Josh Harkinson: Inside Police Lines at the Occupy Wall Street Eviction

[Important because it outlines the continuing institution of a new police tactic designed to eliminate media coverage of police actions against peaceful protesters: the "frozen zone."]

Exclusive Video: Inside Police Lines at the Occupy Wall Street Eviction
Amid this morning's crackdown on Zuccotti Park, I was one of the only reporters bearing witness.
By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones

By about 4 a.m. today, New York City police had pushed the media out of Zuccotti Park and were preparing to evict the few dozen protesters who remained. Yet there I was, standing in the park amid a gaggle of high-ranking officers, quietly watching the whole thing unfold.

"You gonna occupy awhile?" one officer cracked to another.

"Yeah," the other guy smiled.

I stood next to them against a short granite wall, trying to avoid notice.

Like the other reporters who'd swarmed to Lower Manhattan to cover the eviction, I'd quickly discovered that the media was not allowed here. The police had created a one-block buffer zone around the park—in some areas two or three blocks—and were refusing to admit even the most credentialed members of the press. A New York Times reporter had already been arrested, a member of the National Lawyers Guild told me. I feared that Occupy Wall Street's big day was being censored.

As occupiers streamed out of the park, harried by baton-wielding cops, I resolved to get inside. Shielded from view by a car, I slipped under a barricade and came to another blockade across the street from the park's southeast corner, where I cut through a hole and was quickly approached by a police officer. "I'm not an occupier," I told him, holding out my business card.

"That's great, he said, pointing away from the park. "But you are going to have to wait on the other side of the street."

I waited, and when nobody was looking, I crossed back over as confidently as I could and entered a scrum of suit-wearing police brass and cleanup workers scrubbing the park's sidewalk. Nobody bothered to stop me as I strode up to the park's northern entrance and stopped against a wall, a few yards from where police in helmets surrounded the the remaining occupiers.

Next to me, an officer was telling an important-looking guy named Eddie about "the intel we've had over the past couple of months" about "the severely mentally retarded, the ones that are real fucked up in the head, and have been violent in the past." He went on: "They are a little off kilter. They're off their meds. They haven't had meds in 30 days."

"I'm only 24 hours off mine," Eddie joked.

"It's good for you, Eddie," the cop said. "You've got to come clean every once in a while."

As the two men talked, a sweaty-faced man wearing a neon vest over a business suit walked up and started tearing protest signs off the wall."I couldn't wait," he said. "Destroying things never felt so good."

"Really," someone said, almost inflecting the word as a question.

"They're fucking assholes," the guy in the suit shot back.

Another guy came up to Eddie. "How are we about hooking up the fire hydrants?" he asked. "We talkin' to somebody?"

"Do it. Do it," Eddie said over the roar of a garbage truck.

A few yards away, the last occupiers took turns waving a large American flag. Huddled inside the park's makeshift kitchen, they seemed as diverse as Occupy Wall Street: There was a shaggy punk in a spiky leather jacket. A young girl in a red sweatshirt that read "Unity." Clean-shaven guys wearing glasses. A shirtless occupier named Ted Hall, who has led an effort to hone the movement's "visions and goals." All of them surrounded a smaller group of occupiers who'd chained their necks to a pole.

To Read the Rest of the Report and To Watch the Video

More:

Slate: David Weigel - The Frozen Zone

Stephen Graham and Tariq Ali: Police Crackdowns on Occupy Protests from Oakland to New York Herald the "New Military Urbanism"

Police Crackdowns on Occupy Protests from Oakland to New York Herald the "New Military Urbanism"
Democracy Now

After a wave of raids across the country in which police in riot gear broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments and arrested protesters, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that she participated in a conference call with officials from 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy movement. As police forces violently crack down on protests across the United States and Europe, we look at the increasing influence of military technology on domestic police forces. Stephen Graham is professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K. His book is, "Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism." "Why the Occupy movement is so powerful, what it’s demonstrating, is that by occupying public spaces around the world — and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces — it’s reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy," Graham says.

Guests:

Stephen Graham, professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K. His most recent book is called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.

Tariq Ali, participant in Occupy Oakland