevitable. But neither the politicians nor the police seem to have learned their lesson. To this day, Commissioner Davis says she doesn't regret inviting the WTO to town. "Seattle is an international city," she has explained. "This is what we do."
And the police? The next time the WTO wants to hold a meeting, Assistant Chief Ed Joiner told reporters, it should do so in a city with a bigger police force. Or, he added, in a country with a military government.
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