Seattle PD pepper sprays protester & breaks apart my PVC Pipe sign rig after arresting two people who confronted the police line

https://reddit.com/link/1ldecbj/video/rw33zgygwe7f1/player

Saturday night I recorded two people being arrested (posted earlier) who were confronting the line of police at a protest outside the federal building on 2nd, after the No Kings protest was over. A minute after that, other protesters gathered who were outraged about the arrests, and the police formed a line and pushed down the length of the block. One person was pepper sprayed (who wasn’t doing anything, and was even clearly walking backward as the police line advanced, right before the spray came), and the police pushed me backward causing the PVC pipe sign rig to break apart and breaking my glasses when they got knocked off. I found out yesterday someone had filmed it from the sidewalk, so I edited it together with clips from the GoPro that show the sequence of events. The five minutes of clips here cover a timespan of about 25 minutes.

At one point a cop picked up the detached portion of the sign rig off the ground and walked off with it. Later he found me when things had died down and told me he was just removing it from the scene so that people couldn’t use it as a weapon; I said fine, sort of, but why didn’t he just say that earlier? And the whole reason it broke in the first place was because the police line crashed into me.

Seems like SPD owes me some new RayBan frames but obviously I’m very lucky compared to people who have come away from protests with much worse. Meanwhile, this does provide some context to news stories about the number of people who were arrested or shoved around by police at protests; even progressive commentators will say, “Well, those people must have been doing something.” Not necessarily.