Chilling videos and pictures of the raid

Occupy Wall Street Loses Legal Bid to Rebuild in Zuccotti Park
By Quinn Norton November 15, 2011,
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After a day of chants, debates and yelling at the police who evicted them from Zuccotti Square Tuesday, Occupy Wall Street protestors were overtaken by a a wave of silence that rippled through the crowd at 5 p.m., as they learned they’d lost a court battle to rebuild the park.

Occupy Wall Street protestors had been hopeful all day that a state court would allow them to re-establish their two-month old encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, which was destroyed 16 hours earlier by hundreds of police officers in a surprise morning raid praised by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Instead, the court allowed the city’s new rules against structures and sleeping in the park to stand.

The false hopes deepened the impact of the court loss on Occupiers, who began living in the park near Wall Street in September in protest against an economic and political system that has benefitted the ultra-rich at the expense of the rest of society for decades.

The sidewalks around the park remained open to protestors, and after the shock of the ruling set in, the motley crew of protestors split along demographics. The young homeless settled in for sleep on the sidewalk on the west side of the park, while the seemingly unstoppable drum circle took to the sidewalk across from the park’s northern edge.

On the east side, a general assembly gathered to make decisions about how to proceed under the new rules.

Occupy remains determined not to fade away, despite the raid, the new rules and the imminent approach of New York winter.

“The whole world is watching,” said one protestor, in a message echoed out telephone-style to the rest of the General Assembly. “What we do in this space will inspire people everywhere.”

Tim Fitzgerald, an active member of Occupy’s logistics group, told Wired.com that the legal fight wasn’t over, either.

“We have really good lawyers and plan to appeal,” Fitzgerald said, showing off the red indentations in his wrists from the cuffs put on him that morning when he was arrested, in the kitchen, for trespassing and disorderly conduct.

At 6 p.m., the police began allowing protestors back in the park, which led, despite light rain, to a party, albeit one best described as a bit beleaguered.

The police arrested more than 200 protestors in the morning, along with a number of reporters. Using bulldozers and garbage trucks, the police destroyed the encampment’s medical facilities and library, disposing of the books into a garbage truck. Sanitation crews power-washed the park after police dismantled the tent city that had grown over the last two months in Zuccotti Park.

“No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities,” said Mayor Bloomberg Tuesday morning after the raid. “The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out –- but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others –- nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law.”

Following the evacuation, the movement moved north to Foley Square, where a General Assembly was held to decide the next course of action, though some people just curled up and went to sleep. During this meeting, the battered and angry (but mostly just exhausted) protestors got word from their legal team that they had acquired a restraining order from Judge Lucy Billings of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The crowd was jubilant.

A protestor spoke up, holding an American flag suspended between two bamboo poles, claiming it had been the last thing standing at Zuccotti Park and that the protestors should return it to the park. The flag quickly became totemic and was held high in the vanguard of protestors attempting to return to the park.

They marched, or trudged, downtown, past City Hall, fortified by a heavy police presence, to Sixth and Canal streets. It was there the legal plan was explained in what has become characteristic OWS communication: a three-part people’s mic. The legal team pointed out that if they weren’t allowed to return to the Zuccotti that the police would be in contempt of court.

A section of the protest moved on toward Zuccotti, arriving there to find the barricades. No one was being allowed back into Zuccotti Park, and a new set of rules had been posted to the barricades, specifically aimed at the Wall Street movement. The rules prohibit camping and/or the erecting other structures, lying down on the ground or on the benches, placing tarps on the property, or the storing any personal possessions anywhere in the park.

But the police had no intention of allowing the protestors back in before a final court ruling. They arrested the man with the flag, which they then confiscated.

For the rest of the afternoon, the park was surrounded by chanting protestors, including Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas, a marine who gained viral fame for a video decrying police treatment of unarmed Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. Throughout the afternoon, rumors pulsed through the crowd that the temporary injunction had turned permanent, but the police simply held their line until the news came at 5 p.m. that Occupy had lost in court.

The sweep of Zuccotti is part of a larger crackdown of the Occupy Wall Street movement, preceded by the evacuation of Portland’s Lownsdale and Chapman Squares over the weekend and the city of Oakland’s raid on protesters yesterday, and has been followed by Philadelphia, Toronto, Phoenix, among others, today.

Additional reporting and writing by Beth Carter and Ryan Singel

Occupy Wall Street: NYPD attempt media blackout at Zuccotti Park
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Journalists report aggressive treatment as media blocked from protest camp during surprise police raid

New York police attempted to impose a media blackout as they cleared Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park late last night.

As police swooped on the park in the early hours of Tuesday, the city closed airspace in lower Manhattan to prevent news helicopters taking aerial shots of the scene. Vans were used to obscure views of the park and a police cordon effectively blocked accredited media from reaching the site. Some of those members of the press who were in the park or were able to get there say they were arrested, pepper sprayed or treated aggressively.

One of the few reporters on the scene when the police moved in was Josh Harkinson, a writer for Mother Jones magazine. As police used tear gas to remove the last protesters from the park Harkinson identified himself as a member of the media and was physically dragged out of the park. He was told that reporters had to stay in a "press pen".

Reporters tweeted their frustration using the hashtag #mediablackout and said police were ignoring and even confiscating press passes.

A New York Post reporter was "roughed up" according to the New York Times' Brian Stelter. Lindsey Christ, of local cable-news channel NY1, said on-air this morning that "the police took over, they kept everybody out and they wouldn't let media in. It was very planned."

At a press conference after the raid, mayor Mike Bloomberg defended the decision to raid Zuccotti Park as "mine and mine alone." He said the decision to clamp down on media coverage was made to "protect the members of the press. We have to provide protection and we have done exactly that." He said the move was made "to prevent a situation from getting worse".

Bloomberg said that "from the beginning, I have said that the city had two principal goals: guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters' First Amendment rights. But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority."

The New York Police Department did not return calls for comment.

While most media were left scrambling to catch up with the surprise midnight raid, some sections of the local press appear to have had some forewarning of what the police were planning. The New York Post, a persistent critic of Occupy, was able to splash on the news even though it happened after most papers had gone to press. The New York Times too was able to get early coverage on its website as the raid happened.

"Maybe Mayor Bloomberg has been watching Syrian TV or perhaps taking to Assad. His tactics are more akin to something you would see in Damascus than you would expect in country that claims democracy and freedoms of speech such as the United States," said Karanja Gaçuça, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press working group.

Josh Sterns, associate program director at Free Press, has been tracking the arrests of journalists at Occupy rallies across the US. So far he has counted 14 media arrests and many incidents of violence against media covering the events.