Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson was one of the few, if not the only, reporters inside the police perimeter at Zuccotti during the raid (previous BB blog post here). At Mother Jones, his first-person acccount is now live.
I waited, and when nobody was looking, I crossed back over as confidently as I could and entered a scrum of suit-wearing police brass and cleanup workers scrubbing the park's sidewalk. Nobody bothered to stop me as I strode up to the park's northern entrance and stopped against a wall, a few yards from where police in helmets surrounded the the remaining occupiers.
Next to me, an officer was telling an important-looking guy named Eddie about "the intel we've had over the past couple of months" about "the severely mentally retarded, the ones that are real fucked up in the head, and have been violent in the past." He went on: "They are a little off kilter. They're off their meds. They haven't had meds in 30 days."
"I'm only 24 hours off mine," Eddie joked."It's good for you, Eddie," the cop said. "You've got to come clean every once in a while."
As the two men talked, a sweaty-faced man wearing a neon vest over a business suit walked up and started tearing protest signs off the wall. "I couldn't wait," he said. "Destroying things never felt so good."
"Really," someone said, almost inflecting the word as a question.
"They're fucking assholes," the guy in the suit shot back.
Another guy came up to Eddie. "How are we about hooking up the fire hydrants?" he asked. "We talkin' to somebody?"
"Do it. Do it," Eddie said over the roar of a garbage truck.
