Occupy Wall Street encampment gone but movement lives on

THE encampment is gone, but the movement lives on.

What nobody knows is just how long it can survive without a literal place to call home.

For Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park was a rallying cry, a symbol of defiance. But in recent weeks, the park itself unwittingly morphed into a mirror image of the world it was trying to change: a microcosm of society rife with crime, drug problems and fights over things like real estate and access to medical care.

That’s why, after protesters were hauled out of the park during a police raid early on Tuesday, some organisers believe the loss of their camp is actually a blessing in disguise.

“This is much bigger than a square plaza in downtown Manhattan,” said Hans Shan, an organiser who was working with churches to find places for protesters to sleep on Tuesday night. “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.”

The protesters have been camped out in the privately owned park since mid-September and had vowed to stay put indefinitely. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he ordered the sweep because health and safety conditions had become “intolerable” in the crowded plaza. The raid was conducted in the middle of the night “to reduce the risk of confrontation” and “to minimise disruption to the surrounding neighbourhood,” he said.

By early Tuesday evening, some protesters were being allowed back into the park two by two. But they could each take only a small bag after a judge ruled that afternoon that their free speech rights do not extend to pitching a tent and setting up camp for months at a time.

Pete Dutro, head of the group’s finances, said the loss of the movement’s original encampment will open up a dialogue with other cities and take the protest to the next level of action.

“We all knew this was coming,” Dutro said. “Now it’s time for us to not be tucked away in Zuccotti Park, and have different areas of occupation throughout the city.”

Where will they go next remains unclear. Without a place to congregate, protesters will have a difficult time communicating with each other en masse. The leaders of the movement spent most of Tuesday gathering in small groups throughout the city — in church basements, in public plazas and on street corners — and relaying plans in scattered text messages and email.

For now, they’re planning to move forward with plans for a day of civil disobedience and marches, which has been in the works for weeks. And they’ll be joined by angry city leaders who publicly denounced Bloomberg for the nighttime raid.

Robert Harrington, owner of a small importing business in New York, stood outside the barricade with a sign calling for tighter banking regulations.

“To be effective it almost has to move out of the park,” Harrington said. “It’s like the antiwar movement in the ‘60s, which started as street theatre and grew into something else.”

“The issues,” he added, “are larger than just this camp.”

The next challenge is figuring out how to decentralise the movement and give it staying power.

“People are really recognising that we need to build a movement here,” Shan said. “What we’re dedicated to is not just about occupying space. That’s a tactic.”

The aggressive raid seemed to mark a shift in the city’s dealings with the Wall Street protests. Only a week ago, Bloomberg privately told a group of executives and journalists that he thought reports of problems at the park had been exaggerated and didn’t require any immediate intervention.

It was the third raid of a major camp in a span of three days, as police broke up camps on Sunday in Portland, Oregon, and Monday in Oakland, California.

The timing did not appear to be coincidental. On Tuesday, authorities acknowledged that police departments across the nation consulted with each other about non-violent ways to clear encampments. Officers in as many as 40 cities participated in the conference calls.

When New York police began their crackdown at 1am, most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters were sleeping. Officers arrived by the hundreds and set up powerful klieg lights to illuminate the block. They handed out notices from Brookfield Office Properties, the park’s owner, and the city saying that the plaza had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous. Many people left, carrying their belongings with them. Others tried to make a stand, locking arms or even chaining themselves together with bicycle locks.

Dennis Iturralde was fast asleep on a cot when the shouting woke him up. Dark figures were running through the tents in the dim orange light of street lamps. Something slammed into the cot, flipping him to the ground.

“They were tearing everything apart,” Iturralde said. “They were hitting people, spraying people if they didn’t move fast enough.”

Within minutes, police in riot gear had swarmed the park, ripping down tents and tarps. Around 200 people were arrested.

The ouster at Zuccotti Park came as a rift within the movement had been widening between the park’s full-time residents and the movement’s power players, most of whom no longer lived in the park.

* The City of London Corporation yesterday served a legal notice on anti-capitalist protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral. An officer tied copies of the notice to several tents.

The corporation asked the demonstrators to pack up tents pitched on the public highway around the cathedral by 6pm today.

It said it would issue proceedings in the High Court if protesters fail to meet the deadline.

Protesters immediately vowed to fight the corporation.