NYPD Helps Give "Flood Wall Street" a Major First Amendment Victory

This past Monday’s “Flood
Wall Street” march and sit-in, organized by remnants of the
Occupy Wall Street movement, was designed to provoke a
confrontation with the police that would lead to mass arrests,
which for the most part failed, but not before attracting national
attention to their cause via theatrical civil disobedience.

Prior to the march, leaders of the happening used the human mic to
offer “Non-violent Direct Action Training,” which included
instructions on how to be arrested peacefully and providing pens to
write the phone number for the National Lawyer’s Guild on your
arm. 

Their stated goal was to “shut down” Wall Street, and by
extension capitalism, to end the climate crisis,
but after 8 hours of sporadic sitting and standing,
performance art, and the
return of
Hipster Cop, the crowd had thinned-out significantly and only

102 arrests were made. 

The part of Broadway in Lower Manhattan, just north of
Bowling Green, is narrow and frequently congested even without
3,000 people in the middle of the street. Police erected barricades
to separate the two sides of the street, and about a dozen
bored-looking cops paced back and forth within those barricades
for hours while Flood Wall Street had their moment.

Though most protesters were peaceful, many shouted insults
at the police and some, like the prankster
who tried to lasso the Wall Street Bull,
came perilously close to assaulting police officers, which could
have easily sparked a wider confrontation. 

What most befuddled and frustrated the protesters was that
the cops seemed to be in no hurry to crack skulls and drag
thousands of hippies to the pokey.

They could be forgiven for expecting a heavy-handed
reponse from the NYPD, given
how the cops handled the eviction of the orignal Occupy
Wall Street encampment, but credit where it’s due, the police
allowed the protesters to have their say before calling off the
party as night fell, and then handling the dispersement as
peaceably as possible. 

Brooklyn College professor and police reform advocate Alex S.
Vitale
praised the NYPD for its patience, tolerance and
professionalism, going so far as to award them credit for giving
the First Amendment “a major victory”:

A couple of thousand people showed up and at around 11:30 a.m.
many sat down next the bull sculpture in the middle of Broadway
just above Bowling Green. They were allowed to occupy that space
for much of the afternoon. The police made no effort to arrest
them, disperse them, or even to isolate them from onlookers. This
was a major departure from past practice. Similar efforts in recent
years have been met with widespread use of force to push
demonstrators onto sidewalks along with often random arrests to
intimidate others.

By around 3:30 PM many of those sitting in dispersed, but
several hundred marched north towards Wall Street. Police made
little to no effort to contain them until demonstrators attempted
to breach the barriers blocking access to Wall Street. At that
point a few people were subjected to pepper spray and punches as
they wrestled with police over the barricades there–a not
unreasonable use of force given the circumstances.

Even after that violent confrontation, police allowed people to
occupy Broadway for another 3 hours before finally warning, then
arresting the remaining 100 protestors in a calm, deliberate, and
methodical manner.

While some may criticize the mayor for tying the NYPD’s hands,
in fact this is an example of the kind of more tolerant and
flexible policing the city needs as an antidote to 20 years of
aggressive zero tolerance approaches. The First Amendment scored a
major victory this week.

Reason TV covered Flood Wall Street and the larger climate march
on Sunday. Watch
here,
here and below: