No cops at White Center Pride’s annual street festival (WCP) tomorrow.
“We’ll get right to the point,” the non-profit’s board of directors wrote in an email to its community Thursday night, “we heard you, and there will be no cops at White Center Pride. Our mission is to create spaces that are safe, joyful, and affirming for our entire LGBTQ+ community — especially for those who have historically been marginalized, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, disabled, and youth voices.”
WCP also posted a version of the statement on Instagram. (Share away).
The change will be minor compared to years past. White Center Pride Committee President Eliot Hills says officers have never been posted up at White Center Pride. But historically, Seattle Police Officers and King County Sheriff’s Deputies have walked through the event and checked in with its security team. They won’t be doing that this year.
Two law enforcement booths have also pulled out. SPD’s Community Service Officer Program and The Seattle Office of Police Accountability voluntarily withdrew when the White Center Pride Committee shared concerns from the community.
Hills says emails about cops, and cop behavior at the right-wing Christian supremacist rally at Cal Anderson over Memorial Day weekend, started trickling in a few days ago. By Thursday, the emails were flooding in.
“All saying similar things,” he says: People felt unsafe and that a police presence conflicted with White Center Pride’s mission to create an “inclusive space for all.”
The shift comes after police violently cracked down on protesters outside of an anti-LGBTQ Christian Supremacist rally on Capitol Hill. Extremism experts and academics who study the Christian right told The Stranger that the Mayday USA #DontMessWithOurKids rally on May 24th was part of an intentionally provocative strategy to use conflict with the local queer community as evidence of “anti-Christian bias,” one of President Donald Trump’s pet issues.
After it lost control of the crowd, SPD defaulted to violence against protesters. Officers arrested 23 of them at the first rally at Cal Anderson, and another eight at the rally at City Hall. Seattle Police Officers Guild President Mike Solan blamed SPD mismanagement at Cal Anderson on staffing and portrayed the conflict as the inevitable consequence of letting a “peaceful group” demonstrate in Cal Anderson Park, which he called “Antifa land.”
At tomorrow’s street festival, WCP’s Hills says public safety is still an important concern. White Center Pride has hired a trained “community-based safety team” of unarmed LGBTQ people and allies experienced in deescalation, accessibility and support. It’s coordinated with the Seattle Fire Department in case of a medical emergency. White Center Pride also has a rudimentary first aid tent (for boo-boos, not emergency care).
“Things like band-aids,” Hills says. “We’re not applying them. It’s just, ‘You need a band-aid, here you go.”’
WCP also has a “Resources & Resistance” area for non-profits, community organizations, and mutual aid programs, including Queer Trans Combat Arts Seattle, Ingersoll Gender Center (with guides for name and gender marker changes in King County), Queer Scouts Seattle, Entre Hermanos, the Fair Work Center and Courageous Constellations, which provides resources for family planning and second parent adoption.
