OCCUPY WALL Street protesters vowed to retake Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan yesterday after their encampment was dismantled by police and up to 200 people were arrested in the early hours.
“No matter what Bloomberg tries to do, this is not the end of Occupy Wall Street,” Bill Buster, the spokesman for the evicted protesters said. The group promised to mark the end of the second month of their movement by “shutting down Wall Street” tomorrow.
At 1am yesterday, New York City police handed out notices ordering some 200 people to leave the park because it was unsanitary and dangerous. Some packed up and left, while others retreated to the kitchen area at the centre of the camp and began to construct barricades. About a dozen chained themselves together. Two chained themselves to trees.
At 3am, hundreds of riot police armed with bullhorns, shields and pepper spray shined klieg lights on the protesters before converging on them, plucking them out one at a time and handcuffing them. Police chief Raymond Kelly said 142 people were arrested in the park, and 50-60 others in nearby streets. Sanitation trucks moved into the camp with power hoses.
The National Lawyers Guild said it obtained a court order allowing protesters to return to the park with tents. Mr Bloomberg said they could return, but without tents. The city wanted to ensure public health and safety as well as freedom of speech, he said. “But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority . . . The occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard . . . Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”
The Manhattan camp was the spiritual heart of the Occupy movement in protest against corporate greed and economic inequality. It spread to hundreds of US cities. Police in Oakland and Eureka, California, and Portland, Oregon, have also moved against protesters.
Hours before the New York eviction, Kalle Lasn, the founder of the Adbusters website in Vancouver that precipitated the occupation of Zucotti Park, told CBC Radio there was a danger that with winter “an ominous mood could set in . . . hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure”.
Mr Lasn said December 17th, the end of the third month of the movement, would be an appropriate date for groups to “reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.”
Meanwhile in London, the City of London Corporation has relaunched legal action against the anti-capitalist protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The corporation had offered to give the protesters until the new year to leave the site. But yesterday, Stuart Fraser, policy chairman, said: “We paused legal action for two weeks for talks with those in the camp on how to shrink the extent of the tents and to set a departure date – but got nowhere.
“So, sadly, now they have rejected a reasonable offer to let them stay until the new year, it’s got to be the courts.