On November 30, 1999, tens of thousands of unionists, environmentalists, and direct-action affinity groups shut down the opening of the World Trade Organization's ministerial in Seattle. The city declared a civil emergency, established a fifty-block "no-protest zone," and over the following days police swept up roughly six hundred people — the overwhelming majority arrested not for property destruction but for standing in the wrong part of downtown, many while complying with dispersal orders or simply shopping.
The prosecutions evaporated on contact with courtrooms: nearly all charges were dismissed, and juries acquitted most of the handful tried. The aftermath ran longer than the trials — in 2007 a federal jury found the mass arrests unconstitutional, and Seattle paid about one million dollars to a class of arrestees. But "Seattle" had already entered police doctrine as the disaster to be prevented, and the decade of preemptive raids, mass kettles, and militarized summit policing that followed was designed explicitly so that no city would be "another Seattle."