Occupy Seattle turns on Seattle Central

Seattle police used pepper spray on Occupy Seattle protestors and arrested six of them. Meanwhile, the demonstrators are say they’re “disappointed” their host site, Seattle Central Community College, is complaining about them.

Photo credit: KING 5 TV

Earlier this week Seattle Central complained that demonstrators have been vandalizing the school’s restrooms and costing them $20,000 a week. Occupy Seattle quotes a faculty member as saying the bathrooms were in poor shape even before demonstrators arrived.

“I have worked in the building for 13 years and the south end bathrooms have been considered the worst. With the continued defunding of Community Colleges, SCCC was forced to cut custodial staff again, so the bathrooms have been even worse,” faculty member Kimberly McRae is quoted as telling Occupy Seattle.

Occupy Seattle also says it is not the source of the drug paraphernalia found in or around a community college. They quote a former teaching assistant, Athena Marsden, as saying, “Every day as part of our jobs, we picked up drug paraphernalia, needles, used condoms, cigarette butts, anything that threatened the safety of the kids. All that stuff was there way before Occupy Seattle.”

The demonstrators also doubt the school is spending $20,000 a week. They’ve asked Seattle Central to detail how they came up with that number.

“We request a full accounting of the dollars the school alleges has been spent as a result of our encampment so as to assure ourselves and the community that we are not being blamed for spending that is either unnecessary or inaccurately attributed to Occupy Seattle,” they write on the Occupy Seattle website.