[What follows is an eyewitness account by Jurist staffer Ben Dictor of demonstrations held on 12th Street and Liberty Square on September 24th.]
Police Riot on 12th Street
More than fifty New York City Police officers forced dozens of peaceful protestors onto East 12th Street between 5th Avenue and University Place on Saturday September 24th at approximately 2:30 p.m. Officers quickly barricaded the street at both ends with orange netting and refused to allow anyone to leave–effectively turning the city block to an urban warzone.
Many of the protestors had marched to Union Square from the Anonymous-led encampment at Liberty Plaza known as “Occupy Wall Street.” (The occupation was originally proposed by Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist organization, and then was subsequently promoted by Anonymous, the online network of hacker activists that rose to global notoriety in its defense of Wikileaks. The encampment has been ongoing since September 17th.)
Many others marched with signs from the Workers World Party condemning the execution of Troy Davis.
Moments after the NYPD created their makeshift pen, dozens of officers blockading University Place began marching west, forcing protestors and pedestrians toward the barricade at 5th Avenue. I along with other patrons and employees at the Stand 4 restaurant watched in horror as officers indiscriminately used physical force in what can only be described as a police riot. Protestors were tackled to the ground and arrested. We watched as one officer grabbed a protestor by his shirt with one hand while landing a violent blow to his body with the other.
The protestors’ chanting was quickly drowned out by sirens of approaching mass-detention vehicles, squad cars and police motorcycles. Customers of the surrounding shops and restaurants appeared shocked after watching one officer drench in pepper spray three protestors who were standing peacefully on the sidewalk directly outside the entrance to Num Pang. The young women writhed in agony on the sidewalk, screaming as others rushed to assist them, who then mistakenly flushed the women’s eyes with water (which makes the burning worse). I, along with several other bystanders, ran across the street to guide the blinded protestors away from the melee as seasoned veterans of the movement arrived with diluted milk of magnesia to ease the burning.
The officers were relentless; they forced everyone west towards the barricade by any means necessary. Police helicopters circled overhead as the officers pinned dozens of protestors against walls of surrounding buildings, perfecting their mass arrest.
As dozens of protestors sat, handcuffed on the sidewalks, the police slowly began allowing people to leave 12th street.
Phone calls poured into the National Lawyers Guild from protestors who witnessed the assault and word spread among the crowd that the police were planning a similar assault on the encampment at Liberty
Plaza (now known as Zuccotti Park) that evening.
Liberty Plaza and the Tyranny of Structurelessness
By Saturday evening Liberty Plaza was filled with a few hundred demonstrators taking part in the so-called occupation of Wall Street. The police presence began to quickly increase as more than one hundred officers encircled the park and were scattered throughout the surrounding streets. Officers created a dense line along the entrance to the park, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as more officers, vehicles and the orange barricade netting arrived. The NYPD made no attempt that evening to communicate with the protestors, but the amassing presence of blue uniforms spoke volumes as to their intentions.
The signs and banners throughout the park were inscribed with messages condemning wealth concentration, corporate “personhood” and the role of corporations in American politics. While the group claimed to have no leaders, and to make all of its decisions through consensus, there were approximately a half-dozen individuals who routinely leapt upon a table or park bench to proclaim something on behalf of the group.
As the police presence amassed, the informal leaders in the square periodically proclaimed to their informal followers that they would not surrender the park. Many seemed to romanticize the very real possibility of arrest.
The group’s website claims that the movement is inspired by the Arab Spring, but the scene at Wall Street bore little resemblance to Tahrir Square. While, throughout the Arab world, we have seen civil society united in their concrete demands for a transformation of their respective societies, the consensus-driven encampment at Liberty Plaza has been unable to express anything more than a common frustration. The lack of formal leadership and insistence upon consensus leaves the group united only in their opposition to the status quo rather than in their vision for how it ought to be transformed.
Feminist scholar and attorney Jo Freeman, critiquing this structureless model of organizing, once noted that “[t]he more unstructured a movement is, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages.”
It seems that this may be the legacy of the Wall Street occupation. Unlike their self-proclaimed inspiration in Egypt and Tunisia, the group at Liberty Plaza seems to have unlimited demands directed at an unidentified target. “The lesson here,” as Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek pointed out in his 2007 essay Resistance is Surrender, “is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill.” Rather, Zizek suggests that the correct approach is to “bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.”
[What follows is an eyewitness account by Jurist staffer Ben Dictor of demonstrations held on 12th Street and Liberty Square on September 24th.]
Police Riot on 12th Street
More than fifty New York City Police officers forced dozens of peaceful protestors onto East 12th Street between 5th Avenue and University Place on Saturday September 24th at approximately 2:30 p.m. Officers quickly barricaded the street at both ends with orange netting and refused to allow anyone to leave–effectively turning the city block to an urban warzone.
Many of the protestors had marched to Union Square from the Anonymous-led encampment at Liberty Plaza known as “Occupy Wall Street.” (The occupation was originally proposed by Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist organization, and then was subsequently promoted by Anonymous, the online network of hacker activists that rose to global notoriety in its defense of Wikileaks. The encampment has been ongoing since September 17th.)
Many others marched with signs from the Workers World Party condemning the execution of Troy Davis.
Moments after the NYPD created their makeshift pen, dozens of officers blockading University Place began marching west, forcing protestors and pedestrians toward the barricade at 5th Avenue. I along with other patrons and employees at the Stand 4 restaurant watched in horror as officers indiscriminately used physical force in what can only be described as a police riot. Protestors were tackled to the ground and arrested. We watched as one officer grabbed a protestor by his shirt with one hand while landing a violent blow to his body with the other.
The protestors’ chanting was quickly drowned out by sirens of approaching mass-detention vehicles, squad cars and police motorcycles. Customers of the surrounding shops and restaurants appeared shocked after watching one officer drench in pepper spray three protestors who were standing peacefully on the sidewalk directly outside the entrance to Num Pang. The young women writhed in agony on the sidewalk, screaming as others rushed to assist them, who then mistakenly flushed the women’s eyes with water (which makes the burning worse). I, along with several other bystanders, ran across the street to guide the blinded protestors away from the melee as seasoned veterans of the movement arrived with diluted milk of magnesia to ease the burning.
The officers were relentless; they forced everyone west towards the barricade by any means necessary. Police helicopters circled overhead as the officers pinned dozens of protestors against walls of surrounding buildings, perfecting their mass arrest.
As dozens of protestors sat, handcuffed on the sidewalks, the police slowly began allowing people to leave 12th street.
Phone calls poured into the National Lawyers Guild from protestors who witnessed the assault and word spread among the crowd that the police were planning a similar assault on the encampment at Liberty
Plaza (now known as Zuccotti Park) that evening.
Liberty Plaza and the Tyranny of Structurelessness
By Saturday evening Liberty Plaza was filled with a few hundred demonstrators taking part in the so-called occupation of Wall Street. The police presence began to quickly increase as more than one hundred officers encircled the park and were scattered throughout the surrounding streets. Officers created a dense line along the entrance to the park, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as more officers, vehicles and the orange barricade netting arrived. The NYPD made no attempt that evening to communicate with the protestors, but the amassing presence of blue uniforms spoke volumes as to their intentions.
The signs and banners throughout the park were inscribed with messages condemning wealth concentration, corporate “personhood” and the role of corporations in American politics. While the group claimed to have no leaders, and to make all of its decisions through consensus, there were approximately a half-dozen individuals who routinely leapt upon a table or park bench to proclaim something on behalf of the group.
As the police presence amassed, the informal leaders in the square periodically proclaimed to their informal followers that they would not surrender the park. Many seemed to romanticize the very real possibility of arrest.
The group’s website claims that the movement is inspired by the Arab Spring, but the scene at Wall Street bore little resemblance to Tahrir Square. While, throughout the Arab world, we have seen civil society united in their concrete demands for a transformation of their respective societies, the consensus-driven encampment at Liberty Plaza has been unable to express anything more than a common frustration. The lack of formal leadership and insistence upon consensus leaves the group united only in their opposition to the status quo rather than in their vision for how it ought to be transformed.
Feminist scholar and attorney Jo Freeman, critiquing this structureless model of organizing, once noted that “[t]he more unstructured a movement is, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages.”
It seems that this may be the legacy of the Wall Street occupation. Unlike their self-proclaimed inspiration in Egypt and Tunisia, the group at Liberty Plaza seems to have unlimited demands directed at an unidentified target. “The lesson here,” as Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek pointed out in his 2007 essay Resistance is Surrender, “is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill.” Rather, Zizek suggests that the correct approach is to “bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.”