'Go in heavy'—SPD's violent May sortie into Cal Anderson started with a balloon

Leaked details from last week's Sentinel Event Review reveal that the Seattle police response to the May 24 counterdemo was even more senseless and over-the-top than previously believed.

After the Seattle police rolled into Cal Anderson Park on bikes and arrested 23 people counterprotesting a fundamentalist concert in May, there were lots of wild stories about how it all started. One of the more fanciful claims still circulating was that “antifa” chucked water balloons filled with urine into the crowd. As it turns out, a balloon was involved, but it was the regular kind — with air in it.

Last week, the Office of the Inspector General held the first meetings of its sentinel event review panel on the police department’s response to a counterprotest against an out-of-town Christian group’s anti-LGBTQ event in the park. At a meeting, the origins of the violent show of force were revealed.

Apparently, a counterprotester in black bloc attempted to release one of the Christian group’s balloons, and dozens of bike cops moved in to arrest him for property destruction. A bodycam recorded Lieutenant Matthew Didier beforehand saying, “Go in heavy and put some fucking work in on these guys.”

Mounted on bikes, members of the Community Response Group — the euphemistically named anti-protest unit — drove into the demo at full speed and began arresting everyone in black bloc.

Aside from the man messing with the balloon, the CRG was trying to arrest another person for an equally dubious act of property destruction: tampering with the Christian group’s bubble machine.

These two petty misdemeanors were a paper-thin pretext for the Seattle police to escalate and make arrests. And once they were in the park’s interior, it was a chaotic mess of shouting, punches, and pepper spray.

Lt. Didier acknowledged it was a “tactical” error to go into the park to make arrests and that a wiser course of action would’ve been to track the subjects and arrest them later, according to a source familiar with the proceedings.

On a different day, the panel had discussed the definition of “antifa,” which the police panelists conflated with “black bloc,” the tactic of dressing in black non-descript clothing to avoid identification. Officers said that anyone who dressed in all black was there to break the law and instigate, while using the protest as a cover. However, community members pointed out that people, such as protest medics, wear black bloc to maintain their anonymity, not necessarily to commit crimes.

The OIG showed bodycam videos of the police deployment on the last day. Didier and Lt. Larry Longley, who leads the Police Outreach Engagement Team, justified the response by saying that officers were forced to watch crimes happen in the 2020 protests, and it was bad for morale.

The SER consisted of six police officers and four community members (it was supposed to be six, but evidently the Community Police Commission couldn’t field two more). The panel will meet once more in December before issuing its full report.