Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Updated: Nov. 3, 2011 In Oakland, Calif., a small group of demonstrators faced off against police following a peaceful march of thousands of Occupy Oakland protesters. A roving group of about 100 mostly young men broke from the main group of protesters in a central plaza and roamed through downtown streets spraying graffiti, burning garbage and breaking windows. The police said some in the group briefly occupied a building on 16th Street near the port. After warning the group to clear the building, which according to local media reports was vacant, officers in riot gear fired tear gas and bean bag rounds shortly after midnight local time. Dozens of protesters “wielding shields” were arrested, the police said; the building was cleared by around 2 a.m. The spasm of violence early Thursday morning came after thousands of Occupy Oakland protesters had expanded their anti-Wall Street demonstrations on Wednesday, marching through downtown, picketing banks and swarming the port. By early evening, port authorities said maritime operations there were effectively shut down. The day before, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City, who has defended the free speech rights of Occupy Wall Street protesters while objecting to their message, said that he had become more concerned about how the protest encampment was affecting life in Lower Manhattan. Background Occupy Wall Street is a diffuse group of activists who say they stand against corporate greed, social inequality and the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process. On Sept. 17, 2011, the group began a loosely organized protest in New York’s financial district, encamping in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned park open to the public in Lower Manhattan. The idea, according to some organizers, was to camp out for weeks or even months to replicate the kind, if not the scale, of protests that had erupted earlier in 2011 in places as varied as Egypt, Spain and Israel. On the group’s Web site, Occupywallstreet, they describe themselves as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” The 1 percent refers to the haves: that is, the banks, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry. The 99 percent refers to the have-nots: that is, everyone else. In other words, said a group member: “1 percent of the people have 99 percent of the money.” Three weeks into the protest, similar demonstrations spread to dozens of other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. In October, demonstrations in emulation of Occupy Wall Street were held in Europe, Asia and the Americas, drawing crowds in the hundreds and the thousands. The political impact of the movement was increasingly plain. Democrats offered cautious support and Republicans were generally critical, but both parties seemed to agree that the movement was changing public debate. While the protesters seem united in feeling that the system is stacked against them, with the rules written to benefit the rich and the connected, they are also just as often angry about issues closer to home, like education and the local environment. Each gathering bubbles up from its own particular city’s stew of circumstances and grievances, and the protesters bring along their pantheons of saints and villains. A new set of challenges to the Occupy Wall Street movement began to emerge on Oct. 29, namely, winter. In the Northeast, a storm bearing strong winds and wet snow rolled up north. There was concern in the movement that the effort needed to stay warm — for that storm and those to follow — could eventually be a drain on the movement’s intellectual energies; and, of course, on its numbers. The Early Days Within a week of the initial demonstration, the protest grew. On Sept. 24, police made scores of arrests as hundreds of demonstrators, many of whom had been bivouacked in the financial district as part of the protest, marched north to Union Square without a permit. As darkness fell, large numbers of officers were deployed on streets near the encampment in Zuccotti Park, where hundreds more people had gathered. Efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: protesters were corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police forcibly arrested some participants; and a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting. On Oct. 1, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators who marched north from Zuccotti Park and took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action, but protesters said they believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting after hundreds had entered. As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans spread across the country, news media coverage of the Occupy movement spread, too, to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts. Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Oct. 12 that the protesters would have to leave temporarily starting at 7 a.m. Oct. 14 so that the park could be cleaned. Many called the evacuation order a pretext for shutting down the protests permanently. The cleanup was postponed shortly before it was supposed to begin, averting a feared showdown between the police and demonstrators. Buoyed by the longevity of the encampment in Manhattan, a wave of protests swept across Asia, the Americas and Europe the following day, with hundreds and in some cases thousands of people expressing discontent with the economic tides in marches, rallies and occasional clashes with the police. In New York, the police arrested 45 during a raucous rally of thousands of people in and around Times Square. Other than in Rome, where a largely peaceful protest turned into a riot, the demonstrations across Europe were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Similar scenes unfolded across cities on several continents, including in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; Hong Kong; Toronto; and Los Angeles, where several thousand people marched to City Hall as passing drivers honked their support. But just as the rallies in New York have represented a variety of messages — signs have been held in opposition to President Obama yards away from signs in support of him — so did the protests contain a grab bag of sentiments, opposing nuclear power, political corruption and the privatization of water. Powerful Unions Lend Support The protest in New York got reinforcements on Oct. 5, when prominent labor unions — struggling to gain traction on their own — joined forces with the demonstrators. Thousands of union members marched with the protesters from Foley Square to their encampment in Zuccotti Park. The two movements may be markedly different, but union leaders maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature. Labor leaders said they hoped Occupy Wall Street would serve as a counterweight to the Tea Party and help pressure President Obama and Congress to focus on job creation and other concerns important to unions. The Police Response The police’s actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism, but that may appear less nimble in dealing with the likes of protesters. In everyday policing situations, the one-two punch of uniformed response usually goes like this: Blue shirts form the first wave, with white shirts following. But those roles seem reversed in the police response to the Wall Street protests. As the protests lurched into their third week, it was often the white shirts — the commanders atop an army of lesser-ranking officers in dark blue — who laid hands on protesters or initiated arrests. Video recordings of clashes showed white shirts — lieutenants, captains or inspectors — leading underlings into the fray. And a white shirt is the antagonist in the demonstrations’ defining image thus far: Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna’s dousing of penned-in women with pepper spray on Sept. 24, which seemed to surprise at least one of the blue shirts standing near him. Police officers, law enforcement analysts and others cited a number of reasons for it. The prevalence of white shirts around Zuccotti Park, the center of the protests, signals how closely the department monitors high-profile events. Strategies are carefully laid out; guidelines for crowd dispersal are rehearsed; arrest teams are assembled. It is all in an effort to choreograph a predictable level of control. Yet in the pepper-spray episode on Sept. 24, critics say, judgment was lacking. Deputy Inspector Bologna faces an internal disciplinary charge that could cost him 10 vacation days, the police said on Oct. 19. The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also opened an investigation into the episode, which was captured on video and disseminated on the Internet. The police said on Oct. 20 that the “cumulative arrest” number since the movement’s start was 942. The Political Response As the protest entered its fourth week, leading Democratic figures, including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama, were embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment see the movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.

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