Seattle DSA Condemns Anti-Trans Police Violence in Cal Anderson Park
APPROVED FOR RELEASE 25 MAY 2025
Seattle DSA strongly condemns the violent police riot that occurred yesterday, during which officers assaulted, peppered sprayed and arrested protestors and bystanders including DSA members as they peacefully exercised their 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate against a bigoted anti-trans hate rally in Cal Anderson Park hosted by an out-of-state astroturf group.
It is egregious that the city and state would use public resources to protect a hate rally. Sending in law enforcement to attempt to provoke, arrest and injure Seattleites advocating for a city free from discrimination and hatred is disgusting.
We condemn Mayor Bruce Harrell for using the police to target queer protestors in one of Seattle’s gayest neighborhoods, and call on every local elected official to condemn these actions by police and investigate how this hateful, bigoted event was ever allowed to take place.
Today is a shameful reminder that the state has chosen to side with hatred and discrimination, and the police will always come down on the side of those who seek to attack and erase us. Seattle DSA will always stand with the trans and queer community – an attack on one is an attack on all.
Seattle DSA Statement on Those Arrested at Cal Anderson Park
APPROVED FOR RELEASE 26 MAY 2025
This past Saturday, 24 May 2025, twenty-three Seattle community members were arrested after the Seattle Police Department and Washington State Troopers violently attacked protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech to tell the anti-queer, transphobic, anti-choice astroturf group MayDayUSA their hate is not welcome here. Seattle DSA condemns this recent exercise of state violence and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s equivocating statement on the events of last week as he attempts to absolve himself of responsibility.
While several of the arrested were soon released, many remained in jail over the weekend under false, trumped-up charges including felony assault. Among these political prisoners are close comrades of Seattle DSA, individuals with deep ties to our community who have been active in the wider movement for a just, collectively liberated world.
This uncalled-for attack at the hands of the police and courts will not go unchallenged by Seattleites as we face many mounting crises, an increasingly hostile Mayor and City Council, and a growing recognition that politics-as-usual is a dead-end. Seattle DSA stands with our queer and trans neighbors as they fight for their liberation from both the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and the many violences of capitalism, and we stand with political prisoners who fight for justice and freedom.
As we mark the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the summer of uprisings it sparked, we have seen demands for police accountability and disarmament as well as prison abolition be met with further police impunity, more police funding, and an ever-growing prison-industrial complex. Time and time again marginalized communities have borne the brunt of state violence in defense of an untenable status quo, communities including our BIPOC, queer, unhoused, migrant, and low-wage neighbors. And time and time again these communities have risen up to declare this situation unbearable and fought back.
We demand charges be dropped for the Cal Anderson Defendents and for Bruce Harrell to immediately resign. Seattle DSA further continues to demand for the end of prisons and police militarization as tools of domination and capitalist exploitation along with the wider structural violence of racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that underlie them.
Without justice, there can be no meaningful peace. And attack on one is an attack on all.