What does Occupy Wall Street want? In a nutshell? An end to the culture of obedience which, irony of ironies, is manifest by massive insubordination on the part of appointed and elected officials, as well as the financial, industrial and economic agents we employ.
The agents of law enforcement, who have responded most visibly and most inappropriately to demands that they do their jobs, are just the tip of an iceberg, which a rising tide of popular disaffection is exposing to the electronic eye.
This weekend, the New York Times deserves some kudos for providing an outline of the iceberg's dimensions.
The first thing that should be noted is the almost instantaneous coverage of the re-engagement between protesters celebrating New Year's Eve in Zuccotti Park and the NYPD, supplemented with an update at two o'clock in the morning of the first day of 2012.
2:10 a.m. | Updated More than 500 people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered in Zuccotti Park on Saturday and, in a return to scenes from earlier in the year, the evening began with the sound of drumming and calls of the now familiar slogan, “We are the 99 percent” — and it ended with torn-down barricades and a scuffle with police officers.
That the police launched an assault is reported further on, but still in terms of a "scuffle."
Moments later, at least a dozen police officers charged into the park, plowing directly into a crowd of people, some of whom were trying to flee, pushing and shoving. One man was thrown down and pinned to the ground by several officers.
Where former President George W. Bush was famously described as "all hat and no cattle," it seems the NYPD have been taught that they're wranglers and citizens is what they get to practice on. One is tempted to conclude that it's "all practice and no profession," if other reporting coming out of New York is to be believed.
For, while hundreds of cops are being dispatched to wrangle with protesters in parks, on sidewalks and in the streets, they can't be bothered with respondingto real crimes being perpetrated against individual citizens and, even worse, failing to record their reports to make their statistics look good.
It's bad enough that historically crime rates compiled by the FBI, for example, are based on reported arrests, with nary a follow up to see how many charges are dismissed, nol processed or pled down to insignificance just so citizens don't have to waste more time with the cops' foolishness. That there is much foolishness is not attested by the fact that, regardless of how well citizens do their part, there's just no follow up.
Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.
In typical bureaucratic fashion, the Police Chief appointed a panel--to look for what's obviously not there.
The panel, which has not yet released its findings, was expected to focus on the downgrading of crimes, in which officers improperly classify felonies as misdemeanors.
But of nearly as much concern to people in law enforcement are crimes that officers simply failed to record, which one high-ranking police commander in Manhattan suggested was “the newest evolution in this numbers game.”
It is not unusual for detectives, who handle telephone calls from victims inquiring about the status of their cases, to learn that no paperwork exists. Detectives said it was hard to tell if those were administrative mix-ups or something deliberate. But they noted their skepticism that some complaints could simply vanish in the digital age.
Ah, the digital age. I can well remember the promises of a number of chiefs and deputies that, once they got those new computers, all the information anyone could possibly want to trace police efficiency and effectiveness would be handed over to all us nosy citizens. It never happened. Not even when a chief told me to my face that the print-out was sitting on his desk, waiting to be sent, did I ever get a smidgeon. Police do not like being responsive to citizens.
That's probably not universally true. After all, in a video out of Des Moines, Iowa, where Occupy is getting ready to occupy the caucuses, there's a picture of a cop actually writing a report at the three second mark. Which reminds me that, while police have become increasingly reluctant to release reports to the press, "while the investigation is on-going," arrested persons can demand a copy of the report substantiating the charges against them, usually within a number of hours or days.
Since I've yet to see an image of NYPD writing down anything on the spot as they round protesters up and, considering that some cops introduce themselves as the "arresting officer" for the first time when people are booked into the holding facility, I'd wager that the number of reports being generated about the crime wave occasioned by OWS are slim to none. Perhaps the omission is going to be blamed on the systematic problem that the Chief had the foresight to address with his "panel."
Imagine how the crime stats in New York City would have swelled if all the arrests of OWS had been properly logged and recorded and justified! Talk about "consternation!"
As an era of low crime continues, and as 2011 draws to a close with felony numbers running virtually even with last year’s figures, any new felony is a significant event in a precinct and a source of consternation to commanders.
On the Upper West Side in July, a man in red shorts climbed through a window into the living room where Katherine Davis, 65, was reading the paper. She ran, a few steps ahead of him, and locked herself in an adjacent apartment, where she watched through the peephole as the man searched for her before he left.
Officers drove her around to look for the intruder, unsuccessfully. Ms. Davis asked if they could take fingerprints. But the officers said, “Oh, no, that’s only if you have a detective, or investigation,” she recalled. She asked for a case number.
“They said, ‘There is no case number,’ ” she said.
Perhaps OWS should take a cue from Ms. Davis and save themselves some time by asking for their case numbers. What they probably shouldn't do is fall for that trick the LAPD are trying to pull by offering "classes in free speech" in exchange for (imaginary?) charges being dismissed.
Perhaps "show me the charges" needs to be added to the occupiers' refrain.
Some behavioral patterns are multi-purpose.
“A police report wouldn’t get made because they make you wait in the police station for hours,” one commander said. Eventually, he added, the crime victim would give up and leave.
Occupy is about not leaving, anymore.