John Cassidy in the New Yorker Blog | Wall Street Protests: Commissioner Kelly Outdoes Himself
John Cassidy in the New Yorker Blog | Wall Street Protests: Commissioner Kelly Outdoes Himself
Was the NYPD crackdown on OccupyWallStreet protesters, who occupied Brooklyn Bridge at the weekend leading to over 700 arrests, part of the increased militarisation and heavy-handedness of the force since 9/11, or are the authorities feeling vulnerable?
So why are the police behaving in this way, evoking comparisons to the civil-rights era? One theory is that the protest, which is now spreading to other cities, is creating genuine alarm inside the financial and political establishment. “The over-reaction clearly shows that the authorities feel quite vulnerable,” Carne Ross, a former British diplomat and expert on direct democracy, who has been speaking regularly to some of the protesters at their Zuccotti Park encampment, told me. “If this was an animal rights protest, the police wouldn’t be reacting in this way. They know there are very strong feelings among ordinary people about Wall Street and the bailouts: the rage and hatred is intense.” Ross may be right. But even now, the protest remains far too small to be called a mass movement. And thus far it has had a negligible impact on the day-to-day business of Wall Street. As the protesters debate the meaning of anarchy and community banking, the employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase are carrying on as normal. If Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are quaking in their Church’s wingtips, they are keeping it to themselves.
The other theory is that Kelly and his boss Bloomberg are blundering around, not sure what to do. During the past decade or so, City Hall and the N.Y.P.D. have adopted an increasingly hard line approach to street protests, which has gone hand-in-hand with the growing militarization of the police department in response to 9/11. Does the N.Y.P.D. really need helicopters armed with machine guns capable of shooting down small planes? BearCat armored personnel carriers? Intelligence operatives in the Middle East? Kelly thinks it does, and Bloomberg has given free rein to his imperial ambitions.
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