By Alison Vekshin and Esmé E. Deprez - Nov 15, 2011 5:38 PM GMT+0700
New York City police in riot gear swept into a Lower Manhattan park to remove Occupy Wall Street protesters early today following similar moves that shut down camps in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon.
Demonstrators “should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office said today on its Twitter feed. “Protesters can return after the park is cleared.”
Hundreds of protesters have slept in tents and under tarps since Sept. 17 in Zuccotti Park, which was both the birthplace of the protests against economic inequality and the physical symbol of the movement. The police operation came after organizers announced plans to mark the two-month anniversary of the movement this week with plans to “shut down Wall Street” and “occupy the subways.”
“Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces — our spaces,” activists said in a statement released at 2:25 a.m. local time. “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”
Two hundred to three hundred people were in the park when police using loudspeakers told protesters to leave or face arrest, said Chris Porter, 26, a welder from Indiana who joined the protest in the park about a month ago.
Police broke down tents and “destroyed everything” while forcibly removing protesters who had locked arms, he said. The Associated Press said about 70 people were arrested, citing Paul Browne, a police spokesman.
City cleaning crews in orange vests hauled away dumpsters full of the encampment’s remains.
Sergeant John Buthorn, a police spokesman, declined to comment on police actions in the park.
‘The Situation’
“The mayor will be speaking on behalf of the city, not the NYPD,” Buthorn said in a telephone interview. “Because of the situation, the police department is not going to speak for the mayor.”
The one-square block space hosted a medical tent, kitchen area serving three meals a day, library, comfort station doling out underwear, sweaters, pants and blankets, and tables offering media outreach and legal guidance.
Resident protesters at Zuccotti have evaded eviction and confrontation with New York City police before. Thousands of allies convened in the early morning hours of Oct. 14, leading Brookfield Office Properties Inc., the owner of the park, to postpone a scheduled cleaning.
Court Dates
Hundreds of protesters arrested last month during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge are scheduled to start appearing in court today to face disorderly conduct charges.
More than 900 people have been charged in connection with the protests since mid-September, including about 700 arrested during the Oct. 1 bridge demonstration, according to police.
The demonstrators refer to themselves on signs and in slogans as “the 99 percent,” a reference to Nobel Prize- winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s study showing the richest 1 percent control 40 percent of U.S. wealth.
Oakland police cleared a downtown encampment yesterday after a slaying on Nov. 10. Police in Portland evicted campers at Chapman and Lownsdale squares on Nov. 13 after two people suffered drug overdoses. Salt Lake City banned protesters from staying overnight at Pioneer Park on Nov. 11 after a person was found dead at the camp that morning.
Change in Leaders
“The people who originally founded the encampments are either no longer there or no longer in control,” Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said yesterday in a telephone interview. “In part of clearing the camp, we moved a lot of the homeless -- they were about half of the residents.”
Deaths, sexual assaults, drug dealing and theft in the tent cities threaten public safety, officials said. The camps have drawn the homeless, street youths and a criminal element, some officials said.
“In the past few days, the balance has tipped,” Portland Mayor Sam Adams said in a Nov. 10 statement. “We have experienced two very serious drug overdoses, where individuals required immediate resuscitation in the camp.”
“The encampment idea became hijacked by people who were more interested in a party,” Sergeant Pete Simpson, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said yesterday in a telephone interview.
When protesters began camping in Portland on Oct. 6, “the groups that day were people who have been committed to the movement,” Simpson said. “Then those people started leaving and the homeless population and street youth began moving in.”
Free Speech
The camps have cropped up in cities nationwide to protest economic disparity. Demonstrators decry high foreclosures and unemployment rates that plague average Americans while large bonuses were issued by U.S. banks after they accepted a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker on Nov. 11 announced the city would stop issuing overnight camping permits for the demonstrators.
“The Pioneer Park protest site has become a place where some members of our homeless population have settled rather than seek available shelter and needed services,” Becker said in a statement. “We will continue, as a city, to honor and respect the rights of all of our residents to express themselves.”
In Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter said on Nov. 13 that the city “must re-evaluate” its dealings with Occupy Philly after numerous reports of thefts and assaults at the group’s tent city on Dilworth Plaza outside City Hall. Since Oct. 6, emergency medical services have made 15 runs to the camp and a woman reported a rape Nov. 12, he said at a news briefing. Nutter said he’s asked for additional police in the area.
Group Fractured
Many of the initial leaders that the city dealt with have since left and the group is fractured, Nutter said. The mayor said he wants to avoid confrontation with the Occupy movement and agrees with them on issues such as unemployment, poverty and bank lending.
“Now we’re at a critical point where we must re-evaluate our entire relationship with this very changed group,” he said.
The movement has no plans to change its encampment strategy despite the crackdown, said Mark Bray, a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street.
“The tactical strategy of having an encampment has become an important symbolic battleground and we’re not giving it up,” Bray, 29, of Jersey City, a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University, said yesterday in a telephone interview.
Mayor Bloomberg declined to say at a news briefing yesterday whether he was in talks to end the encampment.
“We’re not going to allow people to stop commerce and to stop people’s right to go around and express themselves,” Bloomberg said. “They all have the right to protest and that’s one of the basic principles.”
The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
To contact the reporters on this story: Alison Vekshin in San Francisco at avekshin@bloomberg.net; Esme E. Deprez in New York at edeprez@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net
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