Seattle Democratic Socialists of America Statement:

Seattle PD Attack & Arrest LGBTQ+ Protestors

No Charges for the Cal Anderson 10!

This past Saturday, 24 May 2025, twenty-two Seattle community members were arrested after the Seattle Police Department and Washington State Troopers violently attacked protestors exercising their 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 twelve of the arrested were soon released, ten have remained in jail since Saturday under false, trumped-up charges, some facing 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 the courts will not go unchallenged by Seattleites as we face 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 violence 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 defendants 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. An attack on one is an attack on all.