Judge Rules 'Occupy' may Proceed in Class-Action against NYPD for Brooklyn Bridge Entrapment

On Oct 2, this blog reported how the NYPD led Occupy Wall Street protesters onto the Brooklyn Bridge, only to then kettle and arrest hundreds of them. The initial reports in the New York Times reporting the entrapment was then changed (and the reporter’s name changed) after receiving calls from NYPD spokesmen 20 minutes after publication (see original article New York Times Changes Story, Shifts Blame)

 In an opinion issued late yesterday, US District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that a class action lawsuit against the police may proceed, and that New York Police Department officers are not entitled to qualified immunity from the arrests from the October 1, 2011 Brooklyn Bridge incident. He has ordered the lawsuit to proceed. In issuing his ruling, Judge Rakoff referred to historic protests by Thomas Paine and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"This is a major victory in the fight for justice and vindication for the seven hundred people falsely arrested by the NYPD," stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund which filed the class action lawsuit days after the arrests. "This is a clear message in defense of free speech. The Court's ruling means that scores of NYPD officers are potentially liable to hundreds of arrestees who were mass arrested in a peaceful protest in a blatant violation of their constitutional rights."

"From the onset, this case has involved competing narratives: the police's carefully crafted PR presentation that was spun to the press in the immediate hours after the mass false arrest, versus the truth," stated Carl Messineo, Legal Director of the PCJF. "The plaintiffs in this lawsuit sought to set the record straight in their demand for justice. The court repeatedly cited the evidence presented in the complaint, including multimedia video evidence, in its finding that NYPD officers can be held liable for conducting these false arrests. We've said all along that the police invited protestors into the bridge and then turned around and, without notice or warning, arrested them. The ruling vindicates and credits that narrative that we have said is the truth all along."

The Judge’s rulings states:

 "[A] reasonable officer would have understood that it was incumbent on the police to clearly warn the demonstrators that they must not proceed onto the Brooklyn Bridge's vehicular roadway...the officers...turned and started walking away from the demonstrators and onto the road way -- an implicit invitation to follow. While the demonstrators might have inferred otherwise if they had heard the bull horn message, no reasonable officer could imagine, in these circumstances, that this warning was heard by more than a small fraction of the gathered multitude...Indeed, the plaintiffs' video shows what should have been obvious to any reasonable officer, namely, that the surrounding clamor interfered with the ability of demonstrators as few as fifteen feet away from the bull horn to understand the officer's instructions."

The ruling opens with the following: "What a huge debt this nation owes to its 'troublemakers.' From Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr., they have forced us to focus on problems we would prefer to downplay or ignore. Yet it is often only with hindsight that we can distinguish those troublemakers who brought us to our senses from those who were simply . . . troublemakers. Prudence, and respect for the constitutional rights to free speech and free association, therefore dictate that the legal system cut all non-violent protesters a fair amount of slack. These observations are prompted by the instant lawsuit, in which a putative class of some 700 or so 'Occupy Wall Street' protesters contend they were unlawfully arrested while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011."

Green Party candidate Jill Stein defends First Amendment

In spite of efforts by police across the nation to silence the media during their coordinated assault on protesters, videos made by ordinary citizens and posted on YouTube have gone viral and provided all the evidence that is needed to show the excessive brutality exercised by The Police State against American citizens last night: Pepper spray used on an octagenarian who was moving too slowly, thousands of books destroyed, protesters roused and rounded up at night, press passes confiscated, individuals with official court restraining orders punched in the face by uniformed officers, a NY city Councilor beaten...and the list goes on.

The Republicans continue to dismiss the people with total disdain, while Obama's Department of Homeland Security coordinates with City Police forces to storm the protests.

In the midst of this, the Green Party alone has had the courage to stand up and oppose these gestapo-like tactics. I reprint, in its entirety, the official statement released by Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for President:

"The aggressive, needless police actions across the country against Occupy Wall Street (OWS) are an assault on civil liberties and an effort to suppress a much needed movement for economic justice and democracy. The courageous protesters who have stood up to intimidation by lethal force are standing up for us all.

The use of police in full riot gear with helicopters buzzing overhead to arrest peaceful and largely sleeping protesters is frightening commentary on the militarization of state and municipal security. Unprovoked police violence against citizens practicing peaceful civil disobedience - clearly documented on videos gone viral on the internet - is deeply alarming: young women being corralled and pepper sprayed on Wall Street, students at University of California Berkeley being attacked with nightsticks, Iraq veteran Scott Olsen who served two tours of duty supposedly defending freedom, yet whose own freedom was assaulted in a police attack at Occupy Oakland that fractured his skull and rendered him unable to speak.

In conducting these raids, public officials are suppressing rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. Routinely, reporters were physically prevented from observing the raids. Many of those who managed to get in to the sites were reportedly intimidated or arrested. If access to public ways and public health and safety concerns were significant, other non-military solutions were available to deal with them. The lack of such efforts belies the excuse that these concerns justified police raids.

As the OWS protesters have said, the defenders of the 1% can evict the protesters, but they can't evict an idea. The protest is here to stay. I call upon the mayors of the occupied cities to follow the example of Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, California, who welcomed the local occupation, and to allow the Occupy gatherings to continue.

Throughout American history public assemblies by the people have been essential to the advance of our civil liberties and to the defense of our freedoms.

Coxey's Army in 1894 marched from Ohio to DC, demanding public jobs for the unemployed in the midst of a recession. In 1932, the Bonus Army of 17,000 World War I veterans and their families, in the third year of the Great Depression camped in DC demanding the immediate cash-payment redemption of their World War I bonuses that were scheduled to be paid in 1945. In 1968, the Poor People's Campaign, a legacy of recently assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, set up a shantytown in DC known as "Resurrection City" in support of an Economic Bill of Rights, seeking full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and affordable low-income housing. In 1985-86, students erected and camped in anti-apartheid shantytowns on college campuses to protest investments in corporations in apartheid South Africa.

Some of the OWS protesters are homeless. Many more are young and jobless, often carrying unconscionable college-loan debt burdens. They are the tip of the iceberg of insecurity that is increasingly intolerable for growing numbers of the American public, with the upper 1 percent of Americans now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year and controlling 40 percent of the nation's wealth. Income disparity in the US now exceeds that before the Great Depression. Thus, the anguish that compels protesters to sleep on the cold hard ground is not going away.

The political parties of the 1% are showing signs of neither understanding the protest, nor acting to address the root economic causes. I challenge President Obama to forbid all Federal involvement in these disturbing violations of civil liberties, and to urge all elected officials to respect the right of citizens to peacefully assemble to petition their government for redress of the economic grievances caused by rule by the 1%."

Jill Stein for President Campaign


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NYPD clears Occupy Wall Street

This is how a Fascist Police State Operates:

Shortly after midnight, the Mayor has a secret meeting, calling NYPD, NYFD, and Public Works Departments to City Hall.

NYPD shut down all subways, subway stations, and the Brooklyn Bridge at 1:20 am. All New Yorkers held hostage by the NYPD.

NYPD amass in riot gear at Broadway and Canal, 1:43 am. Snipers take position on rooftops.

In spite of Constitutional provisions guaranteeing Freedom of the Press, Press are barred from entering Zuccotti Park to record the imminent raid at 2:07 am, and Press helilcopters are evicted from airspace. Defiant reporters rounded up by NYPD: one pepper sprayed at 2:03 am, at least one New York Times Reporter demanding to exercise his 1st Amendment rights is arrested and removed at 2:22 am. Press several blocks have press badges confiscated; police refuse to give badge numbers or names.

The NYPD assault on Zuccotti Park, which is private property, begins.

5,000 Books discarded in a dumpster at 2:42 am. Bulldozers move into Zuccotti Park. NYC Council Member Ydanis Rodríguez arrested and bleeding from head, 2:44 a.m

Remaining Occupiers chain themselves to tree, which had been protected by Occupiers throughout. The tree is cut down by NYPD at 2:55 am. Fire Hoses are brought in at 3:08 am.

Doormen at area residential apartments ordered by police to prevent residents from leaving (confirmed by NBC news at 3:37 am)

130 police in Riot Gear surround Zuccotti Park. Deputy Mayor and Legal Counsel in Oakland, California, resign in protest of Oakland raids on Occupiers...raising the question of a nationally orchestrated 'cleansing' campaign.

Combined action by government entities, in the dead of night. Silencing of the Press. Cutting off of transportation routes. Destruction of books. Sweeping of private property by government thugs. Pepper spray, arrests, assaults.

Call (212) NEW-YORK. Sheldon Silver 212-312-1420. Christine C. Quinn - City Council (212) 564-7757 Brookfield Properties(212) 483-0771


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NYPD Routinely Plant Drugs on the Innocent

An article in todays Gothamist recounts the court testimony of Stephen Anderson, a former NYPD Detective, who admitted widespread drug planting of drugs on innocent civilians.

Reporter John Del Signore wrote,

A former NYPD Detective testified...that he regularly saw police plant drugs on innocent people as a way to meet arrest quotas. Ex-Detective Stephen Anderson, who worked in the Queens and Brooklyn South narcotics divisions, was called to testify in the trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny, who has been charged with falsifying public documents and business records. Anderson's testimony was intended to reveal that, as the Daily News puts it, "cop corruption wasn't limited to a single squad. In fact, it's pretty widespread!"

Anderson was busted for helping plant cocaine, a practice known as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008. He testified yesterday that he did it to help out fellow officer Henry Tavarez, whose "buy-and-bust" arrests had been low.

"I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy," Anderson testified in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Anderson avoided jail time by pleading guilty and agreeing to testify against other officers swept up in the corruption bust. (The two men that got flaked received a $300,000 settlement from the city.)

The corruption I observed... was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators," Anderson testified, according to the Post. Asked by Justice Gustin Reichbach how he felt about setting up innocent men, Anderson replied, "It's almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they're going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway."

Reacting to Anderson's testimony, Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance says, "One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing - and quotas further incentivize such practices."