Category Archives: violence

How Occupy Was Repressed

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The official report into the NYPD abuses relating to OWS is now out. It’s 195 pages long. Written by lawyers and academics from Harvard, NYU, Fordham and Stanford, it’s only the first in a series of seven. If you’re reading this, it’s probably not a wild surprise to you that the police went far beyond the law in their repression. Nonetheless, the full extent of their malfeasance, read in one document is pretty amazing.

For example, look at the table of contents for Chapter one:

Chapter One: Aggressive and Excessive Police Use of Force

1. Bodily Force: Pushing, Shoving, Dragging, Hitting, Punching, Kicking

2. Weapon Use: Batons, Pepper Spray, Barricades, Scooters, Horses

3. Restraints: Flex Cuff Injuries

4. Delays and Denial of Medical Care

5. Unnecessary Police Force Violates and Suppresses Protest Rights

The report notes that about 7,000 people have been arrested across the ten months of the Occupy protests in the U. S., while the number of financial crimes prosecuted is at a 20 year low. 85 journalists have been arrested, 44 in New York alone. There have been 130 reported incidents of (alleged) physical force by the NYPD “that warrant investigation”, according to the report. From my own experience, either that number is very low, or I have happened to witness a strikingly high percentage of these incidents.

There’s a useful history of both the movement and the relevant law that has lots of interesting detail. For example, Zuccotti Park was originally created in 1968 by U. S. Steel in order to get its zoning variances. So the shift of the space from US manufacturer to Canadian real estate company tells a certain story in itself. The extensive footnotes and references make the document a vital source for future research on OWS.

Most of the text concentrates on the suppression of dissent by force. It cites a definition of force:

The International Association of Chiefs of Police defines force as “that amount of effort required by police to compel compliance from an unwilling subject.” Excessive force is defined as “the application of an amount and/or frequency of force greater than that required to compel compliance from a willing or unwilling subject.”

The Supreme Court has far vaguer definitions of “objective reasonableness” versus violence that would “shock the conscience.” What would shock the conscience of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas I wonder? Technically, the NYPD require their own officers to intervene “if the use of force against a subject clearly becomes excessive.” Anyone seen that? Thought not.

Indeed, the report notes that in New York there has been “near-complete immunity for alleged abuses.” The most serious of these include:

hard kicks to the face, overhead baton swings, intentionally applying very hard force to the broken clavicle of a handcuffed and compliant individual

More “routine” allegations, reported nearly 100 times, include:

  • Pushing;
  • Shoving, tackling, or throwing forcefully backwards, to the ground, or against a wall;
  • Dragging along the ground;
  • Hair pulling;
  • Hitting or punching, including to the head and face; and
  • Kicking, including to the head and face

As they indicate, these “minor” incidents have a notable “chilling” effect on  free speech because people feel scared to attend legal protests for fear of suffering assault. What’s particularly useful about this report is that it does not end on November 15 with the eviction of Zuccotti but continues to document police violence as recently as July. Here is a retort to the “nothing to see here” attitude of the mainstream media for the past seven months.

The police themselves have plenty to look at, based on their near total surveillance of OWS. The Tactical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) videos everything. The report notes that one a June 6 march about debt, TARU filmed by-standers in close-up, who came to the windows of their apartments to see what was happening. Medical personnel have been video-ed while treating people. The permanent filming is in breach of the NYPD’s own code of practice. The only upside is that with so much material, there’s not much they can do with it.

Highlighting numerous ways in which the NYPD violate international law, the report recommends a number of perfectly sensible reforms to police practice, none of which will even be considered by Ray Kelly and his self-satisfied leadership. Indeed, the NYPD refused to co-operate with the report and have refused to comment on it. So, the conclusion states:

If New York officials fail to announce a good faith intention to undertake these measures, the United States Department of Justice should exercise its authority to investigate allegations of official misconduct. United Nations Special Rapporteurs with mandates addressing expression, assembly, and human rights defenders should also investigate US practice.

There is precedent here, during the Civil Rights Movement, for such actions. However, one motivation for such investigation was the presence of the Soviet Union, taunting the U. S. with its own contradictions. Now that the U. S. sees itself as the sole global agent of military force, it is unconcerned with international law and its international reputation.

I Fought The Law

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Today is the seven-month anniversary of OWS. It coincides with a remarkable ratcheting up of pressure on Occupy from authorities of all kinds–personal, police, professional. At the place where these three roads meet is the Law, saying: “enough, time to concede.” The reply is given: “I prefer not to.” But it’s getting much harder.

Now some of my friends  and colleagues give me a look: “Occupy? Still?” As if you had just discovered deconstruction. So, yes, I am a bit obsessed. Since when was that a bad thing in professional life? and it’s been seven months, not years.

Federal Hall. Credit @mollyknefel

By unrelenting hostility and willingness to improvise the terms of the law, the police do now have the upper hand in the streets. The NYPD yesterday determined that you may not have “moveable property” on the sidewalk in New York– and that did apparently include a dog that one of the occupiers had on Wall Street. The primary target of the police is the cardboard sign, now that the tent has been outlawed. The revived “sleepful protest” has  been driven onto the steps of the Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights was first introduced. It is supposed to feel like a last stand. While I don’t think it is, I feel the pressure.

The Federal pen

As mentioned yesterday, the academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek. Here’s her summary:

Bluntly put, some of the ideas that most galvanized people in the fall—those associated with autonomy, horizontality, and leaderlessness—have also come to be faulted for conflicts and disillusionment within the movement.

I haven’t heard this criticism, except in what you might call the academic wing of the movement, but there you hear it all the time.

I can’t get into a full analysis of this paper because she asks us not to cite it, so you’ll have to read it yourself. In short, she argues that Occupy should accept its own condition of “lack” in relation to the “lack” it has identified in the political system (The Big Other) and thereby set about representing the overlap created. While I’m not fully sure what to make of this, I take it to mean that if Occupy is to create a form of collectivity, it has to respect the laws of kinship or disintegrate. Occupy should thus negate its own negation of the political system. I can’t help but feel that it would no longer be Occupy were that to happen and in considerable part that transformation would come from a reassertion of the traditional authority of the Law, as Lacan would have had it. Not to mention the law as the cops have it. What we could gain by the strategy is opaque to me.

Is this Law unchallengeable? By chance, I’ve been reading Judith Butler’s lectures on Antigone, where she discusses the possibility of a “post-structuralist” form of kinship that would not be dependent on the Law of the Oedipus complex. She notes that in Oedipus at Colonnus, none other than Oedipus himself berates Antigone and her sister for being out of place, even as they take care of him instead of their brothers, “in their place.” Even Oedipus gets to castigate Antigone for asserting a willingness to “live out of doors.” His curse on his children/siblings is the re-assertion of the necessity of staying in place. That is to say, anyone transgressing their alotted role will be punished. The place one must be is the place where three roads meet and Oedipal destiny is enacted.

What if the incest taboo is not the only form of establishing kinship? What if kinship is not destiny? As the results of incest, Antigone and her siblings all embody the failure of the Law and, while they are punished for this, they also claim glory and honor of their own. Butler interestingly footnotes here the enfant terrible of anthropology Pierre Clastres. Like Sahlins, Clastres refused to equate power with kinship. Clastres asserts that the kinship system tells us almost nothing about the social life of a people. He further argued that the Amazonian peoples he studied were determined to prevent the emergence of permanent inequality by means of careful safeguards.

These arguments have been developed by David Graeber, who also notes that Clastres’ romantic over-investment with the Amazon prevented him from discussing the widespread use of sexual violence in these same “egalitarian” societies. He astutely concludes

Perhaps Amazonian men understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, backed by force, would be like because they themselves wield that power over their wives and daughters.

The point of the Antigone myth and the Amazonian egalitarians is, then, not that we want to be like them, but that these moments show cases where the “universal” Law does not apply, and is therefore not universal at all, but particular and backed by force of various kinds.

That’s why “I Fought The Law” is a counterculture classic: not because it celebrates a victory–the law won–but because it discovers that, unlike Bartleby who negates himself in the end, you can fight the law. And, yes, you can lose.

Law? Or Theatre?

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Another day, another few notches out of the right to assembly in Bloombergistan. A march against police violence was broken up  by–guess what? police violence. Learning from these repeated encounters, an action protesting climate change at the U. N. was a theater of the absurd of arrests, in which the cops had to arrest people claiming to be the one percent.

Cops playing their role at Disrupt Dirty Power

If you’re on the right kind of Twitter and Facebook feeds, you’ll have heard about the unnecessary use of force on the police brutality march. The use of some switchbacks by the marchers in NoHo seemed to irritate the police, who were themselves trying to prevent the march from reaching Union Square about a mile to the north. Of course, it’s not illegal to walk to Union Square but since the middle of this week it has suddenly become illegal to have a rally there, according to mysterious new “rules” that popped up overnight.

In a series of arrests was one of Messiah Hamid, a 16 year-old woman with her shirt lifted by the NYPD. Many present and looking at the photographs were reminded of a similar photograph, known as “the woman with the blue bra”, showing her being dragged away by the military in Egypt. I’m choosing not to reproduce the photograph of Hamid’s arrest because she’s a minor but there were many such scuffles (see below).

Just another violent arrest of a minor in NYC

The sustainability action called Disrupt Dirty Power was designed to force police to arrest participants as part of the action. A group dressed as business executives marched onto the grass at the United Nations and started proclaiming their adherence to free market principles and the pursuit of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nukes. A ridiculously disproportionate number of police were present and leaped in to make the arrests. However, they had forgotten to bring their van, so the performers had a perfect stage to expound their views to assembled photographers and live streamers.

"The One Percent" address the media

The Disrupt Dirty Power action had a strong narrative to it that was about more than reacting to recent events. It suggested a “join the dots” strategy, in which the connections between social and ecological crisis and the profit-first motif of neoliberalism are visualized. It begins to look as if non-violent civil disobedience with the presumption of arrest is emerging as the next stage of the American Spring. Perhaps it’s better than volunteers who have been trained in civil disobedience should be those arrested than random teenagers. At the same time, is this law? or theatre? If law is a set of agreed principles  y which a society is organized, what’s happening in New York is not the rule of law. It’s an improvised way to maintain law enforcement, which is altogether different.

The contradictions in what the police are doing need to be stressed even in the U. N. action that was designed to involve arrests. For their intervention was so rapid that the second part of the action in which the 99% celebrated the just arrest of the one percent had to be conducted from across First Avenue.

The 99 percent

It’s not even clear under whose authority arrests are made at the U. N. which has autonomy–as anyone who has tried to park in New York knows–but is also subject to local and Federal law. One U. N. security person was present but was about as important as a Vichy cop would have been to the Gestapo. No comparison intended of course.

The action was intended to end with a projection onto the United Nations building by the intrepid OWS projections team. Somehow the police got wind of this and warned organizers that any projection would lead not only to the arrest of those involved but the impounding of the vehicle from which the projections are now done. In what sense is it a crime to project light onto buildings? Vacant buildings at that. By what law do the police get to confiscate expensive equipment and threaten to do so before it is used?

The law is a theatre it is a singularly monotonous one. There is only one line: “order.” The scenes are all the same. So every night at midnight in Union Square when the police put up their new barricade, the Occupiers stage a performance. Tonight: Animal Farm!

 

And the lid comes off Bloombergistan

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Just like that, the One Per Cent Emirate of Bloombergistan lost control of the streets. A day that began with news of the re-eviction of OWS from Union Square unfolded into a re-occupation with more people by midday.

Re-occupied: banner appears at 2pm

In the early evening, it became the scene of an extraordinary gathering in memory of Trayvon Martin, the young man killed in Florida. Union Square was packed with people and the crowd was majority minority.

Rally for Justice for Trayvon Martin

There was a strong undercurrent of controlled anger that in 2012 a police-sanctioned vigilante killing of a totally innocent child could not only happen but be excused by a ridiculous “law.” George Zimmerman, the murderer, had recourse to the “Stand your ground” law that allows people to use guns if they feel threatened and that’s the end of it. Except here, he was the stalker and the aggressor, while Trayvon had nothing more than some Skittles and an iced tea. Both were much in evidence at Union Square, with packets of Skittles flying across the crowd.

During the speeches, people stood respectfully. There were some emotional moments when Trayvon’s parents, showing enormous dignity under the appalling circumstances, addressed the crowd. His mother’s voice broke a little but she came back to call for justice. As the rally ended, the Square circulated with mic checks and calls for a march.

Taking the streets

With OWS people in the front, people poured into the street, closing down 14th St in minutes. As thousands joined in, police attempts at blockades were swept past at the corner of Sixth Avenue, where we went north.

Occupied Sixth Ave tonight

Similar efforts at 20th St, similar results. The march headed uptown for a while and then doubled back to Union Square. There were more people on the streets than at any time since N17 last year–estimates of 10,000 seemed about right. No doubt the New York Times will say 500.

From there people headed in a variety of directions. As I write there are people in Times Square, Union Square and downtown on Broadway. The silly bull statue on Broadway was liberated from its barricades and is now surrounded by police. Zuccotti has been surrounded by police in riot gear all night, the perfect visualization of Bloombergistan.

Zuccotti, new capital of Bloombergistan

Now Union Square has apparently been cleared because of a “suspicious package” and the arrests are beginning as the marches thin out and people disperse.

None of that is the point, although it will form whatever headlines there are for this march. What was striking about today was to see the way that the Union Square occupation merged and integrated with a much wider section of New York’s 99 per cent with mutual goodwill and respect. The sense that enough is enough, which has been so notable since the demonstrations of the weekend, has struck a chord across New York. As we marched down the streets, many people joined in and even more waved, gave clenched fists or other gestures of support. There were more people of color on the streets and in downtown than I can remember and I have never felt safter. The locked-down, hyper-policed, segregated money machine broke down for a few hours and out of the cross-hatched space that emerged, you could see the outlines of a new city. I liked it. I would like to live there.