Seattle Mardi Gras Riots

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On February 27, 2001, during Mardi Gras celebrations in the U.S. city of Seattle, Washington, rioting broke out in the Pioneer Square area of the city. During the riot there were many random, unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders. Seventy-two people were injured and several women were sexually assaulted. One person, Kris Kime, died of injuries sustained during an attempt to assist a woman being brutalized. Twenty-one people were arrested.

There is dispute over whether the incident was racially motivated. An editorial in The Stranger claimed the incident was racially motivated, that much of the violence was directed at white civilians, and that most police suspects were black. [1] Seattle Police reportedly recommended the perpetrators be charged with hate crimes. However, others contest there was a race basis for the riots, noting that many of the participants were themselves white, and that the types of violence (sexual assault) were not congruent with the traditional race riot. (See Watts Riots, or Rodney King riots.)

During the incident, Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske ordered the police at the scene not to intervene, instead maintaining a perimeter around the violence, supposedly because he feared escalation. Shortly after the incident, the Seattle police force voted a resolution of "no confidence" in Chief Kerlikowske when officers complained of being "held back too long". The City of Seattle acknowledged police strategy presented a public safety threat, and settled with Kime's family for just under $2,000,000. Seattle created a task force to investigate the cause of the Mardi Gras riots. Initially task force meetings were closed to the public, but protest forced the city to open them.

Mayoral challenger Greg Nickels made Kime's death a political issue in his campaign, saying the certificate of his death would hang in his office should he become mayor. A picture of Kime hangs there today.

On the day after the Mardi Gras riots ended, Seattle had a magnitude 6.8 earthquake, the worst in 37 years. The scale of the Nisqually Earthquake caused people to refocus their attention on earthquake recovery and away from the violence of the riots. Outside the Seattle area, the Mardi Gras riots attracted little media attention and have largely been forgotten, as opposed to the riots surrounding the prior WTO Meeting of 1999, which are still widely remembered.