The hundreds of cops who carried out the raid on Zuccotti Park deliberately kept the press and even legal observers away from the scene — thus hiding the city’s actions from public scrutiny.
Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly deny that. The nighttime sweep simply aimed “to reduce the risk of confrontation in the park . . . to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood,” Bloomberg claimed Tuesday.
The crackdown, of course, came just ahead of major solidarity marches planned for Thursday by unions and community groups on the two-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The biggest of those marches was planned for right here. Bloomberg’s raid will likely make Thursday’s march even bigger.
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“This heavy-handed act has made us more determined to support these kids,” one city union leader said yesterday.
There is, for instance, the case of City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Washington Heights), who rushed to Zuccotti Park when the raid started and was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Several people detained with him told me Rodriguez was bleeding badly from a gash in his forehead. Still, by 6 p.m., he had not been arraigned and his lawyer, Leo Glickman, had not been allowed to see him.
“We’re not asking for special treatment,” Glickman said. “We’re asking for him to be treated like everyone else — and he’s not . . . It’s an effort to silence him and silence this protest.”
Retired Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith can’t believe what she saw this week. At the urging of her son, who joined the Zuccotti Park protests weeks ago, Smith had volunteered to be a legal observer in case of mass arrests.
She received a text message early Tuesday that a bust was imminent, so she got to Zuccotti around 1:30 a.m. As she exited the subway at Broadway and Dey St., she met a wall of cops in riot gear who were preventing people from getting anywhere near the park.
“There was a black woman standing next to me,” Smith said. “She kept frantically telling the cops her daughter was in park and she wanted to make sure the girl was okay.”
“All of a sudden, a cop takes his baton and cracks her in the head,” Smith said. “She hadn’t done a thing. Then they started chasing people down the street.”
Smith’s efforts to get police to recognize her as a legal observer proved futile. Likewise, several reporters who were arrested while covering the protest found their press credentials worthless.
Our mayor repeatedly says he is a defender of free speech. But the First Amendment, Bloomberg notes, “does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.” Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Michael Stallman bought the mayor’s argument and ruled in the city’s favor.
Amazingly, even as cops cleared Zuccotti Park of the rebel tent camp, other tent structures, complete with generators, were going up at other parks, with City Hall’s blessing.
At Union Square Park, for example, rows of tents have already been erected for the annual holiday market so vendors can sell their trinkets through Christmas.
A second tent market will soon spring to life at Central Park near Columbus Circle. Pay the city rent, and tents are fine. But tents and generators so people can protest Wall Street greed? That’s an unhealthy idea that requires immediate police action.
