‘Wait, Capitol Hill Is Gay?’ 

This story originally appeared in The Stranger’s 2026 Queer Issue.

Happy Anniversary! It’s been one year since Christian supremacists took over a historically queer park in Seattle’s historically queer neighborhood.

The event, which you may have read about in last year’s Queer Issue, was part of the Mayday USA tour, an anti-trans, anti-abortion spectacle specifically designed to goad Seattleites into a protest that served their narrative: Christians as victims of left-wing oppression.

It worked. Mayday USA’s carefully edited videos appear to show droves of radical black bloc leftists descending on an innocent and peaceful worship event, forcing the Seattle Police Department to protect the worshipers.

And they were able to create that alternate reality on their social media feeds in large part because Mayday USA played SPD like a fiddle. Cops cracked down on protesters, forcing them back with bicycles and batons and violently arresting some for “destruction of property” because they untied Mayday’s balloons. City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was at the protest, said in a council meeting that SPD’s pepper spray had given her chest pains for more than a week.

A year later, City Hall and SPD insisted that they’ve learned from their mistakes. Last summer, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) convened a panel of SPD officers and community members to discuss the events of the weekend and its 16 reported uses of force by the cops. And last month, the OIG presented the results of their panel discussions to Seattle City Council. So what better time to review.

“Is that why there’s so many gay bars here?”

According to the OIG report, SPD came in hot with the counterprotesters because officers came from precincts outside the neighborhood, and didn’t understand or acknowledge the “cultural significance of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and specifically Cal Anderson Park, for LGBTQ+ communities.” The rainbow crosswalks were too subtle.

They also seemed to think they were reaching out to the wrong gay people. “Certain LGBTQ+ community organizations historically receive more attention, credibility, and outreach from SPD than others,” the report says. SPD didn’t reach out to LGBTQ organizations that had “prior knowledge” about the rally, to
prepare for “potential tensions.” The report doesn’t say which orgs they reached out to.

It’s an awfully roundabout way of saying they have no gay friends.

“What’s the word you can’t say?”

The most famous quotes from the cops that day came from a public records request in January. “We’re going in this time with guns blazing and all our pieces in place,” said Officer Matthew Didier. “We are past talking to people; we’re here to fuck people up now.”

The quote didn’t even make it into the report, but it did acknowledge that SPD worked closely with Mayday USA’s private security, and that they’d picked up the “transtifa” term from the organization’s “liaison.” (It’s like antifa, but
more transgender.)

The police outreach engagement officers, a team established to work with the public after the 2020 protests, started using the term, and according to the report, it spread among the SPD officers on the scene. The report acknowledges that the word was “perceived by community members as anti-transgender.”

SPD also went into the event believing that “antifa” (anyone who opposes our current government) and “black bloc” (a protest tactic) are organized, hierarchical groups intent on confronting the police, and used “open-source intelligence” (social media) to gather intelligence on “antifa.” The report encouraged them to do literally anything else (our words, not theirs).

Crowd Control

All of this, the OIG says, led SPD to misjudge what crowd control measures were necessary, leading to flagrant, escalating shows of force rather than “targeted arrests.” They said these arrests were “not consistent with that policy or training and resulted in officers striking numerous peaceful counterdemonstrators without warning or opportunity to move.”

“The confusion and uncertainty were exacerbated by SPD engaging in multiple melees and arrests amidst the chaos of the officers riding bicycles quickly into the crowded area,” the report continued. Civilian panelists recommended that they try “avoiding running bystanders over with bicycles.”

What’s Next?

The report had been public for months, but May’s public safety meeting was the first opportunity for council members to ask the OIG questions directly in the public record. It started with a bang. About half a dozen protesters—including two people violently arrested at Cal Anderson—spoke during public comment about their experiences with SPD, and, when they pivoted to the presentation, effectively shut the meeting down. Councilmembers Eddie Lin, Dionne Foster, and Alexis Mercedes Rinck joined the protesters on the floor while they talked about what it was like to have a cop kneeling on their neck.

Eventually, a disgruntled Committee Chair Bob Kettle pivoted to a virtual meeting.

Foster pointed out perhaps the most frustrating detail in the report—OIG had made the same recommendations in their reviews of the 2020 protests. OIG chief Lisa Judge responded with word salad. “There are going to be common themes,” she said. “It’s not that SPD didn’t implement recommendations.” And then again: “Those recommendations were implemented,” she said. “But they didn’t use all of the lessons learned.”

“They were implemented, but not implemented that day,” Foster said back.

As one of the protesters said: “Culture eats policy for breakfast every day.” 

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