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发帖数: 676 | 1 October 1, 2011, 4:29 pm
Police Arrest About 400 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge
By AL BAKER and COLIN MOYNIHAN
Updated, 6:12 p.m. | In a tense showdown above the
East River, the police arrested about 400 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall
Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn
Bridge on Saturday afternoon.
The police did not immediately release precise arrest figures, but said it
was the choice of those marchers that led to the swift enforcement.
“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” said
the head police spokesman, Paul J. Browne. “Those who took over the
Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”
But many protesters said that they thought the police had tricked and
trapped them, allowing them onto the bridge and even escorting them across,
only to surround them in orange netting after hundreds of them had entered.
“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us on to the
roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street
who was in the march but was not arrested.
Things came to a head shortly after 4 p.m., as the 1,500 or so marchers
reached the foot of the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the bridge, just east of
City Hall. In their march north from an encampment at Zuccotti Park in
lower Manhattan, they had stayed on the sidewalks – forming a long column
of humanity penned in by officers on scooters.
Where the entrance to the bridge narrowed their path, some marchers,
including organizers, stuck to the generally agreed-upon route and headed up
onto the wooden walkway that runs between and about 15 feet above the
bridge’s traffic lanes.
But about 20 others headed for the Brooklyn-bound roadway, said Christopher
T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who accompanied the march.
Some of them chanted “take the bridge.” They were met by a handful of high
-level police supervisors, who blocked the way and announced repeatedly
through bullhorns that the marchers were blocking the roadway and that if
they continued to do so, they would be subject to arrest.
There were no physical barriers, though, and at one point, the marchers
began walking up the roadway with the police commanders in front of them –
seeming, from a distance, as if they were leading the way. The Chief of
Department Joseph J. Esposito, and a horde or other white-shirted commanders
, was among them.
After allowing the protestors to walk about a third of the way to Brooklyn,
the police then cut the marchers off and surrounded them with orange nets on
both sides, trapping hundreds of people, said Mr. Dunn.
Mr. Dunn said he was concerned that those in the back of the column who
might not have heard the warnings “would have had no idea that it was not
okay to walk on the roadway of the bridge.” Mr. Browne said that
individuals that were in the rear of the crowd that may not have heard the
warnings were not arrested and were free to leave.
Officers began plunged into the crowd – with protesters at times chanting
“white shirts, white shirts” — and, one by one, they made the arrests,
using plastic flex cuffs. A freelance reporter for The Times, Natasha
Lennard, was among those arrested. Charges against those arrested were not
immediately available.
Earlier in the afternoon, as many as 10 Department of Correction buses, big
enough to hold 20 prisoners apiece, had been dispatched from Rikers Island
in what one law enforcement official said was “a planned move on the
protesters.”
Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway,
said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the
protesters to claim the road. “They weren’t pushed back,” he said. “It
seemed that they moved at the same time.”
Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It
seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman
saying ‘don’t do this’.”
He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be
safe.” He left the bridge when he saw officers unrolling the nets as they
prepared to make arrests. Many other who had been on the roadway were
allowed to walk back down to Manhattan.
Mr. Browne insisted that the police did not trick the protestors into going
onto the bridge.
“This was not a trap,” he said. “They were warned not to proceed.”
The Occupy Wall Street protests, against what demonstrators call inequities
in the economic system, are in their 15th day. |
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