The police said the public space had to be cleared out for sanitation reasons. Judge upholds eviction of 'Occupy'

A state judge upheld New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to evict Occupy Wall Street protestors from the Lower Manhattan park where they had been camping out for nearly two months.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman’s ruling came less than 24 hours after 1,000 police in riot gear had removed hundreds of demonstrators from Zuccotti Park in the early morning hours, along with their tents, sleeping bags and other gear.


“The movants [protestors] have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators, and other installations to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely. Neither have the applicants shown a right to a temporary restraining order that would restrict the City’s enforcement of law so as to promote public health and safety,” Stallman said in his ruling.

Daniel Alterman, one of the attorneys of the National Lawyers Guild working on behalf of the protesters, said just minutes after the ruling was announced that he was “disappointed,” but that it was only a “little bump in the road” for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“We’ll continue to fight, continue to support our clients, continue to watch out for our clients’ rights,” Alterman told POLITICO. “In reality, you can’t expect that the court system will rule for the protesters even if [the judges] are among the 99 percent – they’re still judges.”

He said the decision on whether to ask for a repeal of Tuesday’s ruling will likely be made in a matter of days.

Early Tuesday morning, as many has 200 demonstrators were arrested when police had cleared Occupy Wall Street out of the privately owned park, tossing their tents into garbage trucks and touching off a chaotic scene in Lower Manhattan.

The police, some in full riot gear, started handing out notices at around 1 a.m. from Brookfield Office Properties, the owner of Zuccotti Park, saying the public space had to be cleared out for sanitation reasons, The Associated Press reported. The papers said the park — where demonstrators have camped out for nearly two months — “poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard to those camped in the park, the city’s first responders and the surrounding community.”

More than 1,000 cops surrounded the encampment, and protesters started to chant, “The whole world is watching!” and sing Bob Marley songs, the New York Post reported. Occupiers were informed they could come back in a few hours but that they would no longer be allowed to camp out at the park or bring back tents and sleeping gear.

A tick-tock of Tuesday morning’s developments posted on the Occupy Wall Street website show a scene of chaos and violence. “Police are bring in bulldozers,” the blog noted at 1:20 a.m. Within the next hour, there were “unconfirmed reports of snipers on rooftops,” as well as “helicopters overheard” and “pepper spray deployed,” with reports of at least one reporter being sprayed.

Around 2 a.m., the Occupiers said the New York police destroyed the “OWS library,” throwing 5,000 donated books in the dumpster. At 2:55 a.m., New York City Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez was “arrested and bleeding from head,” the OWS website said. A little after 3:30 a.m., the park’s “kitchen tent” was reportedly teargased, and police moved into the camp with “zip cuffs.”

“Folks in #thepeopleskitchen are gassed, tackled, dragged by arms and legs, and all others are being barricaded out so they can’t watch #ows,” the protesters wrote on Twitter at around 4 a.m.

Hundreds of evicted Occupiers have regrouped in Foley Square, about nine blocks north of Zuccotti Park, and protesters planned to meet at 9 a.m. at Canal and 6th Avenue. “This movement can’t be contained in one square block in Lower Manhattan. It is bigger than that. You can’t evict an idea whose time had come,” they wrote on their website. “Show your support. Turn out en masse.”

At around 6 a.m., attorneys for the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild obtained a temporary restraining order against the city, various city agencies and Brookfield properties, which directed that protesters be allowed back into Zuccotti park with their tents, sleeping bags and other belongings.

In a morning press conference, Bloomberg said Zuccotti Park was originally set to reopen at 8 a.m., but citing the court order which he said needed clarification, announced that the park would remain closed to the public until that situation could be straightened out.

Until a decision was made following a 11:30 a.m. court appearance regarding the eviction of the protesters , the city was temporarily prohibited from evicting protesters from Zuccotti Park and enforcing “rules” that prevent protesters from “reentering the park with tents and other properly previously utilized,” according to the court’s order.

But multiple media outlets reported that when protesters tried to go back into Zuccotti Park, police maintained their barricade around the camp and those trying to reenter the grounds weren’t allowed to do so.

According to the New York Observer, members of the press were denied access to the park during the police raid. Towards the end of the eviction process, a group of protesters reportedly began to chant, “Media go home,” visibly unhappy with reporters writing about the developments.

It has been reported that the Occupiers had planned to shut down Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday by holding a street carnival on the movement’s two-month anniversary.

Some time after 6 a.m., Bloomberg said in a written statement that while he supports the First Amendment rights of the protesters, his greater priority is protecting the public’s health and safety, and he took full responsibility for the “final decision to act.”

“Unfortunately, the park was becoming a place where people came not to protest but, rather, to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others,” Bloomberg said, noting that for some residents of the area, noise and unsanitary conditions of the Occupy camp had created “an intolerable situation.”

He added: “The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out — but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others — nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here — the First Amendment protects speech — it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.”

He said the demonstrators from now on will have to “occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”

In his morning news conference, Bloomberg answered questions about reports that members of the press had been kept prohibited from entering the park during the raid, saying the move was in line with police protocol.

“The police department routinely keeps members of the press off to the side when they’re in the middle of a police action. It’s to prevent the situation from getting worse and to protect the members of the press who have the same rights as everybody else,” he said.

Bloomberg said New York City has always been a city where people can express themselves. “We have a history going back to the founding of this city of being open and welcoming. And what was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that,” he said. “It had developed into a situation which was prohibiting a lot of people from expressing their views.”

He also reiterated that residents of New York City “have a right to be safe, and they have a right to say what they want to say, and they don’t have a right to keep others from saying what they want to say or not saying anything.”

“That’s exactly what’s at stake here and that’s exactly why we acted,” he said.