NEW YORK (AP) — New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly has issued an internal message ordering officers not to unreasonably interfere with media access during news coverage and warning those who do will be subject to disciplinary action.
via NYPD Orders Officers Not to Interfere With Press – NYTimes.com.
Many local police departments facing Occupy protests have also not seen dissent like this in their streets in recent decades, and don’t know any other approach, Vitale says.
“In places like Dallas and Denver, police are pulling out batons because they don’t know how to deal constructively with dissent,” he adds.
Vitale says that the use of rubber-coated bullets and tear gas often signals “handling dissent on the cheap.” Instead of bringing in enough officers to establish control, “a handful of guys are sent in with armor, rubber bullets and flashbang grenades.”
“It’s very clear that cities across the country have not learned from our mistakes,” said Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle who resigned after the debacle of 1999 and has since publicly expressed regret for his handling of the situation, especially the use of tear gas.
via Robocops vs. the occupiers – Law enforcement – Salon.com.
…If the Dutch findings are right, police officers wading into a peaceful protest and spraying people are more likely to cause violence than to stop it; use of pepper spray in these kinds of situations isn’t just excessive and unfair, but also stupid.
And while the benefits of sprays in the right situations were clear, controlling officers once they had these weapons proved to be difficult. Across the forces studied, some 6% to 15% of uses of pepper spray were against suspects that posed no threat to either officers or civilians. Often suspects were sprayed from too close a distance or for too long.
Worryingly, an “unknown number” of officers took to carrying their sprays while off duty. Research into pepper sprays has tended to focus on their health effects, but perhaps it should also look at its impact on the psychology of the officers carrying them.
via How dangerous is pepper spray? | World news | guardian.co.uk.
The occupation space itself becomes a spectacle that attracts newcomers who behave in unpredictable ways and who broaden the movement by bringing in perspectives that challenge the ideas of experienced organizers. This creates disruptive moments, such as Marine Corps vet Shamar Thomas’ shaming of 30 cops in Times Square. Watching his performance, which has been viewed nearly 3 million times, gives me chills and makes me wince seeing him in combat fatigues, dressing down dumbfounded cops.
“How do you sleep at night doing this to people?” he shouted. “You’re here to protect us … If you want to go kill and hurt people, go to Iraq. Why are you hurting U.S. citizens?”
The notion of suggesting that someone should go to Iraq, a country tormented by the United States for decades, to hurt people is beyond the pale. But Thomas’ outburst shows how Occupy Wall Street has touched people deeply and allowed them to see the movement as their own, rather than having to sit through weeks of anti-oppression workshops or spend years studying economic, political and cultural theory that few have the interest in or patience for.
Civil disobedience is a tactic, but it is also a statement, like singing “We Shall Overcome” with a bunch of strangers a block from the New York Stock Exchange. Protests and marches bring attention to our movement, but also define what our movement is fighting for: an economic order built on equality, not profits; a political order built on popular justice, not private self-interest; a fuller and freer democracy, not only in the political process itself but over the economic resources that we all depend upon to live. The law-and-order regimes that encircle our protests and cordon off our marches are saying, in effect, that these are not possible; we say they are. When we get arrested, we are saying, in effect, that the law is not sacred. And as our movement grows, in the face of ever intensifying efforts to contain us, the opportunities to define and to demonstrate again and again what it is we are resisting will only increase. We do not have to knock down barricades to overflow them.
The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The state reactions to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it.
I’ve got another case to add to those in my earlier post on intuition and the sense of reality. This case arose in a long, and often interesting, discussion of the recent evictions of Occupy Wall Street encampments. The discussion has been taking place at Crooked Timber and has involved, among other things, a fairly extensive conversation between one Adrian Kelleher, about whom I know nothing, and Rich Puchalsky, whom I know from The Valve and CT.
Kelleher has been making long, detailed comments saying, more or less, “you’re doing it wrong, you can’t possibly succeed.” Puchalsky, who’s been working with the Occupy group in his neighborhood somewhere in in not-Boston Massachusetts, has been saying, “you don’t at all understand the Occupy movement.” In particular, Kelleher made two long comments, 333 and, particularly 334, which is about how OWS is swimming against “the tide of history.” Puchalsky responds in 341.
Here’s my reply to Puchalsky:
Puchalsky: It’s possible for someone to have quite conventional political views and yet act quite differently within a social situation that is different.
BB: Bingo!
Puchalsky: When that failure happens, people in OWS will have friends that they can trust, people who they’ve worked with at a very elemental level.
BB: Bingo! Bingo!BB: Let me invoke Marley’s Theorem, named after my old buddy Jason Marley: “If you want to know what it’s like to drive a car, you’ve got to sit in the driver’s set and drive the car.” Sitting in the passenger’s seat watching the driver won’t do it, nor will sitting in the back seat, and certainly not sitting at home in your den imagining what driving a car is like. You’ve got to be IN the car, making decisions about traffic, the road, and pedestrians. It’s that elemental.
That last paragraph is where we get the intersection with my earlier remarks about intuition. Puchalsky is IN the OWS movement and so understands it from the inside; he’s in the driver’s seat. Kelleher, apparently, is not. Continue reading
A reporter for Politico found that use of the words “income inequality” quintupled in a news database after the Occupy protests began. That’s a significant achievement, for this is an issue that goes to our country’s values and our opportunities for growth — and yet we in the news business have rarely given it the attention it deserves.
Several area churches have been sheltering protesters in the days since the city banned sleeping in Zuccotti Park, and church officials said they were alarmed by the idea that the police might be monitoring their conduct.
“It is disconcerting that they would actually enter the sanctuary,” said the Rev. James Karpen, known as Reverend K, senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, on West 86th Street. “Here we had offered hospitality and safety, which is our business as a church; it just felt invasive.”
via Occupy Wall Street Protesters, Even in Churches, Can’t Escape Watch of Police – NYTimes.com.
Occupy is an open source protest. That means it doesn’t have a specific message. It is a container for may groups/motivations/passions held together by simplest of ideas: it is possible to permanently occupy of places of power. Anyone that tells you it needs to have a specific policy agenda is a) not an expert and b) still living in the 20th Century.
The Occupy approach, a permanent 24x7x365 geographically ubiquitous protest movement, may be about to zoom. Reinforcements are coming.
via OCCUPY NOTE 11/17/11 Contagion #ows – Global Guerrillas.
Truth and Traditions 