Four protesters arrested in the winter of 2021 for marking the East Precinct with anti-police messages in chalk and charcoal were awarded $680,000 by a jury last week in a federal civil rights lawsuit that has played out over years of injunctions and appeals.

Lawyers for Derek Tucson, Robin Snyder, Monsieree de Castro, and Erik Moya-Delgado argued the Seattle Police Department and officers Ryan Kennard, Dylan Nelson, Alexander Patton, and Michele Letizia violated the group’s First Amendment free-speech and peaceful assembly rights over the temporary anti-police messages scrawled in chalk and charcoal around the East Precinct and on cement barriers placed outside the facility at 12th and Pine in the wake of the 2020 protests.

A core of the case was how SPD was treating protesters arrested during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic despite policies that prohibited booking people for
non-violent offenses. “This occurred because, in December 2020, the Seattle Police Department and Mayor’s Office targeted non-violent protesters for retaliation in the form of an exception to these health and safety related booking policies,” the plaintiff’s lawyers wrote. “As a result, political protesters suspected of nonviolent offenses, including Plaintiffs, were booked into the Jail during a pandemic while similarly situated non-political detainees were not booked.”

The arrested protesters spent a night in jail but were never charged in the case.

The plaintiffs were each awarded $20,000 in compensatory damages and $150,000 in punitive damages.

Earlier decisions in the case put Seattle’s enforcement of all graffiti on pause until the court later clarified its stance.

2024 has brought some of the final legal battles stemming from the Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. In January, a $10 million settlement was announced between the city and 50 plaintiffs harmed by the Seattle Police Department’s flawed response and crackdowns on the protest crowds.

The chalk “graffiti” case is also a reminder that anti-police protests continued on Capitol Hill well beyond 2020 as the East Precinct was walled-off by SPD leadership and surrounded with a tall security fence. That fencing finally came down in late 2021.

Anti-police messaging continued to target the walled-off East Precinct even after the January 2021 arrests

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