Ari Douglas is fine. His lawyer has now told us nothing was broken, and offered no good reason, beyond theatrics, why he was screaming his head off like someone in unimaginable agony: “It’s clear that he was in distress, that he was trying to get away.” She has all but admitted that he placed his leg under the motorcycle on purpose, and the videos agree. If he was hit by the scooter, it was a low-velocity nudge of the front wheel against the wedge of his foot, and while that may technically count as battery he was not seriously injured. Ari Douglas is frankly an embarrassment to the OWS movement, and the faster we move on from him the better.

It does OWS no good — and I am a staunch supporter of OWS — to adopt a “Down with pigs” message. People like cops. People rely on cops. Cops are among those being screwed by Wall Street shenanigans and anti-union maneuvering. Many cops are sympathetic with the movement. While real abuses should of course be spotlighted, we should not assume bad faith on the part of the police, should not make them into the enemy. Conservatives would like nothing more than for public perception of OWS to shift from “Common folk who are fed up with the super-rich” to “Dirty hippie anarchists who don’t like authority,” and making it all about the inevitable friction with law enforcement that comes with any large protest is a great way to help that along. Remember who the bad guys are: the ones looking down on cops and protesters alike from their balconies and skyscraper windows.

(Also: I’m gonna say this right now. Do not do a Google Image search for [lacerations] to see what they look like. Seriously.)

[Edit: if you like, here's a news story describing someone's leg being run over without being broken: http://www.gloucestertimes.com/local/x645313972/Wife-arrested-for-driving-cab-over-husbands-leg That fits with my intuition — most of the time a car'll break your leg, but there are exceptions. It's not as simple as 4000 lbs. ÷ 4 = broken leg; cars have suspensions, their fronts are heavier than their backs, etc.]

On the other hand, the police seem to have been rather rough while pinning him.

I’ve tested the shoelace theory with a similar scooter and it is possible to trap a lace under the rear tire by stretching the full lace out and carefully positioning the tire, but that’s no excuse for kicking the scooter over.

She also said, “Even if he did place his leg underneath the scooter, it does not give
the police a license to pin him down and charge him with felony criminal
mischief and resisting arrest.”

http://gothamist.com/2011/10/15/attorney_for_legal_observer_hit_by.php

Or perhaps it’s the preferred medical intervention – prior case history has shown that sufficient application of nightsticks leads to the patient stopping writhing.  Clearly battery is an effective analgesic.

I had a car drive over my foot and it didn’t hurt a bit. *shrug*

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6162

More recently, longtime NLG member Lynne Stewart was convicted of aiding terrorists. In short, don’t get the impression that they are just ACLU liberals. I would not at all put it beyond an NLG lawyer to fake an injury for political purposes. (In the Vimeo clip it sure looks like he faked it.)

In other words, same as it ever was.

There are plenty of clear-cut instances of police officers gone wild in protest situations like this. This is not one of them, and makes other more credible instances seem questionable.

http://vimeo.com/30550909

People don’t realize how little a demonstration in DC is worth, though. Bureaucrats don’t care who’s chanting in front of their buildings. 

Probably they are used to it. Habituation is probably the greatest risk to the protest. I’ve worked in places where there are all always a handful of protesters about protesting something or another. I can tell you, you walk by protesters every day, you stop noticing them after a while. Occupy is not a ‘small number of people’, though, so different rules apply. That said, while BoingBoing is covering the heck out of this event, most of the other news sources have dropped back to only one story a day or so. Which is fine — certainly there’s other stuff going on the world — but it may not be great for the protesters.

But it certainly looks like a helmetted officer is swinging a baton at him at about 0:20…

I don’t see how this is a winning strategy for the cops at all, nor for politicians, nor for the corporations being protested. I mean, whoever is ultimately pulling the strings, they aren’t even acting rationally self-interested, which is the most un-1% thing I can imagine. :P

I’ve had my leg run over by a 2-ton car and it didn’t hurt a bit

YouTube video or it didn’t happen.

Of course the problem is NYPD said they never pepper sprayed people, then they only happened to get the women while targeting phantom men, then it was isolated as the same crazed cop randomly sprayed more people on the street, and once the public review board saw the tapes and said they were investigating suddenly NYPD decided maybe it was something that needed an internal investigation.

It is hard to believe either side, but given how much the NYPD has done on camera they they then deny I’d believe the runover/hit person over NYPD until more detail came out.