The clashes that erupted between the OWS protesters and the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge were one of the major reasons that the dear old MSM began to pay attention to the movement and solidarity groups began to mushroom across the country. The Occupy Wall Street group at Daily Kos is undertaking as one of its several projects an effort to monitor and track the interactions of the various occupy groups with local law enforcement. There has already been a category of links in the mothership resource diary. We are now starting a program of using a special tag of "police intervention" in diaries that report on conflicts between demonstrators and police. If a diarist objects to its inclusion we will remove it.
Use of this tag will make it possible to pull together reports which are likely to become more frequent as the movement spreads. My plan is to pull the information together on a weekly basis and post a digest diary that provides links and some discussion of events and trends. I would strongly encourage anyone who has information about such incidents to either write a diary about them or to post the information as a comment in the digest diaries. This is going to be an ongoing issue and I think that it is something that we should keep a focus on.
So far most of the attention has focused on the situation in New York. That is where the most violent events have occurred. Elsewhere the incidents that I have seen have been about efforts by police to restrict the hours of demonstrations in public spaces and to removes camps and their equipment such as tents and sleeping bags. Such incidents with arrest of individual demonstrators have occurred in
Seattle
San Francisco
Santa Barbara
San Jose
Sacramento
Does anyone know of others?
I am not putting in all of the links that have collected since the beginning of OWS. They can be found by using the tag.
There are a number of important issues to explore around this topic. Some of the questions that come my mind are:
Can the right to peaceful assembly on public property be limited by time of the authorities choice?
Where does peaceful protest end and civil disobedience begin? A deliberate attempt to block traffic is usually seen as civil disobedience. However, if police insist on focusing on technical infractions such as distributing food without a permit, they can turn just about anything into civil disobedience.
Yesterday there was a significant incident in Washington, D.C. There was a protest at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum that was attributed to the Occupy DC group. Here is a diary that reported on the events that resulted in the museum guards using pepper spray.
BREAKING (UPDATE - Slo-Mo & New Video): Police Pepper Spray Protesters in DC
A few hours later there was another diary which presents convincing information that the demonstration was not an activity of Occupy DC and reporting evidence that the editor of a right wing magazine had deliberately acted to provoke the guards to use pepper spray.
Conservative Magazine Brags of its Agent Provocateur's Role in Provoking Police Action in D.C.
Such efforts to discredit this movement are doubtless going to be an ongoing occurrence. That is one reason why collecting up to date accurate information and making it easy for people to retrieve should provide a useful service.