With 47 comments since publication
January 13, 2012
by William Gerrard
The first time I attended an Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest was the march on October 1, which ended with the arrest of more than 700 people on the Brooklyn Bridge. The encampment at Zuccotti Park was barely two weeks old, and there was no broader Occupy movement yet to speak of.
I had supported the protesters from the sidelines before the march, despite (or perhaps because of) how flailing they appeared at first—but I might not have been inspired to come out to the bridge that day had it not been for the infamous video of Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna pepper spraying non-violent female protesters a week earlier.
Police brutality at protests has been a dominant topic in the OWS conversation, and in one sense that’s unfortunate: as individuals, the police have a lot more in common with the protesters than with pension-defrauding bankers and corrupt politicians. But that pepper-spray video, and all of the many images of even worse violence against protesters since then, did get a lot of people mad. And if you want things to change, as Howard Beale says in Network, mad is the first thing you’ve got to get.
“You are your own media.”
While the protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge were still trapped and waiting their turn to be arrested, their comrades were deliberating as a group back at Zuccotti Park about what could be done to help them. The meeting took the form of a leaderless “general assembly,” OWS’s primary vehicle for making decisions, where actions are agreed upon by consensus and all attendees have their own voice—a micro-model of a participatory (as opposed to representative) democracy.
After a certain point, the live video streams coming from the bridge protesters stopped broadcasting; and since the mainstream media had yet to start paying serious attention to OWS, there was no way for anyone who wasn’t standing on or near the bridge to see what was happening.
As a solution, a young man suggested that the smartphone users in the crowd download one of the several applications which allow cell phones to broadcast live video, then head to the bridge to establish a feed. If the news networks weren’t going to provide live coverage of hundreds of people being arrested over the course of several hours on the Brooklyn Bridge, ordinary people would step up and do it themselves.
“You are your own media,” he declared to all.
I searched for, found, downloaded, and installed Bambuser, a free live-streaming app for mobile devices—the whole process took less than a minute—then made my way back to the bridge with a few other volunteers. By now, there was a wall of police blocking the entrance, so we had to stand across Centre Street, yards away from City Hall. I started broadcasting the scene, which quickly escalated as hundreds of marchers arrived to stage a sympathy protest for the arrestees.
I could see that the number of viewers watching my live feed began to rise: slowly at first, by the dozens, then by the hundreds. Messages and questions from viewers started popping up on my screen—“how many arrests?”; “kudos from portugal”; “me too from italy”—to which I could respond by talking into the phone’s mic.
Within half an hour of arriving at the bridge—and having just joined the movement earlier that day—I found myself “reporting” the event for thousands of people. It felt as though I had entered both a new era of media and a new era of politics at the same time; and it seemed as if those two eras were inextricably linked: a “do-it-yourself media,” with news-event witnesses bypassing corporate editorial biases and providing their own live news coverage, in the service of a “do-it-yourself politics,” with citizens bypassing their unresponsive (or irresponsible) representatives and taking to the streets to represent themselves.
”Eviction in Progress”
That powerful interests understand OWS to be an unacceptable threat to the status quo—socialism for the super-rich, sink-or-swim capitalism for everyone else—was made clear a month and a half later when cities across the country launched a coordinated campaign to crush the (mostly) peaceable Occupy assemblies, which had spread rapidly after the mass arrests that day on the bridge.
On November 15, at 1:03 a.m., I received a text message that read, “URGENT: Hundreds of police mobilizing around Zuccotti. Eviction in progress!” (I had signed up to receive the Zuccotti Park “eviction defense text blast.”) When Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD first tried to clear Zuccotti of occupiers a month earlier, they had announced their plan days in advance, giving the OWS organizers time to mobilize a large number of supporters and to jam the park with bodies. That mistake would not be repeated.
By the time I arrived downtown, the police had already erected a cordon of metal barriers in a two to four block radius around the park, preventing the hundreds of people who had shown up in solidarity—despite the late hour and lack of forewarning—from getting any closer. Though the pretext for the barriers was that the area was “unsafe,” the police were permitting civilian vehicular traffic to enter—leading one woman within earshot of me to observe wryly that we could all get to the park if we just took taxis.
Though she was kidding, I thought it was actually a pretty good idea, so I jogged around the cordon perimeter and hailed a cab. When I confessed to the driver that my plan was to circumvent the police barricades in order to get closer to the park, he was game to help.
The police parted the barricades for us, warily but dutifully. As we grazed the east side of the park coming down Broadway, I slid out the door and started broadcasting with my phone—though by now, at 2:00 a.m., only a handful of viewers tuned in. The park and the surrounding area had already been scrubbed clean of civilians, save for a few street vendors with no customers.
Inside Zuccotti, sanitation workers and police were busy breaking down the occupiers’ tents and makeshift structures and throwing them into bins, which were then dumped into a waiting convoy of trucks.
I had about three minutes in which to observe this well-planned, extremely efficient operation before I was spotted by a cop, who made it clear that what I was doing—standing on a public sidewalk, filming public employees from across the street as they performed public business in a public park—was not allowed, not tonight. He ordered me to retreat behind a mini-barricade half a block away.
As I moved to comply, several police officers clad in riot gear carried a non-resisting young woman by her limp limbs toward the same barricade and placed her safely behind the metal barriers, where a now-former occupier helped her to her feet. The moment she righted herself, one of the riot police took a quick jab at her face over the barrier as though she were a punching bag, then casually walked away while his fellow officers guarded us. The former occupier shielded her after the blow and held her for a brief moment as she recovered. Neither of them said anything.
There were eight other people with me in that little security pen, some of them wearing press passes and complaining that the police were preventing them from doing their jobs. The NYPD was creating a de facto media blackout, which they clearly felt allowed them to operate with impunity. I spoke with another former occupier who fled the park shortly before the police arrived out of fear that they would use tear gas; she had severe asthma, she said, and was afraid that she might have a potentially life-threatening asthma attack amid the confusion. The police reportedly used tear gas toward the end of the raid.
Other guests joined us periodically, including a female bicyclist whom an officer had placed in a painful headlock, and another journalist whose visible credentials did not spare him from police harassment. Civilians in Afghanistan (and, until recently, Iraq) are routinely subjected to surprise night raids by U.S. military forces looking for insurgents—yet there we were, in Lower Manhattan, in the middle of the night, being treated by a para-militarized domestic police force as if we were potential enemies rather than peaceful citizens. When Bloomberg said two weeks later that the NYPD was his “private army,” everyone who witnessed the Zuccotti eviction knew that he was only half-joking.
Foreclosure Tour
As it turns out, by removing the protesters from Zuccotti Park, the Bloomberg administration may very well have done OWS a favor. As symbolically important as the occupation was, it was also a liability to the movement going forward: small business owners in the neighborhood were mobilizing their own protest against the constant disruptions; a few reports of crime within the encampment were creating negative publicity; and a punishing New York winter, perhaps only weeks away, threatened to thin the ranks of the occupiers. Bloomberg spared OWS a potential Napoleonic-style winter retreat, and handed them an Alamo around which to rally. The eviction has compelled the occupiers to extend their organizational reach and their demands for economic justice outward, into the very neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the economic crash.
On December 6th, as part of a national day of action against America’s housing crisis, OWS worked with local community activist groups to conduct a “foreclosure tour” through the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the foreclosure rate is five times higher than the state average. Hundreds of people joined the march, which paused at boarded up, bank-owned houses along the way so that foreclosure victims could stand before the crowd and share their stories of life in 21st century America: predatory lenders, no health insurance, children killed in Iraq.
One of the most radical gestures of the Occupy movement has been to transform everyday spaces—parks, squares, sidewalks, bridges—into empathetic forums where private suffering becomes a public concern. With Zuccotti and the other centralized Occupy camps shut down one by one, these sorts of demilitarized zones within the economic war of all against all—where the spirit of cooperation and sharing survives amid the general reign of greed and fiscal austerity—are free to proliferate.
”I’ve got his back.”
Contrast OWS’ manner of speaking to people—and of encouraging them to speak for themselves—with that of the modern political campaign. Consider, for example, President Obama’s new reelection poster: It’s an image of the back of Obama’s head, in front of an old Gap commercial-style white void containing the words, “I’ve got his back.”
The “I” in the text refers to you, a putative Obama supporter; and your pre-assigned role in the 2012 election drama is to express solidarity with the most powerful person on the planet—a man who isn’t even looking in your direction. The poster makes no mention of whether he has our back; whether, for example, heavily indebted Americans might one day receive the same kind of “bailout” protection against catastrophic financial loss as do rich, well-connected firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. (Though extra verbiage about reciprocal back-getting would probably have spoiled the poster’s sleek design.)
Rather than waiting patiently for their Wall Street-financed leaders to experience Saul-to-Paul conversions in limos en route to $30,000-a-plate fundraisers, ordinary Americans are taking the initiative and finding novel ways to help each other.
The final destination of the Brooklyn “foreclosure tour” was 702 Vermont Street, a property vacant for three years—until now, as a homeless family, with the help of OWS and other community activists, was moving in without permission of the owner, Bank of America. This was against the law, of course. But since Bank of America (along with most of the country’s other largest banks) has been accused of committing mass foreclosure fraud, it felt less like trespassing than like a small step toward restitution. As of the time of this writing, the family is still occupying their new home, and more property reclamations are in the works across the country. With the number of people who have been illegally thrown out of their homes potentially in the tens or hundreds of thousands, OWS will have plenty to do through the winter.
William Gerrard is a filmmaker and has been a resident of Chappaqua for 24 years. He graduated from Horace Greeley High School in 2001 and is currently pursuing his MFA in film directing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Part 1: Brooklyn Bridge
http://bambuser.com/channel/wgerrard/broadcast/2012554;
Part 2: Zuccotti Park Eviction
http://bambuser.com/channel/wgerrard/broadcast/2128706;
Part 3: Foreclosure tour
http://bambuser.com/channel/wgerrard/broadcast/2187799
Copyright 2012 NewCastleNOW.org