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A new archival documentary film, “WTO/99,” places audiences in the line of fire, with stomach-churning images of police brutality as tens of thousands took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference.

The film, which first premiered in February, has garnered numerous awards and continues screenings across the country this month, including in Seattle on Dec. 14.

Director Ian Bell, editor Alex Megaro, and their team take viewers inside the vaulted roof of the former Kingdome stadium to witness police training, to activist meetings, and behind the lines of state security inside the Ministerial Conference, exposing the cruel banality of capitalist talking heads broadcast across Seattle TV stations and cable news around the world. 

The conference in Seattle was slated to be “the largest meeting on international trade in the history of the world” and the first time the WTO met on American soil, former King County Labor Council head Ron Judd explains in the film.

It was an opportunity for unions, farmers, nonprofits, environmentalists, and other activists to demand protections for workers, the environment, and Indigenous peoples, and to rein in the expanding transnational power of the WTO, which largely operated in secret with no democratic accountability. For many developing countries, the WTO was an existential threat to their sovereignty, with its jurisdiction affecting every facet of life, including food safety. 

As corporate executives and government officials from across the world converged in Seattle, so, too, did tens of thousands of protesters who vowed to shut it down in protest of what they viewed as a harmful global trade deal. 

Peaceful protesters were met with police using tear gas and rubber bullets as they blocked WTO delegates from attending their closed-door meetings within Seattle’s convention center over five days and ultimately succeeded in collapsing the WTO conference negotiations. The public and civil rights groups largely viewed the Seattle Police Department (SPD)’s response as unreasonably violent, repressive, and “out of control,” leading to the resignation of SPD Chief Norm Stamper.

The SPD did not respond to Prism’s request for comment.

Echoes of protests past

Watching “WTO/99” is part awe, part déjà vu. The same canisters of caustic CS gas stockpiled by the SPD for the WTO protests were also used in 2020 against Black Lives Matter protesters. Many of the same SPD officers who participated in the 1999 crackdown are still employed today, such as Sgt. Sean Moore, a “foot squad linebacker” during WTO, who later asserted in a misconduct investigation interview after the 2020 protests that “hands up or not,” protesters were a threat. Another SPD commander, John Brooks, who worked in a “crowd management platoon” during the WTO, was found to have needlessly ordered the use of CS gas again in 2020 during a notorious incident that received national media attention. 

In his book “Policing Empires,” University of Chicago professor Julian Go writes that “when not attending to crime, the so-called civil police is little else than a repressive state agency for disciplining workers into compliance.” Throughout “WTO/99,” that state violence, vividly meted out against the global working class, is on full display, aiming to wipe out the physical impediments protesters posed to the free flow of capital. As a parallel, Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s documentary film “Union” reveals this same dynamic that plays out in New York City today. 

“WTO/99” is an exemplary historical record, crafted from hundreds of hours of archival film tapes, many digitized by the University of Washington. It sheds light on crucial aspects of the police response and the power of activism and movement media.

In his 2024 oral history of the WTO protests, “One Week to Change the World,” journalist DW Gibson reveals that activists fended off a mysterious attempt to steal a cache of footage from the Independent Media Center after the conference. Despite this and other attacks, “WTO/99” shows that movement media lives on and that the people who narrate this story are those who lived it, who took action, and who risked their personal safety in the streets to create a record for us to learn from. 

The SPD also appears to have learned from some of its public relations mistakes in 1999, when the film shows a mass spectacle of public hearings and official public testimony immediately following the WTO protests. After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, however, the city shepherded a retroactive review of police conduct behind closed doors, dragging out the process for years as the public outcry cooled, all under the purview of the Office of Inspector General, which quietly shuttered a separate official SPD audit along the way. 

The birth of modern “counterterrorism”

In some respects, the WTO protests were their own quiet 9/11 moment, not in the scale of loss of life, but in the profound effect that moment had on the consciousness of American policing. Afterwards, born out of SPD’s lessons learned from WTO, the SPD traveled across the country to teach other police departments “the Seattle way,” the tactics of using bike officers to control large protests.

While many people understand that American society was fundamentally transformed overnight after 9/11, in Washington state, major counterterrorism practices and planning were initiated the same month the WTO protests concluded. In December 1999, then-Washington Gov. Gary Locke, who makes frequent appearances in “WTO/99,” established the state’s Committee on Terrorism (COT). 

Born out of the COT were recommendations to establish “a dedicated anti-terrorism intelligence center for the state of Washington,” initially named the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC), now called the Washington State Fusion Center (WSFC). 

In 2006, the WAJAC would be used to monitor further potential protests against international free trade talks in Seattle, publishing a bulletin explaining that protesters were “using flag bearers, whistles and drummers chanting and passing out leaflets.” 

In 2020, the WFSC was assisting the procurement of weapons to use domestically against Black Lives Matter protesters.

One eyebrow-raising WFSC bulletin in 2020 stated, “Officers in Seattle have also reported seeing protesters using children as human shields in an attempt to prevent law enforcement from employing pepper spray, tear gas, and other crowd control measures.” 

In addition to brute force, activist movements during the WTO protests, the 2020 protests, and protests in between have faced direct infiltration by law enforcement.

In September, President Donald Trump officially identified anti-capitalist political thought as one of the “motivations and indicia” of ostensibly “terroristic activities” plaguing the U.S., and directed the FBI’s counterterrorism task forces to investigate and uproot networks that may “disrupt the functioning of a democratic society.”

Though alarming, the directive isn’t far off from the FBI’s past activities.

At least one of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) in Seattle was actively involved in monitoring and investigating the 2020 protests. 

A separate FBI Seattle unit, working “in close coordination” with one of the FBI Seattle’s JTTFs, mass recruited informants to infiltrate the 2020 protests in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It was there, on Capitol Hill, where SPD officers also chased neighborhood kids and WTO protesters in 1999. 

At one point, viewers of “WTO/99” watch as Capitol Hill residents start coming onto the streets. On camera, one police officer kicks a man in the groin, takes a step back, and then fires an unknown round from his shotgun into the man’s body. As the man is pushed off-screen, the audience hears yelling. 

“I live in this city,” the man screams. “This is my city!” 

Today, Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson seems to have psychically channeled that man’s assertion into her winning campaign platform, frequently telling Seattleites that “This is your city,” bucking corporate capital and its influence. How Wilson decouples her police department from a legacy of repression remains to be seen.

For now, “WTO/99” provides a window into the past that is ever-prescient today.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor