Murphy’s Dissent
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 02:19PM by Theodore Hamm
[Originally published in The Brooklyn Rail, 3.2012]
[EXCERPT]:
The real crackdown, of course, was at Liberty Square late that Saturday night [3/17/2012]. On dubious grounds, the N.Y.P.D. closed the plaza that is supposed to remain open 24 hours. There were 73 arrests, with some folks treated roughly. The next morning at a Left Forum panel, two students from a New England college told me how they had been detained by cops away from the plaza, and during the course of their grilling, they were asked, “Why do you want to jeopardize your education by coming down here?”
Such is the climate of intimidation towards OWS currently being created by the N.Y.P.D. Consider the threat issued to protesters by the person who is ultimately most accountable for police behavior: “You want to get arrested? We’ll accommodate you,” Mayor Bloomberg vowed, two days after the St. Patrick’s night crackdown. In the end, the mayor’s romance with the First Amendment has proved to be rather ephemeral.
As a wide range of police practices came under fire, during the previous week the mayor seemed most concerned about the folks at Goldman Sachs, whose feelings were hurt by an op-ed written by a turncoat. Meanwhile, at a City Council hearing, Ray Kelly angrily defended his department’s stop-and-frisk policy, which in 2011 saw 684,000 encounters (overwhelmingly with young black and Latino men) yield 8,000 guns, a staggering rate of inefficiency that would be accepted nowhere else in the numbers-obsessed Bloomberg administration.