Yesterday, in Police brutality on Wall Street, I complained that the demonstrations and examples of police brutality were not getting the media coverage they deserve. That has changed, and as a result, I understand the dynamics better than I did yesterday. For one thing, most of the abuse that has taken place had been by supervisors, with a rank of Lieutenant or above. Demonstrators report that their relations with rank and file police have been good. For another, rumors of violence by demonstrators are false. There is no evidence of such an occurrence. Here is a poor attempt to justify the abuse, followed by video reports.

When members of the loose protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street began a march from the financial district to Union Square on Saturday, the participants seemed relatively harmless, even as they were breaking the law by marching in the street without a permit. Even as the loose protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street seems unorganized, it poses a challenge to the police. But to the New York Police Department, the protesters represented something else: a visible example of lawlessness akin to that which had resulted in destruction and violence at other anticapitalist demonstrations, like the Group of 20 economic summit meeting in London in 2009 and the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. The Police Department’s concerns came up against reality on Saturday, when their efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: protesters were corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police forcibly arrested some participants; and a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

This excuse does not hold water. The behavior by these demonstrators was completely different from what happened in those other demonstrations. The job of police is to respond to conditions that actually exist, not to react to what they fear might happen.

The badge pictured above belongs to the man accused of pepper straying four women without cause.

Keith covered the story in two segments with activist Kelly Heresy and Reporter Karen McVeigh on Countdown.

Here’s the second.

I’m pleased to hear from demonstrators that relations with police have been positive, overall. However, police brutality during demonstrations has been all too common. Lawrence O’Donnell discussed the weapon demonstrators used that was so terrible that police needed violence to counteract it, and follows with a condemnation of police brutality.

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