How America's Police State Controls Black People

'They Think We Are Animals'
Racism in America's police force is linked to cops' role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society. 

By Nicholas Powers, AlterNet
May 11, 2012,

“Get out of the fucking car,” he yelled. I dashed to my apartment window, looked down and saw a cop aiming his gun at a car. Slowly, hands trembling above his head, a black man stepped out and kneeled on the road. Is he going to kill him? I wondered. If he so much as twitches the cop will blast his brains out.

As the afternoon mist thickened into rain, I saw the officer blinking droplets from his eyes. His face was a knot of rage and fear. Thankfully the young man being arrested didn’t twitch as he was handcuffed. After they left and my panic ebbed, I knew it wouldn't be long until someone somewhere was blown into oblivion by the police.

It wasn’t a knee-jerk anti-authority reaction but a heavy feeling based on history. Months later I read of the NYPD killing 18-year-old Ramarley Graham and 68-year-old Vietnam veteran Kenneth Chamberlain. They join Duane Brown, Sean Bell, Timothy Stansbury, Patrick Dorismond, Michael Stewart and others on the growing roster of black men killed by the police.

Once the smoking guns cool and the body is buried, mainstream media repeat the same words, “accident” or “tragic.” But we, who are black or Latino or politicized, hear the slurs and threats shouted in the background. Progressive news show Democracy Now reported that when cops banged on Chamberlain’s door and he told them he was fine, one shouted, “I don’t give a fuck nigger!” In 2011, cops created a Facebook page to complain about working the West Indian Day Parade, on it they called the black partiers “animals” and “savages,” and one wrote, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” Repeatedly, journalists or lawyers smuggle out of the Blue Code of Silence evidence of police using racist, animal imagery to describe the very people they are supposed to serve.       

Racism in America's police force is linked to their role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society. They enforce laws written by politicians on behalf of the wealthy -- laws that end up trapping poor and working-class people in desperate lives. Racial and sexual minorities, legal and illegal immigrants are seen as threats to the social order. When we protest the law and “occupy” a space we are beaten and arrested. When we commit a crime to “get some” we are beaten and arrested. And when we do neither but simply live we’re busted to make a cop’s stop-and-frisk quota.

Language plays an essential role here. It starts with a defensive joke, a “perp” profile that becomes so blurred it encompasses nearly everyone on the street and a constant sense of danger. Each builds on the other until the change is complete and one day, they casually listen to NYPD Capt. James Coan give a racist hurrah speech to detectives executing warrants in Brooklyn. “They’re fucking animals," he repeatedly said of black people from 2008 to 2010, “If you have to shoot, you shoot them in the head.”




A Shot in the Dark
“He was obliged to keep watch all night long with his guns at hand,” wrote slave trader Robert Durand in 1733. “The negroes were continuously ready to force open his hut to rob him…as they were only looking to avenge the kidnapping of their friends.” During the Atlantic slave trade, 12 million people were stolen from Africa and shipped to the Americas. Slave traders herded them from ship plank to the market, where once bought, they shuffled in chains to plantations. And with each jangling step, slaves were circled by men with guns and whips who did not see them as human beings but as dangerous dark animals.

If your job was to herd, whip and sell people like animals then you must see them as such or risk your sanity. From the auction block, jokes and imagery of Africans as savage heathens and apes, swept through cotton fields and upward into the halls of power. Racial ideology, the belief that a physical difference between humans determines their place in society, rose from the material practice of slavery. In his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson equated blacks to animals, writing that they don’t feel love or pain. “Their griefs are transient,” he wrote “Those numberless afflictions…are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.”

The continuous association of blacks to monkeys created a culture of violent policing of brown bodies. In his 1845 autobiography, abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote of an overseer named Mr. Gore who used his whip like a tongue as if to speak with leather. One day he lashed a slave named Demby who ran into a creek and refused to come out. Douglass writes, “Mr. Gore then…raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he stood.”



Slavery By Another Name
After the Civil War ended, African Americans had a brief season of freedom during Reconstruction. But the sight of their former slaves walking the streets terrified Southern whites. In the book and PBS documentary, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African-Americans from the Civil War to World War II, reporter Douglass Blackmon explained how the Southern ruling class, which wanted the return of free labor, created the Vagrancy Laws. If blacks couldn’t be owned they could be jailed and forced to work. Historian Talithia LeFouria said it meant that, “Anything from spitting or drinking or being found drunk in public or loitering in public spaces could result in confinement.”

Before the war, images of blacks in newspapers were of lazy watermelon-chomping coons or blissful mammies or silent Uncle Toms. After the war they changed into lewd jezebels and fierce brutes. The shift came as slavery gave way to the convict-lease system. Racial ideology still pivoted on the concept of blacks as animals, once safely shackled, now free and dangerous.
Nearly 900,000 black people were arrested and channeled into the convict-lease system, where once incarcerated they were “sold” or “rented” to industries. In this era, police took over for slave catchers and prison guards for overseers as the reactionary force used to turn back history.



Stop and Frisk
“When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and sexual prowess,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1963). If you read black writers of the past one truth becomes clear: an “unofficial” stop-and-frisk policy has always been in effect, though the entire nation.

It’s terrifying, humiliating to have a stranger’s hands pawing your limbs and their eyes peeling away your privacy, trying to find some illegal object on you. It takes a while for your body to feel like yours again. And decades after Baldwin wrote those lines, stop and frisk of blacks and Latinos has gone from unofficial racism to official policy. Nearly four million New Yorkers have been stopped and groped by the police between 2004 and 2011. Nine out 10 were innocent. And 87 percent were black or Latino.

Stop and frisk is a policy that legitimizes race-based control. The change came in 1993, at the end of the crack era, when Mayor Giulani was elected and paranoia of black and Latino youth hung in New York. Just four years earlier, the city convulsed when black teens were accused of and falsely confessed to raping a Central Park jogger.

In came Police Commissioner Bill Bratton with the “broken windows” theory. The premise of "broken windows" is that abandoned urban space invites worse crime, so a building with a broken window invites more vandalism, then squatters, then drug dealing, until it becomes a crack mansion. Broken window calls for ramped-up policing of smaller, quality-of-life crimes.

In reality, "broken windows" provides ideological justification for cracking down on low-level dealers and working-class people. CompStat managing used weekly reports to find the “hot spots,” which were inevitably black, Latino and poor. These areas flooded with police patrols. Drinking on the stoop, washing car windows at the intersection or smoking a joint got you busted.

An era of gentrification was upon the city. Neighborhoods that had been off limits were now open to investors. Rents went up. New stores came in. New people came in until the city is what it is today, large swaths serving as a playground for the transnational capitalist class.
So every day, in the city streets, blacks, latinos and the poor are fondled and pushed around by cops. It's a "natural" site because the classic image of the black “brute” has been transformed into the ghetto thug.

In May 2012, New York City Council members met with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and questioned him on stop and frisk. They said their constituents felt “under siege.” He shot back, “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities -- people are upset about being stopped, yet what is the answer?”



Tricky Math
In 2010, secret recordings were smuggled out of the 81st Precinct in “Do or Die” Bed-Stuy by officer Adrian Schoolcraft. Printed in the Village Voice, the transcripts show bosses ordering street level cops to “pay the rent,” parlance for issuing tickets, summons and making arrests. Precinct bosses showed the inflated numbers to upper management as proof they were working hard. But when actual crimes were reported, officers were told to aggressively question the victims and downgrade them.
Putting “paper” on people and suppressing reports of real crime created statistics for politicians to trumpet how safe the city was on their watch. Under the veneer of First World professionalism, New York shares an ugly dynamic with Third World cities. If you are working class, poor, colored or foreign, you essentially have to pay the cops off. Except in our city, the money doesn’t go into their pockets but to the state in the form of a ticket.

People are being “mugged” by cops. And if you have a ticket you can’t pay, you get a warrant you can’t avoid and when caught, you’ll go to jail. The poorest people in the city are paying for their own oppression.



What's Thug Got To Do With It?
His name was Ro’. I first sensed him in the panicked eyes of my neighbors. My block is a live wire of spoken and unspoken messages; I was told in their suspicious glances and fast walk-away that the new tall black man was trouble. When I got to my building, the DJ who lived downstairs was standing at the doorway with a small knife in his hand.
“What’s going on?” I asked.

“You see that nigga over there,” he jutted his chin to the new guy. “His name is Ro’. Just came back from prison and he’s trying to hustle people, yelling that his bike was broken and they gotta pay to repair it.”

Every time I saw Ro’, he was more raggedy and hungry. My last memory, he jerkily walked along the street like a puppet with invisible strings yanking his limbs. One foot was bare; the other had a dangling slipper. And his eyes seemed to bob in a sea of chemicals. The men on the street shot him hard stares. He vanished afterward, maybe dead or in jail or rehab. I didn’t care which, I was just glad he was gone.

Walking home, I think of who else I want to vanish from the neighborhood. Maybe the bored men who curse my gay friends or the youth who shoot up the summer nights, sending everyone running for cover. And that’s the social contradiction. Black and Latino people are the most victimized by crime but are often brutalized or ignored by the very police who are supposed to protect us. 

We live with a city government that is driven by a conservative vision that casts working-class minorities as “ghetto brutes.” On the other side, some activists on the left cast us as tomorrow’s revolutionary heroes or the mangled victims of capitalism. Between these ideologies is the ever-present reality of crime driven by desire to live the “good life” advertised around us without the resources to do so. Criminals defy the hypocrisy of society and try to “get some” but in a selfish, narcissistic way that destroys the neighborhoods they live in.

It leads to a corrosive division in black and Latino communities where we are afraid of each other and angry for being afraid. We lose faith in ourselves but crave it so much that we seize on spectacles of racist violence to experience once more an ephemeral unity. So when Trayvon Martin, a young black male, was shot dead in Florida by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, instantly we wore hoodies to love in him the innocence stripped and stolen and cursed and stopped and frisked from us every day.

After his death, the racist Web site Storm Front posted two photos of Martin. One was blurry with him giving two middle fingers, looking mad thug. The other was clearly him smiling his new “gold grill” into the camera. The goal was to lower Martin's credibility by making his face overlap with the “ghetto brute.”

It was quickly discovered that the first image was false. But as progressive critics pounced on the photos, we missed a vital point. Thugs don’t deserve to be shot either. In playing the politics of respectability, we relied on Martin’s cherubic youthful face to sell black innocence. He became for many, an icon of our own sabotaged lives. But the scarred, embittered men and women in the 'hood are once again ineligible for public sympathy.

And I fell into this conservative ideology. I studiously look hipster to avoid hassle by the police. Sweaters, dark-rim glasses and a man-pouch are my camouflage. And it works. They never harass me. Since I teach literature, a thick book is often in my hands, which is useful for hailing taxis in Manhattan. Drivers assume I’m “safe” but I hear fear and disappointment in their voices when I say, “Take me to Bed-Stuy!”



My First Night In Jail
Last summer, an officer clamped cold handcuffs on me as I turned to him and said, “I’m glad I’m helping you make your quota tonight.” He roughly pushed me into the car, “Alright smart ass, for that you can sit in the back.”

I had been ticketed for drinking a beer in Tompkins Park. The bills came in the mail but I ignored it until it was forgotten. Now I cursed myself for being caught by 21st century vagrancy laws. While in the cell, new men came in and others were let out. Over the next 16 hours, I heard story after story of guys busted for drinking a beer or not having a ID on them or smoking a joint in the park. Some shouted for hours, some slept and some stared at the wall, projecting a personal movie of where they wanted to be instead.


I thought of Richard Pryor’s routine where he said, “Don’t go to the courts thinking you’ll find justice because guess what you’ll find – just us.”

Police State Blues

Monday, March 19, 2012 by Common Dreams
"Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."

by Phil Rockstroh


At mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.

In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.

Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame, shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.

Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not a force of democratic passion and outrage.

The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.

If rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will, in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S. police state.

But, and I hope I'm wrong in positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements of the city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide, before that day arrives.

At our best, as a species, we human beings use our minds and imaginations to bring less suffering to the world; at our worst, we use said attributes to rationalize causing so much of it.

Although not widely acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind's destruction of the ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications extend far beyond the political realm. The unfolding of these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you rise in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the state of your health and the condition of your soul.

To those who proffer the excuse, "in my heart, I know you're right, but I have to be a realist about this": you're letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump -- it is the alpha and omega point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are confused regarding the nature of reality.

Moreover, you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving a book report on Hannah Arrent's conception of the banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have missed the point. Apropos: Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who see themselves as normal and who live ordinary lives.

And it seems to be what you're actually trying to express is closer to the following: I feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes me feel uncomfortable, so I'll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about it a bit, but I'll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and I'll hope that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.

The Cartesian fallacy that one's joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private matter -- the idea that the process all takes place in one's own mind and body and has no connection to any larger order -- has diminished perception and has stressed the environment to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate criteria of life down to the "bottom line."

But anyone who posits the concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.

Yet the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction. Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality.

To awaken to reality is to suffer…allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.

If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.

To express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good Germans" of the 1930's, you might believe your codified hatreds and commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom…but these beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.

How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded condition?

At this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.

"Show your wounds," exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us.

Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order…to give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.

You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed.

The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence.

This song needs you to lend your voice.

And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."

Our Economy Has Failed -- Until We Admit That, We're Screwed

Industries, communities, natural resources, even sports leagues have collapsed as Ronald Reagan’s corrosive vision has become dominant.
By Kai Wright, ColorLines
Posted on December 30, 2011

At the foot of Manhattan’s Broadway Ave., just below Wall Street, stands one of the city’s most reliable tourism draws: Arturo Di Modica’s 3.5-ton statue of a charging bull. Since 1989, the sculpture has been an iconic symbol of American wealth, of the aggressive capitalist spirit that, it is argued, made this country great and powerful. Visitors flock from around the world to rub the bull’s horns for good luck. Or they used to, at least. Now, tourists snap pictures from behind police barricades.

For more than two months, the raging bull of wealth has sat caged, facing eye-to-eye with a New York Police Department cruiser as cops have worked around the clock to protect it from the Occupy Wall Street movement. The park’s administrator has called the security “Orwellian.” That’s to say the least.

If you’re looking for visuals to encapsulate 2011, look no further than the bizarre scene at Di Modica’s bull. Daily, the country’s largest police force mobilizes to protect the idea of American prosperity from an imagined threat, while the actual economy lays gored and gutted by demonstrable and ongoing crimes.

In the immediate, this perversity results from a spectacular failure of political leadership.

We traveled a long, winding road to the point at which no-brainers like a modest payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment benefits demand political brinksmanship. People of varying ideologies and partisan affiliations may debate endlessly who’s more at fault, but to do so is to truly miss the forest for the trees. The ugly reality is no leader in either party has yet shown the mettle to rise and meet the enormity of today’s challenges.

That’s not to suggest moral equivalencies. Republican leaders have been openly obstructionist, preferring a broken economy to a successful Barack Obama presidency. Their cynicism has rarely been as bald as the recent House vote on the payroll tax cut, but they’ve never made much effort to conceal it.

Still, even if President Obama had been given a willing Congress, the solutions he has championed aren’t nearly on par with the problem. Like his congressional opponents, he insists the structural foundation of our economy remains strong. Rather than confront the core issues—inequity and instability—Obama has thrashed around with Republicans in the margins—over how to control debt, over the degree to which health care should be a commodity rather than a right, over which borrowers were the least irresponsible and thus deserving of help. Meanwhile, at each crucial juncture in his reform-branded presidency, Obama has left financial players to voluntarily take responsibility for their behavior. They remain steadfast in their refusal to do so.

These bipartisan leadership failures have prolonged the immediate crisis, which dates back to 2007, when the foreclosures that would bring down the system first began consuming working-class communities of color in particular. Four years later, Republicans and Democrats alike are still working off of the optimistic notion that we need only contain the immediate problem until we can get back to growth—that we need only protect the bull with barricades until those pesky protesters disappear and allow its charge to resume. With each year that our chosen leaders have indulged this fantasy, a cancer has spread. Each year has brought new records in the poverty, hunger and inequality that will ultimately consume this country.

But that’s just the immediate crisis. As we move into an election year, in which U.S. residents will have prolonged debate over our collective priorities and values, we must pursue answers to a broader question. Since at least 1981, when the Reagan revolution overtook public policy, we have built an economy on two related fictions. 

1. The first is that boundless growth is sustainable. 
2. The second is that unrestrained capitalism, particularly in the financial sector, will create wealth for everyone. 

These are discredited ideas, and the question of 2012 must be how we begin building a society based on something different.

This broader question is crucial because, in truth, the problem extends past the economy.

Look around and you’ll find one broken institution after another, each of them buckling under the weight of the late 20th century consensus that greed is good, that a winner-takes-all individualism will somehow improve our collective endeavors. Industries, communities, natural resources, even sports leagues have collapsed as Ronald Reagan’s corrosive vision has become dominant.

Meanwhile, racism and racial injustice remain rooted in our society in no small part because they are necessary to explain why unrestrained capitalism and unfettered growth fail so spectacularly in creating widespread wealth. The entrenched, generational poverty that has gripped so many black communities and the yawning racial gaps that persist in wealth and income, among other things, can only be explained if they are blamed on the individuals hurt by them. Thus “welfare queens” and “super predator” youth and cheating “illegals” and “lazy Indians” and on and on. These caricatures continue to inform public policy on poverty, education, immigration and more. They continue to explain away inequity and provide villians against which struggling whites can define themselves without questioning the larger system. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quote about slave owners—the original unrestrained capitalists—still rings true: “The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”

Di Modica offered a quote on capitalism, too. In November, Newark’s Star-Ledger asked the artist what he thought about the security around his statue. He didn’t like it. “The bull is for the people,” he declared. “The bull is for everyone, the people with money and the people with no money.” If only it were so.

Wall Street’s bull markets have proven to be for the benefit of a very few. But as the financial industry’s largest players have been unleashed to pursue profit for themselves at all costs, the dreadful consequences have surely impacted everyone. Pensions have been wiped out. Family homes have been stripped of value, many taken away altogether. Small businesses have been locked out of credit markets. More than 14 million people are exiled from the labor force. A galling one in three black children and nearly as many Latino children are growing up in poverty right now, while the president brags about ferreting out fraud in the food stamp program rather than getting more money for it.

Our chosen political leaders have tolerated all of this in order to maintain the fiction that our economic system still works, that the organizing principles of our society remain valid. So the central question of 2012’s likely all-consuming political debate must be simple: How do we acknowledge that our current economy is built on lies and then start erecting a new one based on equity and sustainability?

New Year’s Eve: OWS Retake Wall Street as NYPD focus on Times Square

Sunday, January 1, 2012 by the Sunday Mail/UK

'Whose Year? Our Year'

Celebration: Protesters returned to the park en masse shortly before midnight in downtown Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street movement made a surprise invasion of Zuccotti Park last night while the police focused on New Year's Eve celebrations elsewhere in New York.

Around 800 demonstators piled up metal barricades, hoisting American flags and banners while scuffles broke out between activists and police.

Shortly before midnight, 100 NYPD officers had surrounded the park in downtown Manhattan with reports of pepper spray being used.

One individual was arrested after an officer was stabbed in the hand with scissors. The policeman was taken to Bellevue Hospital and believed to be in a stable condition.

Zuccotti Park hasn't been occupied since police cleared it on November 15 in an early morning raid. The movement escalated at 8pm last night, when around 100 protesters entered the park and erected a small tent.

The New York Times reported: 'By about 10.30 pm, there were more than 300 people inside... One man carried a big white placard that read - New Years Revolution.'

Shortly before midnight, OWS protesters announced on Twitter that they had reclaimed the park and unfurled a huge hand-painted banner reading 'OCCUPY WALL STREET'.

They tweeted: 'Barricades being torn down at liberty [Zuccotti] park...Happy new years!!'

As the new year was welcomed around the city, demonstrators chanted: 'Whose year? Our year.'

On Occupy Wall Street's official website it stated: '2011 was an amazing awakening. Let's start 2012 off right! Come celebrate with thousands of other members of the 99%, at our park and in the streets, as we make our special New Years Revolution together.'

Police in riot gear entered the park at 1:30am where 150 people remained and arrested five demonstrators. Authorities closed the park until 9am this morning.

Activists had been camped out in Zuccotti Park since September 17 to protest against the unjust distribution of wealth in the U.S. and the excessive influence of big business on government.

The movement spread to other U.S. cities including Los Angeles and Portland as well as Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the protest to be cleared in November because health and safety conditions had become 'intolerable' in the crowded plaza.

One million revellers filled Times Square to welcome in the new year last night amid tight security. More than 1,500 members of the NYPD were patrolling the massive 17-block party to ensure everyone’s safety. They also used more than 3,000 cameras and numerous check-points with bag inspections. Alcohol was banned from the event.