Studio 2.8 Video - Black Lives Matter Special Presentation, Watch Extended Video As May 30, 2020 Seattle Demonstrators Massed At 5th and Pine And Then Brutal Seattle Police Attack

The events recorded and presented in this Studio 2.8 photography exclusive video began at the intersection of 4th Avenue and Pine Street in downtown Seattle on Saturday May 30, 2020. This Studio 2.8 Photography video begins after anti-police-brutality political demonstrators had marched for miles through the streets of downtown Seattle, southward past the Seattle Police headquarters, then north nearly to the Seattle Space Needle, back south again, and then north again to Westlake Park at 4th Avenue and Pine Street where this video begins.

As this Studio 2.8 video begins, a group of demonstrators were holding aloft a set of large letters, each the size of a large poster, each covered in shiny silver letters. The large shiny silver letters spelled out the phrase “Don’t Kill Us”, or something to that effect. Suddenly explosions could be heard coming from 5th Avenue and Pine Street, a block away, adjacent to the Nordstrom’s Department Store and the Nordstrom Rack Store, with the Gap and Old Navy stores directly across the street. As the explosions rang out some of the people in the crowd rushed away, south and north along 4th Avenue. However, the Studio 2.8 photojournalist who produced this exclusive Studio 2.8 video moved methodically east along Pine Street, through the huge crowd, toward 5th Avenue.

During the early stages of this Studio 2.8 video, take notice that the Seattle Police bicycle officers who formed a cordon across 5th Avenue were wearing bicycle helmets, but that those police officers were not wearing gas masks. Then later in this Studio 2.8 video, notice that all the Seattle Police officers who stood along the cordon, holding bicycles horizontally in front of them, all, each and every one, had changed into full face gas masks. It had become apparent that the police were planning an attack, and preparing to attack, the huge crowd of thousands of people that had squeezed into the 5th Avenue and Pine Street intersection, as well as east along Pine Street for a block and west along Pine Street, into Westlake Park and the Westlake Mall entrance, and further away north and south along 4th Avenue, a huge crowd thick with people as far away as camera lenses could capture when raised above the crowd.

At the moment of 13 minutes and 15 seconds into this Studio 2.8 video, a woman who wore a blue glove pointed east at the Nordstrom store, toward a group of Seattle Police officers who had moved to arrest someone who had been standing against the outer wall of the Nordstrom store at the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and Pine Street. As the Seattle Police began their arrest, the police shoved some of the nearby demonstrators with their bicycles. Behind the arresting Seattle Police officers, police grenadiers, some with tear gas bomb launchers, and some with “flash bang” grenade launchers, moved toward the officers who were arresting someone in the crowd and taking that person to the ground. As the Seattle Police officers continued to move in, the police yanked away umbrellas that demonstrators had been holding beneath the heavy rain droplets. Then, from behind the cordon, a Seattle Police officer who wore a gray uniform, a different color from the black uniforms the other Seattle Police officer wore, stepped up behind the portion of the police cordon that faced south and lobbed a flash bang grenade over demonstrators’ heads and into the crowd behind. As the grenade exploded, someone shouted “Attack!”, and then the police melee ensued. It wasn’t clear who shouted the word “Attack!”, but it was at that moment in which everything about the scene changed, and what looked like war had begun to erupt all around.

Throughout the brutal Seattle Police attack that transpired for several minutes after the shout of the word “Attack” was heard, the Seattle Police pelted the crowd with “flash bang” grenades and tear gas bombs. Sometimes the cloud of tear gas became dense and thick enough to at least partially empty the center of the 5th Avenue and Pine Street intersection before the gas clear and the protesters rushed back into the intersection toward the police.

As the brutalizing Seattle Police continued, an African American man return, a young man who had worn a black winter jacket, who also had a beard, mustache, and braided medium length hair, who had previously stood at the front of the demonstrating crowd, at the police cordon with his hands aloft and shouted “Get Closer! They Can’t Do Anything If We Have our Hands Up”. As the young African American man returned to the police cordon, through a cloud of tear gas, the young man’s coat was gone, taken off by “medics” who had removed his pepper spray soaked coat and doused his face with a milky white pepper spray antidote concoction. The previously calm and confident man had become angry and shouted, “Ya’ll pepper sprayed me n*gger! Let’s fight cuz’”, but even with his fists clenched at his sides, he didn’t fight. He only protested and shouted at the police officers right in front of him.

Seconds after the young shirtless African American man appeared, the volleys of flash ban grenades and tear gas bombs intensified. 
Near the end of this Studio 2.8 video an anguished European American woman rushed at the police cordon and shouted “You All Are Part Of This!” as she had a large brown cardboard sign about the police killing of African American men, accusing the very police in front of her of being complicit in the deaths of the many African Americans who have been killed by police across the United States while being arrested and taken into police custody.

One of the saddest moments of this Studio 2.8 Photography video, and one of the saddest moments of May 30, 2020 for the Studio 2.8 Photography and video team was seeing the Seattle Police literally grab, a small, young, African American man who wore a red cap, and a shirt with the phrase “I Love Being Black”, on it, be literally grabbed bodily, yanked into the air, over the police cordon and smashed onto the ground where a group of Seattle Police officers pinned him to the ground with his hands behind his back and handcuffed him. Seconds later another Seattle Police officer fanned the entire cordon before him with pepper spray. The pepper spray was too intense and painful for even the Studio 2.8 photojournalist who stood mightily there anyway, in the pepper spray and continued recording video and producing photos. From within the crowd “medics” doused the Studio 2.8 photojournalist with pepper spray antidote, all while the photojournalist continued producing photographs and the video camera on top of the still image photo camera that produced this video kept working. Then the Seattle Police unleashed its fiercest volleys of tear gas yet. The tear gas filled the entire intersection with gas so thick that surely no human being could breathe within that cloud. This Studio 2.8 video ends as the Studio 2.8 photojournalist who produced it retreated eastward along Pine Street leaving behind a massive cloud of tear gas that the exploding flash bang and tear gas grenades that left the 5th Avenue and Pine Street intersection virtually empty.

It was the incident, the melee, recorded by Studio 2.8 photography and video, and presented in this Studio 2.8 video, a transgression that seems to have incited all that has followed in Seattle, both the property destruction and looting that followed immediately, and the weeks of ongoing police protests in various forms around Seattle since that day, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in the middle of the afternoon, in the pouring rain, rain so intense that the cameras had to be wrapped in clear plastic covers to survive, as the massive crowd of political protesters who felt they could no longer tolerate police brutality in America stood and suffered yet more extreme police brutality in order to express their political opinion, and to raise their voices with demands for change, with the hope that such change might yield the justice that all African Americans deserve, just as all Americans deserve equal and fair justice in accordance with everyone’s inalienable rights, the rights codified in the U.S. Constitution and its Amendments, including the 1st Amendment, the 2nd Amendment, the 4th Amendment, the 5th Amendment, the 6th Amendment, the 8th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, especially the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection clause”, and the inherent freedoms and dignity upon which the United States of America is supposed to be established by “we the people”, the citizens of these, our, United States of America.

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