Transcript- Protest Analysis of May 30 by Prof. Clifford Stott

12.14.2023 Stott

806 Buell Realtime Reporting

Transcript- Protest Analysis of May 30 by Prof. Clifford Stott -I ntrod ucti onWith this presentation we want to provide you with a narrative overview of the detailed timeline that we've drawn together based on our extensive analysis of the underlying data.

-OutlineThe presentation is based on an analysis of the application of a very well tested scientific methodology that we've been using for several years to develop a data-driven analysis of how behavioral events develop over time and we have drawn these together for you to act as a platform for your discussion and reflection. What we want to do today is to highlight to you a series of patterns and sequences of interactions that evolved over the course of events on the thirtieth of June, and the general picture that we can determine from that evidence is of a series of demonstrations that occur in different locations across the downtown area that culminate on a general convergence on the Westlake Park area and in the vicinity of Westlake Park there are a series of interactions that took place between in particular 3 and 4 o'clock, following which a major escalation in violence and confrontation develops. We want to highlight how these patterns are also consistent with those observed in our other scientific study of transitions between peaceful protests into riots suggesting that these interactions in the vicinity of Westlake Park were really quite pivotal in playing a causal role in the transition from a generally peaceful series of protests into the violent confrontation we subsequently witnessed.

-Historical ContextNow we need to first of all contextualize events on the thirtieth by referring back to events of the preceding evening. Again, also in the downtown area, where again protest activity and interactions between the protesters and the police escalated into violent confrontation and damage to property, and also to recognize that the events on Friday and Saturday were of course also being framed by incidents in cities all over the U.S. where other BLM protests had developed into violent confrontation that would suggest that this context played a considerably important role in framing protester psychology and police decision-making that had quite a major impact on the interactional dynamics that played out on the thirtieth.

-Overview from the 29 th So let's just remind ourselves of the key issues that come out of the 29 th . The first thing to do is to focus on how events on the 29 th begin to highlight a series of subsequent patterns in the nature of protester behavior. That the protests begin in a relatively unplanned way where relatively spontaneous gatherings led to public assemblies in the city center of Seattle for which the police were relatively unprepared and therefore required quite a rapid mobilization but even with the relatively sophisticated mobilization of the mobilization plans that they have in place it took some time to draw those resources out of other areas of the city and redeploy them to manage the protests. They did that because there was, to some

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extent, evidence for them that there was a risk firstly that there was the presence of antifa protesters in the crowd, which was seen as inherently problematic and dangerous; the protest was moving in an unplanned way along busy highways posing threat and risk; the police officers that were available and present in the vicinity reported experiencing hostility, which further confirmed the idea that this was a potentially hostile crowd. Now these dynamics of spontaneous movement and mobilization of police officers come to a head in the vicinity of 5th and Madison, where the police decide to implement a cordon that prevents the movement of these protesters any further around the downtown area. Very shortly after the implementation of that cordon, there's some damage to a window in the Madison Center and very quickly the situation escalates up into tousles between protesters and police and the deployment of blast munitions, which drives the crowd back to 5th and Marion, whereby there's some smashing of windows on an Amazon Go shop and photographic evidence shows that that damage was perpetuated by a protester who was in possession of an axe who used it to break the glass, and then subsequent to that was a series of sporadic public assemblies around the downtown area that escalated up into confrontation and a particularly high profile incident discussed on social media of apparently excessive use of force by a police officer, and what we see here is these initial interactions may have created a psychology among elements of the protest movement of police illegitimacy, bearing in mind that the process itself was about the levels of police illegitimacy in relationship to George Floyd.

-Events on the 30 th begin with protest outside Police HQNow, events on the 30 th begin with the protest outside police HQ that begins around about 11 am with a relatively small gathering on the pathway opposite police HQ is protected with fencing and police officers. The demonstration grows over the next couple of hours to such an extent that protesters move out onto the highway. It may be that they moved onto the highway because the highway was closed or that the highway may have been closed because protesters moved onto it. We are unclear about the exact nature of that. In any case what we see here is a protest that was going through the data we could find, entirely peaceful. There were no recorded issues from the police perspective or reported on social media or by mainstream media. By around about 1 o'clock, the protest had grown to around about 1,000 in number in excess of that, and protesters began to move off into the downtown area, generally in the direction of Westlake Park along both 4th and 5th ave, moving around the downtown area, again expressing this pattern of relatively spontaneous, unplanned dynamic movement. Now, we have some contradiction in the data here because the police data talks of several incidents of quite serious disorder, but we can find no confirmatory evidence from any other source to triangulate that with and indeed data from other sources records an entirely peaceful period of time with procession progressing through the downtown area with no major incident with confrontation. The several journalists that were present in the vicinity looking for news or livestream and most of them if not all of them talk of peaceful moments, but there's some contradiction there worthy of further exploration because there may have been some quite serious incidents that took place in this period of time.

-Demonstration at Westlake ParkNonetheless, what happens is these processions move through the downtown area, the vast majority of people engaging in peaceful protest, if not exclusively, everyone involved in peaceful protest, and move towards the Westlake Park area, where people had also begun to gather for the second major demonstration of the day which was scheduled to begin at 3 o'clock. Now for some reason the data also speaks to us of police cordons that were placed at the intersections of 5th and Pine and 4th and Pine, and

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may have also been placed in other areas around the Westlake Park block. Now these cordons are interesting because they appear to have initiated a series of interactions that appear to be pivotal in transition from a predominately peaceful protest into a major riot, so the sequence of interactions I think is worthy of detailed consideration and they are a complex set of interactions that are occurring in several locations along Pine St, but predominately in the vicinity of 4th and 5th Ave and most significantly at the intersection of 5th and Pine, so we're just going to look in a little bit of detail at some of the data that we have about that intersection at 5th and Pine.

-First use of blast munitionsNow the first thing to say about it is that it begins with the cordons and the space on the roadway then starts to become populated by a relatively small group of protesters who appear to have approached the cordons from Westlake Park. There is some chanting and members of that crowd do behave in a relatively agitated way, but interestingly some of the chants in the video data around this time are "let us through, let them through," which does suggest that some of the agitation is actually potentially being caused by the fact that the cordons are there and it could well be that the protesters seeking to access Westlake Park from 5th Ave or indeed from 4th Ave were prevented from doing so because of the police cordons. We've certainly got video data that shows police officers instructing people to move away from Westlake Park who are police officers from these cordons, so there may be some important dynamics that begin to evolve from this point, however in the context of those more agitated interactions between protesters and police, the video data does show that an individual does show that an individual does through a plastic water bottle in the direction of one of the cordons and then shortly afterwards, police officers begin to deploy blast munitions into the vicinity, into that roadway space where people are gathered, but you can see to a large extent those munitions are thrown into empty space, although some of them do land adjacent to some of the people gathered in that vicinity. I think more importantly what the video data also does is it talks to us about people on the wider demonstration in Westlake Park itself. So when this round of munitions are fired, they're fired subsequent to a verbal announcement by the police that the people gathered in that vicinity were committing an offense, that it was an unlawful assembly, and it's subsequent to that that the munitions are fired and its subsequent to the announcement that the bottles are thrown. So we see the announcement, we see the bottles, and then we see the munitions.

-Fear and flight in Westlake ParkAnd then what we see in Westlake Park is that when the munitions explode, it creates an effect on the wider demonstration that's a little distance away from the intersection near the stage in Westlake Park, and what you can see when explosions happen is that large numbers of people suddenly turn and run in fear. It's evident that people didn't really understand what those munitions were, where they were coming from, but they heard the munitions, they heard loud explosions and they turned and they ran away in fear. That's interesting I think because its clear that the munitions and the explosions had a wider effect on the crowd as a whole.

-Movement toward intersection: "no justice, no peace"Now shortly after that, what we then see is video evidence of the crowd beginning to move back into the intersection at 5th and Pine and you can see people now returning from the Westlake Park vicinity and beginning to encroach back into the area where one or two individuals move into that space and

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begin gestures which suggest they're asserting their perceived right to be present in that location to protest, but you can see that the vast majority of people there are simply standing in the vicinity of the intersection observing events take place. What's evident from the video data is then the police move back into that area and begin firing further blast munitions at the observing crowd.

-Firing toward the watching crowdNow I think it's difficult to determine exactly why this is happening, it may well be of course that the area that is being targeted is an area where individuals or an individual may have thrown a missile in the vicinity of the police, but it's also evident and you can see from this image that the firing of the munitions was in the general direction of several other people who merely observing events at that particular point in time. But again, a pattern of interactions is beginning to emerge here.

-Forward movement by the cordonEven though these munitions are fired, again it does not deter those protesters, who remain in the area, and what you see is that the bike squad that is here has also begun to encroach into the area and you've got a protester in the green coat there kneeling down in front of the police lines, but gradually what happens is that those protesters from Westlake Park are beginning to return back from running away and quite considerable numbers of them are converging back into the intersection on 5th and Pine subsequent to the firing of those first rounds of munitions.

-Reoccupying the intersectionAs they move back into the space, what you can see is that they start to demonstrate in ways that indicate a view that the police action is at the very least disproportionate or even illegitimate, and you can see several protesters come into the space, they kneel down in the empty intersection, the chant "don't shoot," they raise hands in the air, they face palms at the police, but that doesn't prevent the police firing further blast munitions into the area in close proximity to those protesters presumably because by definition it's been declared an unlawful assembly.

-A lull & absence of dialogueNonetheless, that does not deter the protesters who move in increasing numbers from Westlake Park into the intersection and given the density of the numbers there, begin to abut the police lines. There are basically so many people in the vicinity that it's fully packed with protesters now, so in this sense alone, what we're seeing is a situation where the blast munitions are being counter productive given they were potentially deployed to disperse the crowd. What they've actually achieved is to increase the numbers there and indeed the density. Also interestingly what we see here is considerable levels of interaction initiated by protesters who come up to police and try to engage in verbal communication with them to talk to them about what they're doing, to express their anger about the illegitimacy about what the police are doing, and try to initiate forms of conversation and dialogue with police officers who are forming the cordon, but none of the video evidence shows any indication that any police officer engaged in any form of verbal communication with those protesters and I think that's really important because what we see here is a relative lull from about 3:15 to around 3:20 when the protesters move back into this space and for at least 30 minutes there's no evidence of any major or further confrontation that takes place, so we've gone from a situation of escalated tension and conflictual interaction and gone back into a situation of relatively peaceful assembly in this location. No real

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evidence of any real dialogue or engagement from the police to try to further de-escalate to take advantage of this de-escalation that's occurring. Nonetheless there are protesters, the gentleman on the left here with the black coat on is seen on several occasions moving around the crowd verbally gesticulating to de-escalate the situation, engaging with other protesters trying to calm them down, so there is evidence of de-escalation processes at work in this particular crowd. However, during this period of time what's going on is the police department is also mobilizing further resources into the intersection at 5th and Pine.

-Under siege & gas munitionsNow those resources arrive. Very shortly after their arrival they don gas masks and a very short period of time after that, tear gas munitions are fired - This is around about 4 PM - into the very densely crowded intersection on 5th and Pine, and by this time the crowd in that intersection had become very diverse and lots of demonstrators are affected by the deployment of this tear gas, so several munitions deployed at this time and the entire vicinity becomes filled with chemical irritant and you can see a picture up here on the top right of the screen that several protesters struggled to deal with the negative affects of the tear gas deployment. Our focus here I on the data that talks about these quite problematic and escalating series of interactions, use of weaponry by the police, and so on, but I think its important to recognize that the data actually talks to us about a broader picture.

-Majority of people engaged in peaceful protest throughoutThat broader picture is that in this vicinity between 5ht and Pine and 4th and Pine, there are around about 4000 people, and the overall overwhelming majority of those people are engaged in a peaceful expression of First Amendment rights, and the firing of these munitions does begin to affect these people, it does begin to have an impact on the general crowd and there are several examples of people who are there for peaceful assembly who are negatively affected and the high profile incident of course is the young child who suffered quite considerable negative effects from the chemical irritants that had been released through the munitions and I think it's important evidence that talks to us about the inherently indiscriminate nature of those munitions that they don't differentiate, that they're fired into a vicinity where there are a lot of people and lots of people are simultaneously affected by those munitions in several different ways, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the majority of the people there retained their commitment to peaceful assembly, they gather in the vicinity of the stages at Westlake Park, and despite the imposition of a curfew at around about 5 PM, march at around 6 PM away from the vicinity to another location and peacefully disperse. So the dominant norms here are about peaceful protest, certainly in terms of the crowd that's gathered around Westlake PArk throughout these interactions, but there are patterns of interaction at 5th and Pine and 4th and Pine that do indicate key escalations that took place. Now the incidents at 5th and Pine are particularly relevant.

-Subsequent major escalation, looting & curfewThey are particularly relevant because its subsequent to the deployment of the tear gas that we then see the first major escalation. So we know behaviorally that the crowd changed in the immediate wake of the deployment of chemical munitions at the intersection of 5th and Pine. Now partly I think that the reason for that is that the chemical irritants in the tear gas are used to disperse the crowd and they're very effective at that, but they disperse the crowd into 5th Ave, but they certainly disperse it in the direction of a roadway within which police vehicles were parked. They're unmarked, but they're police

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vehicles, and as a consequence the protesters who have been dispersed from that intersection begin to attack and subsequently destroy the vehicle by setting it on fire. Now I understand there's some quite considerable delay in getting to that fire and the car burns for a considerable period of time, suggesting I think that at some level there was some difficulty in getting resources to that intersection to clear the rioters away and allow for the fire to be extinguished, but again its subsequent to that that through this dispersal activity, in a way that's very similar in pattern to the night before, is that subsequent to an attempt to disperse the crowd it has the effect of breaking the crowd up into different pockets and spreading it around the downtown area where we see then subsequent sporadic developments of confrontation and in this case significant amounts of looting but also there's the blocking of the highway and several subsequent confrontations that take place in the downtown area for some considerable period of time. So I think that's providing a general overview and a detailed look at this potentially pivotal time between roughly 3 and 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

-Preliminary conclusionsSo looking at the evidence then, its safe to draw some preliminary conclusions and we need to be careful about the kinds of conclusions we draw and recognize the analysis here is merely focused on the behavioral patterns. We still need to examine the data around the underlying psychology and decisionmaking but just looking behaviorally at what's gone on we can see a particular sequence and we can see in that sequence of behaviors and interactions that these interactions evolve over time and in evolving over time, they indicate to use a particular pattern where a series of different protests converge on Westlake Park and around Westlake Park there's some police cordons that are deployed. In the vicinity of those police cordons a series of interactions develop which suggest a pattern of evolving dynamics, and those evolving dynamics speak to us about behaviors that are driven by, potentially, perceptions of legitimacy and illegitimacy and those perceptions interact with potential power dynamics that seem to produce outcomes. These patterns of interactions are most acute in the vicinity of 5th and Pine, and its here that a major escalation appears to occur and it appears to occur as a direct consequence of these dynamics. So basically people have gone through these dynamics between 3 and 4 and its in the pattern of those interactions that we then see the subsequent escalation and that's entirely consistent in the patterns that we tend to see in our scientific studies of multiple crowd events evolve from peaceful protest into violent confrontation and it does suggest and is certainly consistent with the hypothesis that those interactions at 5th and Pine were causal, that they were causal in transforming the nature of the crowds psychology in such a way that fed into the dynamics of escalation, and I think that that's a really important thing that we need to focus on in trying to understand how it was that these early forms of confrontation came about. I hope that was useful, thank you very much.

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