Occupy Wall Street
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Occupy Wall Street is a diffuse group of activists who say they stand
against corporate greed, social inequality and other disparities
between rich and poor. On Sept. 17, 2011, the group began a loosely
organized protest in New York’s financial district, encamping in
Zuccotti Park, a privately owned park open to the public, in Lower
Manhattan.
The idea, according to some organizers, was to camp out for weeks or
even months to replicate the kind, if not the scale, of protests that
had erupted earlier in 2011 in places as varied as Egypt, Spain and
Israel.
Three weeks into the protest, similar demonstrations had spread to dozens of other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.
On the group’s Web site, Occupywallstreet,
they describe themselves as a “leaderless resistance movement with
people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing
we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer
tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”
The 1 percent refers to the haves: that is, the banks, the mortgage
industry, the insurance industry. The 99 percent refers to the
have-nots: that is, everyone else. In other words, said a group member:
“1 percent of the people have 99 percent of the money.”
Within a week of the initial demonstration, the protest grew. On
Sept. 24, police made scores of arrests as hundreds of demonstrators,
many of whom had been bivouacked in the financial district as part of
the protest, marched north to Union Square without a permit. As darkness
fell, large numbers of officers were deployed on streets near the
encampment in Zuccotti Park, where hundreds more people had gathered.
Efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: protesters were
corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police
forcibly arrested some participants; and a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting.
On Oct. 1, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators
who marched north from Zuccotti Park and took to the roadway as they
tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The police said it was the marchers’
choice that led to the enforcement action, but protesters said they
believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and
even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting
after hundreds had entered.
As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans spread across the country, news media coverage of the Occupy movement spread, too, to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts.
Michael R. Bloomberg
announced on Oct. 12 that the protesters would have to leave
temporarily starting at 7 a.m. Oct. 14 so that the park could be
cleaned. Many called the evacuation order a pretext for shutting down
the protests permanently. The cleanup was postponed shortly before it
was supposed to begin, averting a feared showdown between the police and
demonstrators.
In a radio interview, Mayor Bloomberg sought to make it clear that
the decision to postpone the cleanup was made by Brookfield Properties,
the owner of Zuccotti Park, and not by his administration.
Powerful Unions Lend Support
The protest in New York got reinforcements on Oct. 5, when prominent labor unions — struggling to gain traction on their own — joined forces with the demonstrators. Thousands of union members marched with the protesters from Foley Square to their encampment in Zuccotti Park.
The two movements may be markedly different, but union leaders
maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can
tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can
benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature.
Labor leaders said they hoped Occupy Wall Street would serve as a
counterweight to the Tea Party and help pressure President Obama and Congress to focus on job creation and other concerns important to unions.
The Police Response
The police’s actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to
fight terrorism, but that may appear less nimble in dealing with the
likes of protesters.
In everyday policing situations, the one-two punch of uniformed
response usually goes like this: Blue shirts form the first wave, with
white shirts following. But those roles seem reversed in the police response to the Wall Street protests.
As the protests lurched into their third week, it was often the white
shirts — the commanders atop an army of lesser-ranking officers in dark
blue — who laid hands on protesters or initiated arrests. Video
recordings of clashes showed white shirts — lieutenants, captains or
inspectors — leading underlings into the fray.
And a white shirt is the antagonist in the demonstrations’ defining
image thus far: Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna’s dousing of penned-in
women with pepper spray on Sept. 24, which seemed to surprise at least
one of the blue shirts standing near him.
Police officers, law enforcement analysts and others cited a number
of reasons for it. The prevalence of white shirts around Zuccotti Park,
the center of the protests, signals how closely the department monitors
high-profile events. Strategies are carefully laid out; guidelines for
crowd dispersal are rehearsed; arrest teams are assembled. It is all in
an effort to choreograph a predictable level of control.
Yet in the pepper-spray episode on Sept. 24, critics say, judgment was lacking.
Raymond W. Kelly, commissioner of the New York Police Department,
said that its Internal Affairs Bureau would look at the decision by the
officer to use pepper spray, even as Mr. Kelly criticized the protesters
for “tumultuous conduct.” The office of the Manhattan district
attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also opened an investigation into the
episode, which was captured on video and disseminated on the Internet.
The Political Response
As the protest entered its fourth week, leading Democratic figures,
including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama, were embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests
in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment see the
movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.
But while some Democrats see the movement as providing a political
boost, the party’s alignment with the eclectic mix of protesters makes
others nervous. They see the prospect of the protesters’ pushing the
party dangerously to the left — just as the Tea Party has often pushed Republicans farther to the right and made for intraparty run-ins.
Mr. Obama spoke sympathetically of the Wall Street protests, saying
they reflect “the frustration” that many struggling Americans are
feeling. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Representative Nancy
Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, sounded similar themes.
It is not at all clear whether the leaders of the amorphous movement
actually want the support of the Democratic establishment, given that
some of the protesters’ complaints are directed at the Obama
administration. Among their grievances, the protesters say they want to
see steps taken to ensure that the rich pay a fairer share of their
income in taxes, that banks are held accountable for reckless practices
and that more attention is paid to finding jobs for the unemployed.
Leading Republicans, meanwhile, grew increasingly critical of the
protests. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, called the protesters
“a growing mob,” and Herman Cain, a Republican presidential candidate,
said the protests are the work of “jealous” anti-capitalists.
The Media Take Notice
Coverage of the movement in the first week of October 2011 was, for
the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released by the Pew Research Center.
The data confirmed an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly
gained speed in September, had entered the nation’s collective
consciousness for the first time when President Obama was asked about it
at a news conference and when national television news programs were
first anchored from the Wall Street protest site.
In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable.
The study showed that cable news and radio, which had initially
ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests
significant coverage in early October, often with a heavy dose of
positive or negative opinion attached.
Some protesters have assailed news media outlets for scoffing at
their leaderless nature and lack of agreed-upon goals, but some have
also carefully courted attention from those outlets.
The spike in news media coverage is significant because, among other
reasons, it may lend legitimacy to the movement and spur more people to
seek out protest information on Facebook and other Web sites.
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