Occupy Wall Street Protesters Hit by Cops…Not Exactly the Bernie Madoff Treatment
Yes, it’s a children’s campaign, and poorly organized to boot. But those kids are doing something when so many people are doing nothing. (If you want to go, there’s a Facebook ride board here .) It’s inevitable that Occupy Wall Street becomes less than peaceful, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch kids being knocked around by cops for remaining in the same place police corralled them. How ironic, that the cops whose jobs and pensions are being attacked are the very people arresting the ones trying to protect their jobs: NEW YORK — Police have arrested seven more people at an ongoing protest on Wall Street. A New York City police spokesman said Tuesday that one of the seven suffered a minor leg injury while resisting arrest. He was treated by paramedics at a police station. The seven were part of a group of a few hundred protesters who have gathered in lower Manhattan to target financial firms. They’re challenging political connections between the firms and Washington lawmakers. From OccupyWallSt.org: The first arrest was a protester who objected to the police removing a tarp that was protecting our media equipment from the rain. The police said that the tarp constituted a tent, in spite of it not being a habitat in any way. Police continued pressuring protesters with extralegal tactics, saying that a protester on a bullhorn was breaking a law. The protester refused to cease exercising his first amendment rights and was also arrested. Then the police began to indiscriminately attempt to arrest protesters, many of them unsheathed their batons , in spite of the fact that the protest remained peaceful. And how about Mayor Bloomberg’s “free speech is what makes New York New York”? Guess he was kidding! New York City police monitoring a social media-fueled protest in Manhattan’s Financial District have charged demonstrators with violating an obscure 150-year-old state statute that bans masked gatherings. Since Saturday, five people connected with the protest to “occupy” Wall Street have been issued a violation for running afoul of the antimask law, according to police. “People here are very acutely aware of it now because of the arrests,” Laura MacAuley, a spokeswoman for the social media-fueled event, said Monday. So they’re hit and dragged by the feet for the equivalent of a parking ticket. Freedom, New York style! The man who filmed the police action — who said he was an activist, Iraq war veteran and law student and insisted that his name not be used out of fear of retribution by the police — said that at around 9:30 a.m., a group of officers, led by an officer “with four stars on his collar” pulled out batons and moved in on the protesters who have occupied the park. Read here for a list of their crimes. Oh, and apparently Yahoo is censoring email sent out with a link to the protest site.
Occupy Wall Street Protesters Hit by Cops…Not Exactly the Bernie Madoff Treatment
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on September 21, 2011. Filed under