Thursday, September 29, 2011

Wall Street Occupiers in for the Long Haul / Pepper-Spray Inquiries Launched


Occupy Wall Street Protesters Settle In, Despite Weather And Police Clashes
by Alexander Eichler
NEW YORK -- The members of Occupy Wall Street are not allowed to use megaphones, so they've adopted a low-tech workaround.

At their twice-daily general meetings in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan's financial district, whoever has an announcement to make speaks slowly and clearly, with a pause every few seconds, so that everyone within earshot of the speaker can repeat back what he or she just said -- amplifying it for the crowd of hundreds to hear.

That crowd, which in some ways resembles an indie-rock concert audience -- mostly young people, with a smattering of Baby Boomers, and a higher than average quotient of hair dye -- has been gathered here, steps from Wall Street, since September 17. They've been addressing a mishmash of concerns and causes -- from war to income inequality to corporate influence in politics -- that has left many onlookers bewildered.

The occupiers' speak-and-repeat technique is time-consuming, but their willingness to use it suggests a group not easily discouraged. Many of the protesters have been camped in this park for what is now nearly two weeks, sleeping on foam pads, cardboard boxes, and a ragtag collection of mattresses and furniture.

Despite lousy weather, media skepticism and clashes with the police -- including an ugly incident this past Saturday in which an officer pepper-sprayed several young women during a march -- the faithful seem to be in it for the long haul.

"Indefinitely," said Shon Botado, one of the protesters staffing the first aid station, a couple of tables spilling over with donated cold medicine, vitamins, tampons and other paraphernalia, when asked how long he was planning to be there. "Until change is made to the financial structure."
 
What that change might look like, no one can say for sure.

Whatever one might say about Occupy Wall Street, it's hard to accuse it of being a single-issue movement. The crowds of people in and around Zuccotti Park have as many different reasons for being there as you can name.

Some said they have come to register their dismay over the environment. Some are there to protest military occupations in other countries. At least a few were moved to attend after the September 21 execution of Troy Davis.

But economic concerns seem paramount for many. Several hand-lettered placards express outrage that banks and bankers weren't punished more severely in the wake of the financial crisis. And the protesters speak often of the national wealth gap -- the vast differences in income that separate the richest 1 percent of Americans from everybody else.

But the group is also devoting considerable energy simply to keeping itself going.

There are about 200 people sleeping in this one-block park every night, eating donated food and running into nearby restaurants to use the bathroom. An internal structure has emerged, one that seems to be getting more sophisticated every day.

At a megaphone-free meeting Wednesday afternoon, delegates from various committees stood and offered updates, assessments, encouragement and advice.

The Comfort committee, which handles bedding and clothing, needed donations. A woman from the Food committee said that her group was just fine on donations, but asked if anyone was willing to make their kitchen available.

"We have a lot of food that could be cooked and brought back here," she said. It was not an outlandish request: A number of New Yorkers have opened their apartments to the protesters, letting them shower and charge their electronics indoors.

Someone from Community Relations reported that local Financial District residents had voted down a resolution against the protesters at a community board meeting -- a welcome signal of support. But, the speaker added, some locals were still concerned about noise at night, so members of Occupy Wall Street were going to sit down and meet with them.

One young woman weighed in with a grim weather report: The forecast called for rain, followed by plummeting temperatures on Friday. "We are going to have to pick some useful strategies to deal with this weather that we know is coming," she said.

Someone stood up to announce a group meditation session happening later that afternoon. Someone tried to lead the group in a song, which was tabled for after the meeting. Someone else declared that his ukulele had gone missing.

It wasn't exactly a Parliamentary session -- and with everything first being said, then repeated en masse, it took twice as long as it otherwise might have -- but most of those present seemed committed to the process.

With the group's priorities so diverse, it's unclear how long the Occupy Wall Street movement will actually stick around. The group has yet to formalize a list of demands or conditions under which it might disperse.

Yet the protesters seem to be thinking in terms of months, not days. Botado, who has been in Zuccotti Park since the movement launched on September 17, said that the group is open to the idea of spending the winter there.

And while the protesters' run-ins with law enforcement seem like they might deter curious outsiders -- in addition to the pepper-spraying incident, at least 80 members of Occupy Wall Street have been arrested in the past two weeks, and several people have been injured by police batons -- many of the people present on Wednesday said they didn't get involved until after these confrontations.

While this is going on, the cause is gaining momentum outside New York. Similar protests have been held or are being planned in dozens of other cities.

The lack of clear direction may eventually prove a stumbling block to the occupiers, but the mood in lower Manhattan this week was one of cheerful energy. A sign -- one of perhaps 100 strewn about the square, or being waved to and fro by demonstrators -- read, "DEMOCRACY MAY BE HARD BUT AT LEAST WE ARE DOING IT."

"What's change?" said Rob, a protester who said he has worked in minimum wage jobs all his life, and asked not to be identified by his full name. "What isn't change? We're here. That's change.""We're here for the long haul," said Patrick Bruner, a protester and student at Skidmore College in upstate New York, who is among those camped out in a private park near One World Trade Center.

******


Occupy Wall Street: Inquiries Launched as New Pepper-Spray Video Emerges
NYPD officer Anthony Bologna faces two investigations as video emerges of a second pepper-spray incident

The senior New York police officer at the centre of the Occupy Wall Street pepper spray controversy fired the gas at protesters a second time just moments later.

After new video emerged on Wednesday showing the second incident, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters that the Civilian Complaint Review Board would investigate the officer, deputy inspector Anthony Bologna.

The New York Police Department's own internal affairs bureau also plans to open an investigation, the New York Times reports.

The investigations were announced after bloggers and activists drew attention to video posted online which showed that Bologna fired pepper spray on two occasions last Saturday as officers broke up a protest march through Greenwich Village.

The first footage shows him targeting a group of female protesters who were being penned in by officers on East 12th Street. The latest video shows another incident on the same street, shortly after the first, when he fired more pepper spray towards at least one of the same women, after they were recovering from the first incident.

On both occasions, the officer appears to have violated New York Police Department guidance on how the gas should be used.

In response to the Guardian's appeal to readers to help us reconstruct Saturday's events on East 12th Street, one protester wrote to say that she was sprayed with gas by the officer both times.

The protester, Ashley Drzymala, also sent us a link to this raw footage, which shows - at about the 3:56 mark - the officer spraying protesters as they retreated from the area of West 12th Street where he had used the gas on another group about a minute earlier.


Drzymala, 21, a student at a state university outside New York, told the Guardian that she had also been sprayed in the first incident.
We saw police throw a guy who had a video camera into a car. I remembered a police officer pushed the kid and he was trying to get away he was just videotaping, he was not inciting anything. I was saying "What are you doing? Stop it, we're peaceful" I kept saying "what are you doing" They shoved him into a car, they just attacked him, it was uncalled for." Then the girl next to me was pulled through the net by police. She had a black-t-short and black curly hair. Then she was dragged across the ground.
Drzymala, who was also shooting video, said she captured an image the woman in the black t-shirt before the attack, when she was calling police fascists and she was uninjured, and afterwards, when they were trying to leave the pavement, her mouth was bloody.

"I was watching her and then I looked up and I saw the police officer, the one in the white shirt coming up with his hand up and he had a vial in his hand."

Her own video shows the first use of pepper spray quite clearly, although her camera was pointing away from inspector Bologna when he sprayed her the second time.


Drzymala added that since she was in Cairo as an exchange student in January and took part in the Tahrir Square protests, she managed to escape the worst of the pepper spray. Being teargassed in Egypt had taught her to turn her head away, she said.

Asked about the first, more highly-publicized use of pepper spray by Bologna, the NYPD commissioner said on Wednesday, "I don't know what precipitated that specific incident."

Chelsea Elliott, who was among the first group to be sprayed, drew our attention to this raw footage, which shows more of what the women were doing moments before the gas was fired at them - arguing with police officers.



The section of the NYPD patrol guide that outlines how pepper spray should, and should not, be used, was posted online in a 2000 report on the matter by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that examines allegations of police misconduct.
According to the guidance, officers are permitted to use pepper spray when "necessary to effect an arrest of a resisting suspect, for self-defense or defense of another from unlawful force, or to take a resisting emotionally disturbed person into custody." The patrol guide also specifies that officers should "not use pepper spray on subjects who passively resist."

Officers with special training, however, do have latitude "in the use of pepper spray for disorder control."

Donna Lieberman, director of New York Civil Liberties Union, said: "There's no excuse for using pepper spray in the faces of peaceful demonstrators whether or not they are engaging in minor disorderly conduct. The use of pepper spray appears to be gratuitous and in violation of police department rules. What the video demonstrates how harmful it is for the police to engage in excessive force against protesters because it causes fear and how harmful it is for the police department itself."

The NYPD were forced to change some of their policing practices during demonstrations, specifically their use of pens, after a lawsuit brought by NYCLU which accused them of excessive restrictions in movements of protesters during the February 2003 anti-war protests in New York.

According to recent statistics, 1722 people complained of being wrongfully pepper-sprayed by New York police officers between 2006 and 2010. Of that number, the civilian review board substantiated just 22 complaints.


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