talking to City Council today, to push back against calling 2024 sit-in protest “violent”

This was in reference to the sit-in protest at Seattle City Council in February 2024, where five other protesters and I were arrested:

https://www.kuow.org/stories/i-feel-physically-threatened-seattle-council-member-says-as-protesters-seek-help-for-refugees

Even the usually fair KUOW mostly ran with the narrative from the council that this was “threatening”, but to be fair they didn’t have a way to get quotes from those of us who could counter that narrative, since we were in jail. (Although when I knew we were going to get arrested, I memorized reporter Ashley Nerbovig’s number so I could call her from jail, and two of us called her from the holding cell and gave her a statement that was used in an article she wrote with Hannah Krieg:
https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/02/27/79405398/police-arrest-six-of-sara-nelsons-political-enemies-after-she-refuses-to-hear-concerns-of-asylum-seekers )

Now that the charges against all of us have been dropped, I wanted to revisit the incident and push back against the attempts to characterize this at the time as “threatening” or “violent”. Here is a transcript of what I said — in the video above, I’ve also spliced in the 10-second video that I played for the Council on my laptop.

“Good afternoon, Council. So, you might have heard, the other five protesters besides me who were arrested at the sit-in protest in February 2024, that they dropped all charges against them. So I wanted to re-visit some statements that were made by the police at the time, and local conservative media, about how this was characterized. So my arrest report, written by Captain Steve Strand, referred to “this violent outburst that included the shouting and pounding on the large glass walls”. That clearly has the effect of making the reader think there was some danger of people trying to do it in a threatening manner, or otherwise intimidate or create a reasonable fear of violence. As you remember, I had a GoPro on that was recording everything, and this is the only footage of what that person was doing, because the security footage from inside the room is just pointing inside the room, and it doesn’t have audio. So, I’m going to try and make this work again:

[plays video clip on laptop showing man clapping his hand against glass window, in time with the chanting]

So you can see the guy outside the window, he’s just pounding his hand like that [making slapping motion]. ‘Money for housing, not police.’ OK. So, he’s clapping with his open palm on the glass window. Obviously he doesn’t think it’s going to break, if he had broken it with his open palm, it would have slashed his hand open. Honestly, if he’d wanted to break the window, it would have been broken, there are chairs all out there. I think everything about the way this event went down – you’re allowed to say it was ‘inconvenient’. It was inconvenient for me too, I was in jail until 2 am. That’s part of the point, you make sacrifices to show that you’re serious. But, I strongly disagree with any attempt to characterize this as ‘violent’ or what a reasonable person would perceive as a risk of violence. People stood here, chanting ‘Money for housing, not police’, people who didn’t want to get arrested filed out peacefully, the people who stayed behind willingly got handcuffed and were escorted out of here. I think the truth matters, even a year later, and I want to go on the record and correct this. Thank you.”