By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle has to pay $680,000, including punitive damages, to four people arrested and jailed for writing anti-police messages in sidewalk chalk on a temporary concrete barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct building during a January 2021 protest against police brutality. The jury verdict came after a six-day trial in US District Judge Marsha Pechman’s courtroom.

The four plaintiffs in the case—Derek Tucson, Robin Snyder, Monsieree de Castro, and Eric Moya-Delgado—were arrested and booked into the King County Jail on January 1, 2021 after writing messages in chalk on a temporary concrete wall outside the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct. The county jail was not accepting bookings at the time because of COVID, but, according to the lawsuit, SPD was able to override the county’s policy by using a so-called “protester exception.”

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison argued, on behalf of SPD, that the chalked messages—which included “BLM,” “peaceful protest,” and “fuck SPD”—violated a local law against “property destruction,” a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail.

“Based on the evidence presented at trial, the jury found the defendants arrested and booked the plaintiffs because of the content or viewpoint of their speech,” an attorney for the four plaintiffs, Braden Pence, said in a statement. “We hope this verdict will be a warning and a lesson to police officers and other government officials across the country who violate the First Amendment—that they are and will be held accountable when they arrest and jail people for protected speech.”

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Last June, Pechman issued an injunction against the portion of the property destruction law that pertains specifically to graffiti, calling it so vaguely worded that it effectively “criminalizes innocent drawings,” including sidewalk chalk drawings by children. In practice, the judge, Marsha Pechman noted, the law allows police to arbitrarily decide which speech is acceptable and which is cause for arrest based on viewpoint, creating “a real and substantial threat of censorship.”

Although the injunction, which prevented the city from enforcing its graffiti law, was eventually overturned, the city attorney’s office continued to pursue the underlying case.

The lawsuit gave several examples in which the police department has encouraged and even participated in sidewalk chalking when it supports their political viewpoint—chalking messages across the sidewalk outside City Hall, for example, during a “Back the Blue” event in the summer of 2020, a time when protests against police violence were happening across the city.

According to the protesters’ attorneys, the jury found not only that the SPD officers made the wrong decision by arresting and booking the four defendants, but that their decisions were “retaliatory” and that they acted “with malice, oppression, or reckless disregard for the plaintiffs’ rights.”

A spokesman for City Attorney Ann Davison said that because the city hired outside attorneys to defend SPD, they do not know yet how much the lawsuit will cost the city. Davison not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.