Wall Street caused millions of people to lose their homes in order to pad their margins, a highly public tent city is a literal, and I think quite effective, representation of that.

I admire anyone who is willing to give up their personal freedom to make their point. I don’t know that I would have the intestinal fortitude to emulate them. Rosa Parks and the entire civil rights movement happened when I was a child, but I’ve always admired them and their cause, knowing now that I probably wouldn’t have been able to join them.
The American Revolution was initiated by people who had the guts to break the existing unfair laws and look where that got us. We now have the freedom to protest the government and everything it does.

My personal take on this situation is that the politicians and others who were making the initial decisions erred by not taking immediate action to enforce the laws, if they were going to enforce them at all. The longer they waited, the more they compounded their error. After the OWS people gained popularity, it became more and more unlikely that the outcome of ANY enforcement action would be positive.

Again, I believe that a lack of leadership, beginning at the very top, was the major cause of this entire debacle and the ensuing consequences. These people probably thought that there was a chance they might be arrested at some point, but they probably never even imagined that the people they had elected to govern them would resort to physical violence towards peaceful people. There is no way anyone with any conscience at all can condone the types of attacks we have seen.

I am very glad that so many people were there who were able to record the process. Some public officials, including many police officers, believe that recording or photography of the public acts of public officials should be forbidden. My former department has had in-car video recorders since the early 90′s. These recorders are automatically activated whenever the overhead lights are on. We also have handheld video cameras in use in the jail. These cameras are not only used to document the activities of arrestees, they have been used to exonerate officers of accusations of excessive force. In this instance, however, the recordings documented excessive force and criminal activity. Now it’s up to the same elected officials who screwed this up to fix it and it may never be completely fixed.

Tell it to Rosa Parks.

Though I must admit that I’ve always been baffled by the whole tent city thing regarding OWS. What does a tent city have anything to do with Wall Street?

     sanction, such as limited uty, suspension

I meant to say

     sanctions, such as limited duty, suspension

Limited duty means they take away your gun and your arrest authority and you get to review the paperwork of the officers doing “real” police work.

I don’t mean to imply that I would have, in the same situation, done the same things. Every level of any department’s chain-of-command has responsibilities to the levels above them to accomplish the objectives assigned. But, they also have responsibility to the levels below them to provide the leadership necessary to accomplish those objectives in a legal manner with the absolute minimum force required to achieve the goals. Some of the stuff I’ve seen, and I admit I’ve not seen most of the coverage, would have resulted in my department imposing immediate sanction, such as limited uty, suspension, dismissal, and even departmentally initiated criminal charges.

I agree that this particular operation broke down in many areas, not the least being the apparent lack of leadership by NYPD. The occasions when their command staff–Lieutenants and above–were at the scene of, or in some cases actively participated in, the most egregious acts of excessive force indicate that there may be a serious lack of internalized ethics as opposed to ethics imposed by fiat. The only ethics that really matter in these situations are those in which you truly believe, not those that someone else imposes on you.

Perhaps the NYPD is, in reality, too large to be effectively operated as it currently exists. The NYPD is nearly three times as large as the next largest police department (Chicago) and more than four times as large as the third largest (LAPD). We’ve all read or heard about the problems in those departments over the years and, when you increase the number of people, you obviously increase the possibility for some of them to be less than completely professional (read: useless a**es with no redeeming virtues). Even in my Midwestern department (MUCH smaller than any of these three) there were people who were actively recruited for employment who, eventually, showed their true abilities. Most of them were quietly eased out or moved to positions where they couldn’t do any damage, but occasionally one would screw up in some spectacular way and it ALWAYS cost the department money.

Lawsuits are probably impending and should be, not only against the individuals involved, but against the department for a little legality called “failure to supervise”. This doctrine, which is one of the reasons that police procedure manuals run to thousands of pages, REQUIRES every level within the department, up to and including the chief officer of the department, to aggressively supervise ALL of their subordinates to prevent things like excessive force and criminal activity.

In reply to your second comment, every decision to use law enforcement in this type of situation is made by the politicians who ultimately control the department because they control the purse strings. Politicians always know where their monetary support comes from and spend at least some of their time providing services and support to these sources. If you don’t think so, just invite the Mayor to your party on a night when some of the city’s “movers and shakers” are also having a party and see which one he or she goes to. Of course, it’s a waste of all that training time, but the politicos usually get what they want, one way or another.

I guess I’ll go ahead and do a little Monday morning quarterbacking of my own. We have a couple of these privately owned public spaces here, also. They have the same rules as any of our other parks–no admittance between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM unless a special permit is acquired. These permits are given for a very small number of reasons such as Independence Day fireworks. The stated reason for this curfew is to deter vandalism and public displays of affection (prostitution).These regulations are posted at every entrance to every public park and even, occasionally, referenced in the newspaper and on radio and television news programs. Anyone found in the parks during these hours is cited for “being in a park after hours” and escorted out. If they refuse to leave, they are arrested for trespassing. It doesn’t matter what your reason is for being in the park, without the permit you get the citation. It has nothing to do with your freedom of speech, it’s where you are physically present. If you violate this well known, and well posted, city ordinance, you get the citation, no exceptions.

If a group such as the ones described in these news stories was to appear during the day in one of our parks and refuse to leave at 10:00 PM, as required, a group of officers (not the riot squad although, depending on the size of the group, it might be standing by at an off-site location) would be dispatched to enforce the curfew. The officers selected for these types of enforcement activities are normally the most experienced and least excitable members of the department. The idea would be to push the crowd toward the parking area where, hopefully, the majority of he group would just give up and go home. Those closest to the officers would be cited for the curfew violation but most of them would “escape” and clear the park, which is the ultimate goal. A few trespassing arrests would probably be needed, just to emphasize the point, but most of the crowd would just melt away. Mind you, this would be on the FIRST day of the occupation, not however many weeks later that the NYPD decided to clear the park–after the OWS group had coalesced into a social unit determined to oppose any other viewpoint.

The point I’m making is that, no matter what your grievance is, you should not be allowed to break the law to air it. If you want to picket and tell your story in a lawful manner, whether in front of city hall or a private business or anywhere else in the universe, you can do so, as long as you are peaceful, don’t block access, stay on public property, and don’t break the law (even the “minor” law of violating a curfew).

So if OWS was in Imperial Rome, assuming it wasn’t sanctioned by the Tribunes (likely not) the Praetorian guard would have slaughtered them instead of the Legions.

However, the Legions did an excellent job at slaughtering civilian uprisings from Britannia to Palestine and points between.

but I was not on the scene and cannot second guess the person who was there.

with a straight face?

That is an attitude which is also part of the standard issue uniform. It’s a force multiplier itself. And I think you’re wrong about it.  I assure you you can second guess the officer in charge. I wish you would. Someone with some balls and authority needed to have seen the barbarism developing and actually provided some professional leadership, at scale with the threat presented. Reationary brutality does nothing to make America stronger, or anyone safer.

At any rate, thank you for your contribution, it was both better informed and more rational than most of what I’ve read about this, except, for that part I mentioned there, which I hope you reflect on as just some guys 2cents worth. And thanks for your service. 

Yeah… that right there is the problem. You realize how anti-democratic what you just said is right? You get that agents of the state suppressing groups based on their professed political ideology is the whole crux of what’s wrong with this document and the uses of police power it represents? Training police to regard peaceful, nonviolent demonstrators as appropriate targets of violent action and initmidation is precisely why this document is distressing.

Or, perhaps, there are limits to psychoanalyzing others on the internet. :)

If I am to take the comments on BB as in any way representing the beliefs of OWS as a movement, I can see why the police would see OWS in an adversarial light.

The Golden Rule holds paramount.  Unless those with the steel don’t get their share of the gold: it all went to hell when Marcus Aurelius died…he shoulda appointed a worthy successor: Commodus was worthless; the beginning of the End.

Or even more likely, you have one cop go off script crossing the line and making choices that endanger not only the protestors, but other cops that now have to deal the excitement he caused.

We have organization for a reason.  When it comes to people with guns, it is best they have discipline. To follow orders is usually what is going to keep them alive. You don’t want 100 different people interpreting the rules and what their conduct should be 100 different ways. Just because you have discipline and follow orders, doesn’t make you a robot (or as I call them, an Electronic American) – who will open fire on the whim of an order.   As the beginning of Full Metal Jacket says, “The Marine Corp does not want robots. The Marine Corp wants killers.” (Obviously the killers part doesn’t and shouldn’t reflect the civilian police force. My point is they don’t want mindless robots.)