CITY OF STRANGERS

I went back downtown around four. Riots cops made a cordon down Broadway, and were already gathering in numbers around Foley Square where the big evening rally was due to take place, even though there were only a couple hundred protesters milling around. Around City Hall, the cops stood in pairs, maybe twenty feet apart, with police vans lined up down the street, and metal barricades sectioning off the sidewalk. The protestors had left Zuccotti Park earlier in the afternoon and gone to City Hall, but they had dispersed and only the cops where left. If you could ignore the riot gear they were not particularly menacing. Many were giving directions to confused tourists, and one big black cop waved, smiling cheerfully, at a lone protester girl who glanced at him warily as she walked by carrying a sign.

But their very presence ratcheted up the tension. At the last big rally on October 15th, the police had been in regular uniform.

At Zuccotti Park, two women were sitting knitting at the bottom of the square, talking to a man leaning in over the fence about the night of the NYPD raid, the destruction of the library. One of the women had been sleeping in the camp when the cops arrived:

“The sanitation workers threw all the trash on top of the tents, the sleeping gear, everything. One of the kids watched his guitar being crushed in the back of the garbage truck. They say we can reclaim our stuff – how can we reclaim what’s been crushed?”

“I thought the sanitation workers’ union was behind you.” Someone said.

“So did we!” A young black girl broke in. “they thought if they went along, they’d get a good deal from the city.”

The sanitation workers are part of the Teamsters, one of the first big unions to support Occupy.

The real crowd was gathering at the foot of Brooklyn Bridge. A couple dozen protesters, mostly middle-aged or near middle-aged, guarded by almost as many cops in riot helmets, were waving signs and chanting slogans at the bottom of the City Hall steps. The protesters at the foot of the bridge were more diverse in race and age than the crowd down at Zuccotti. A lot of kids, but many middle-aged people, and a heavy doze of black and Hispanic people who looked like they came from Brooklyn or the Bronx. In the middle was a circle formed by the United NY people who stood out because of their white shirts. They were mostly young, black or Hispanic, but I wondered who they were since I didn’t recall seeing or hearing anything about them before, and they seemed to be organizing as some kind of internal community policing service. I later read they were part of the 1199seiu, the Healthcare Workers Union but at the time, I wondered if they were an arm of the police.

The crowd was bottlenecking into the narrow space formed by the police cordon to keep protestors out of the traffic, so I cut around to get into Foley Square. Everywhere small groups were gathering for the rally – nurses waving placards, students, more from the TWU and other unions. Foley Square was filling up, well ahead of the 5pm start. I later learned that there were many groups converging on the Square at once, but at the time the crowd seemed fragmented, the speeches largely confined to chants of ‘We Are the 99%’ interspersed with a shouted ‘Mic check!’ (through a microphone), a tip of the hat to Occupy.

Unlike the last rally, the cops had full riot gear on, and had closed off the roads around the park, so you had to pass through a bottleneck to even get to the park, and couldn’t go across the other side up the steps of the justice building. People were streaming in from all sides, as were the cops who soon formed a perimeter around the back of the park, standing a few feet apart, sometimes with their batons out, as if they were only a few steps away from moving in, and there were yet more cops keeping protestors back from traffic at each end of the street. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cops in one place before, and I remember thinking this is what Tehran must have looked like, as the security forces gathered for the crackdown; I was beginning to wonder if the NYPD saw the occupy movement as one big make-work project. What made the buildup especially absurd was that the crowd by this point was dominated by middle-aged union and professional people, and students, not exactly the types to storm the barricades. The average age must have been above 40. Some balding guy who looked like he could have been an undercover cop himself went up to one of the riot cops and pointed this out. The riot cop had a reasonable, intelligent face and maybe that’s why the guy chose him.

“Most people here are older, in their ’50s and ’60s.”

The cop laughed. “I know. Guess they miss their ’60s days.”

There was humour in his voice, but contempt as well. A young guy walked by. Past college age, but could have been anything -web designer, electrician. He caught what the cop had said as well and shouted:

“Miss their middle-class days more like!” Then, loud enough for the cop to hear: “Fucking clown!”

People were clustered on the pavement across the street. Many were indeed in their ’50s and ’60s, many sounded mid-Western; perhaps they’d come out from their own battles in Wisconsin or Ohio. They too were awed by the police presence: “I wonder how much it must cost to keep a couple helicopters out like that?” One asked as the helicopters droned overhead. The riot cops kept moving in. Many more were waiting in the police vans parked along the street, and yet more were approaching from both streets, wearing full riot gear. Even if they showed no signs of moving in, their presence was intimidating, a very obvious show of force, especially as they kept changing formation, following arcane orders over their walkie-talkies.

I left before the rally got underway. On both sides, it was a show of strength, but the cops really turned it on. Later the protesters marched over the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been a successful rally, yet the next day both the mayor and the mainstream NY media were dismissive, as if it hadn’t mattered at all. Reading the papers, you’d believe them – that is, if you hadn’t seen the cops. The cops told you the higher-ups took this very seriously indeed.

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