Wall Street protesters thwart eviction attempt

A man affil­i­ated with the Occupy Wall Street protests tack­les a police offi­cer dur­ing a march towards Wall Street in New York, on Fri­day, Oct. 14, 2011. The offi­cial cleanup of a plaza in lower Man­hat­tan where pro­test­ers have been camped out for a month was post­poned early Fri­day, send­ing up cheers from a crowd that had scram­bled to scrub the park on its own out of fear the effort was merely a pre­text to evict them. (AP Photo/Andrew Burton)

KAREN MATTHEWS, MEGHAN BARR

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Anti-Wall Street pro­test­ers exulted Fri­day after beat­ing back a plan to clear them from the park they have occu­pied for the past month, say­ing the vic­tory will embolden the move­ment across the U.S. and beyond.

“We are going to piggy-back off the suc­cess of today, and it’s going to be big­ger than we ever imag­ined,” said pro­tester Daniel Zetah.

The show­down in New York came as ten­sions were ris­ing in sev­eral U.S. cities over the spread­ing protests, with sev­eral arrests and scat­tered clashes between demon­stra­tors and police.

The own­ers of Zuc­cotti Park in lower Man­hat­tan had announced plans to tem­porar­ily evict the hun­dreds of pro­test­ers at 7 a.m. Fri­day so that the grounds could be power-washed. But the pro­test­ers feared it was a pre­text to break up the demon­stra­tion, and they vowed to stand their ground, rais­ing the prospect of clashes with police.

Just min­utes before the appointed hour, the word came down that the park’s own­ers, Brook­field Office Prop­er­ties, had post­poned the cleanup. A bois­ter­ous cheer went up among the demon­stra­tors, whose num­bers had swelled to about 2,000 before day­break in response to a call for help in fend­ing off the police.

In a state­ment, Brook­field said it decided to delay the clean­ing “for a short period of time” at the request of “a num­ber of local polit­i­cal lead­ers.” It gave no details.

State Sen. Daniel Squadron, a Demo­c­rat who rep­re­sents lower Man­hat­tan and Brook­lyn, said he had con­ver­sa­tions late into the night urg­ing Brookfield’s CEO to wait.

“The stake­hold­ers must come together to find a solu­tion that respects the pro­test­ers’ fun­da­men­tal rights, while address­ing the legit­i­mate quality-of-life con­cerns in this grow­ing res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood,” Squadron said in a statement.

Brook­field said it would nego­ti­ate with pro­test­ers about how the park may be used. But it was unclear when those dis­cus­sions would occur.

Over the past month, the protest against cor­po­rate greed and eco­nomic inequal­ity has spread to cities across the U.S. and around the world. Sev­eral demon­stra­tions are planned this week­end in the U.S., Canada and Europe, as well as in Asia and Africa.

In Den­ver, police in riot gear herded hun­dreds of pro­test­ers away from the Col­orado state Capi­tol early Fri­day, arrest­ing about two dozen peo­ple and dis­man­tling their encamp­ment. In Tren­ton, N.J., pro­test­ers were ordered to remove tents near a war memo­r­ial. San Diego police used pep­per spray to break up a human chain formed around a tent by anti-Wall Street demonstrators.

In New York City, police arrested 15 peo­ple, includ­ing pro­test­ers who obstructed traf­fic by stand­ing or sit­ting in the street and oth­ers who turned over trash bas­kets and hurled bot­tles. A deputy inspec­tor was sprayed in the face with an unknown liquid.

In one case, an observer with the National Lawyers Guild who was march­ing with the group refused to move off the street for police, and the tip of his foot was run over by an officer’s scooter. He fell to the ground scream­ing and writhing and kicked over the scooter before police flipped him over and arrested him.

And a video posted online showed a police offi­cer punch­ing a pro­tester in the side of the head on a crowded street. Police said the alter­ca­tion occurred after the man tried to elbow the offi­cer in the face and other peo­ple in the crowd jumped on the offi­cer, who was sprayed with a liq­uid com­ing from the man’s direc­tion. Police said the man, who escaped and is wanted for attempted assault on an offi­cer, later said in an online inter­view he’s HIV pos­i­tive and the offi­cer should be tested medically.

Orga­niz­ers in Des Moines, Iowa, warned of a pos­si­ble “big con­flict” Fri­day night after the state denied their per­mit to con­tinue overnight protests at the Capitol.

Though the park in New York is pri­vately owned, it is required to be open to the pub­lic 24 hours per day.

Brook­field, a pub­licly traded real estate firm, had announced plans to power-wash the plaza sec­tion by sec­tion over 12 hours and then allow the pro­test­ers to return. But it said it would begin enforc­ing the park’s rules against tents, tarps and sleep­ing bags, com­plain­ing the grounds had become unsan­i­tary and unsafe.

The New York Police Depart­ment had said it would make arrests if Brook­field requested it and laws were broken.

As the morn­ing dead­line drew near, some pro­test­ers rushed to scrub and sweep the park and pick up trash in hopes of pre­vent­ing a crackdown.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose girl­friend is on Brookfield’s board of direc­tors, said his staff was under strict orders not to pres­sure the com­pany one way or the other. He noted that Brook­field can still go ahead with the cleanup at some point.

“My under­stand­ing is that Brook­field got lots of calls from many elected offi­cials threat­en­ing them and say­ing, … ‘We’re going to make your life more dif­fi­cult,’” he said on his weekly radio show.

In Philadel­phia, pro­tester Matt Monk, a free­lance writer, was cheered by the news out of New York.

“That means at the very least, the powers-that-be, wher­ever they are, know that they have to con­tend with us in a less heavy-handed way,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Oct 14 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.