The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.
In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, routinely obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.
The study, published on Tuesday, found evidence that police made violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments, obstructed independent legal monitors and was opaque about its policies.
The NYPD report is the first of a series to look at how police authorities in five US cities, including Oakland and Boston, have treated the Occupy movement since it began in September 2011. The research concludes that there now is a systematic effort by authorities to suppress protests, even when these are lawful and pose no threat to the public.
Sarah Knuckey, a professor of law at NYU, said: "All the case studies we collected show the police are violating basic rights consistently, and the level of impunity is shocking".
The report says the NYPD was by far the worst offender of all the police departments involved in suppressing Occupy protests:
The NYPD appears to be the worst offender, in large part because it has made little attempt – unlike Oakland, for example – to reassess its practices or open itself up to dialogue or review. The NYPD practices documented in the report include:
• Aggressive, unnecessary and excessive police force against peaceful protesters, bystanders, legal observers, and journalists. This included the use of batons, pepper spray, metal barricades, scooters, and horses.• Obstruction of press freedoms and independent legal monitoring, including arrests of at least 10 journalists, and multiple cases of preventing journalists from reporting on protests or barring and evicting them from specific sites.
• Pervasive surveillance of peaceful political activity.
• Violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments.
• Unjustified closure of public spaces, dispersal of peaceful assemblies, and trapping of protesters.
• Arbitrary and selective rule enforcement and baseless arrests.
• Failures to ensure transparency about government policies.
• Failures to ensure accountability for those allegedly responsible for abuses.
The report argues that the lack of transparency and accountability is especially troubling because the public does not know whether police actions are guided by specific written policies, or whether they are random or ad hoc.
The NYPD turned down multiple requests to meet the researchers, who say they were keen include the police's point of view in the report. The other four police departments examined for the project all sent representatives to meet researchers. The NYPD did not provide a comment to the Guardian by the time of publication of this article.
As I wrote earlier - this Bloomberg's city.
You're lucky he lets you live.
Not "live in it."
"Live."
This is so much more than i needed!!! but will all come in use thanks!!
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Unfortunately, the fascist NYPD police apparatus repressed and took away the freedom of speech and the freedom to demonstrate peacefully from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their crackdown violated their constitutional rights in the most egregious fashion.
ReplyDeleteGood. Most of us came to the same conclusions, back at the time when these things were done to Occupy, but I'm so glad that the findings are now coming out from pretigious, official sources and are being made public.
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