A report from Seattle’s police watchdog has found that officers made several key errors when responding to people protesting an evangelical rally at Cal Anderson Park last year.
Cal Anderson is in the heart of Seattle’s historically queer Capitol Hill neighborhood. When a Christian group with anti-LGBTQ+ messaging held a rally there in May 2025, people gathered in opposition. Police clashed with protestors, using pepper spray on them and arresting 23 people in a response that was criticized as overly-aggressive.
The report, which was presented to city council members on Tuesday, sought to unpack what led to the heavy-handed response. It was conducted by Seattle’s Office of Inspector General and included a panel of police representatives and community members.
“Something went really wrong in a way that we don’t want to replicate again,” Seattle Inspector General Lisa Judge told councilmembers.
Tensions over the Cal Anderson incident are still high. Several activists at the meeting said they were harmed by officers’ actions that day.
“We need to create additional systems of accountability, because the current ones are not working,” said Kelsey Burns, one of the people arrested at the protest last year.
The meeting was eventually moved online after being interrupted several times by activists who were angry that the review panel did not include the voices of people impacted by police violence.
The inspector general’s report ultimately identified 66 factors that contributed to the “poor outcomes” at the Cal Anderson protests. They largely involve bad communication, a lack of cultural understanding and outdated assumptions about the nature of protestors by police.
Judge said police failed to account for the broader cultural context of the rally. The review found that police were actively communicating with the evangelical group holding the rally, but not with the protestors who showed up with the goal of protecting an important space for the LGBTQ+ community.
“The historically queer neighborhood where this was happening wasn’t taken into account,” Judge said. “There was very little, if any, communication between police and the queer community.”
Police also lumped the protesters together with an overly-broad “antifa” label, Judge said, which led to assumptions about the protestors’ intent to commit violence and ultimately exacerbated officers’ aggressive response.
During the meeting, Deputy Seattle Police Chief Yvonne Underwood said “it wasn’t our best work that day.”
A body camera video released after the incident showed that one commanding officer at the scene told other officers: “We are going in this time with guns blazing,” and, “We are past talking. We are here to f*** people up now.”
Although the comments were widely condemned, the footage isn’t mentioned in the inspector general report. When asked why it wasn’t included, Judge told councilmembers she was not sure the comments “necessarily played as large a role as is assumed.”
“That statement came out when they were hours into this, and had already made a number of arrests, a number of uses of force.” Judge said. “That wasn’t just the philosophy of SPD going in and starting that day, that was kind of in the middle or toward the end of the day.”
The report includes a number of recommendations, including that police prioritize "dialogue policing” when doing crowd management; communicate more clearly and build relationships with community members; and avoid lumping protestors together as a unified oppositional group.
Police are reviewing the recommendations in the report and doing crowd management training, Underwood, the deputy chief, said. The department is also “meeting with different groups in the community.”
“We fully acknowledge that there is relationship building that needs to happen there,” Underwood said. “There’s a breakdown of trust between some members of the community and the police department.”
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