Ivy Hedberg
Recently the Occupy movement has gained traction in the US since Occupy Wall Street and Occupy San Francisco began on September 17th. Since then, the protest has spread to over 600 communities in the US alone. But as is often the case with protests, there are a growing number of reports of excessive police force and brutality.
"We're not doing anything!", one woman cried as she watched one of her fellow protesters forcefully dragged into the street. Numerous videos can be found on Youtube of some of the more intense—and far more often than not, unprovoked—uses of force by the police. In one video, an officer reaches across a barrier to seize a woman and drag her into the street, before pinning her down with the help of two other officers. In another, a young man acquiescing to arrest is shoved to the ground by an officer, who then shams the man’s head against the pavement.
One now infamous clip which has gained a lot of media attention comes from Occupy Wall Street. In the clip, a small group of women are herded into a huddle with orange netting. A lieutenant approaches them, and without any provocation, whips out a can of pepper spray and blasts them all in the face—as casually as if they were cockroaches. He then calmly retreats, re-holstering his canister as he goes, as the women fall to the ground and begin screaming. The forty-second video, viewed more than 1.5 million times on Youtube, caused quite a stir in the media. The officer, NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, was much maligned in the weeks following the incident, and though the NYPD initially defended his action, he was eventually docked ten days vacation and transferred to a new department.
Another, perhaps more concerning clip shows a police officer forcing a man holding a professional-grade video camera to the ground and smashing his head against a parked car. Video cameras are the enemy of the excessively forceful officer—with the power of easily accessible recording equipment and social media like Youtube and Twitter that can spread pictures and videos like wildfire, nearly every instance of an officer acting out of line now runs the risk of being caught on camera. Not that it stops the troublemaking officers—as seen in the aforementioned video; sometimes it encourages them to act out against the people carrying the cameras.
This can be seen in another video from Occupy Oakland. Filmed by videographer and Youtube user Scott Campbell, it starts as a simple video showing the police lineup in Oakland, California. It proceeds peacefully as he advances down the line, remaining a respectful distance away from them as he shows how many officers are present. In the last ten seconds, however, an officer can be seen raising a gun and firing a rubber bullet directly at Campbell. The shot hit him in the leg, causing a fierce, multicolored bruise spreading across most of his thigh. Once again, evidence shows the attack was entirely unprovoked: Campbell was doing nothing wrong, had even asked at the start of the clip for permission to film which was, evidently, granted.
In fact, Occupy Oakland has had some of the worst instances of intense brutality. Particularly horrifying reports come from two different Iraq war veterans, both members of Iraq War Veterans Against the War, receiving critical injuries from officers. One of them, Kayvan Sabeghi, was arrested, brutally beaten and forced into a jail cell where he was denied medical attention for almost eighteen hours. He was finally admitted to a local hospital the next morning, where he was reported to have a ruptured spleen and a large amount of internal bleeding. Fortunately, his condition was stabilized, and he escaped relatively unscathed. The second, even more unsettling story is that of Scott Olsen, who was struck with a projectile fired at close range. The projectile fractured his skull, significantly damaging the speech center of his brain. He is now no longer able to speak.
Fortunately, though, not all protestors are met with such force—quite the opposite, in fact. The majority of officers have continued to do their job correctly and without the use of needless force. Hastings’ own Young Democrats Club recently visited Occupy Wall Street on a Saturday afternoon and reported that the police were polite and respectful, although "somewhat disgruntled looking" at one point, one officer even engaged them in discussion about the sign they were carrying. "Overall they were perfectly respectable," said junior Miranda Willson, theorizing that they probably agree with the protestors, since "they are working class themselves."
While reports like these are wonderful to hear—after all, who wants to hear that their fellow students had been terrorized for their beliefs?—they also make the reports of brutality even more upsetting. It proves that protestors and officers can not only keep each other in line without violence, but can peacefully coexist. With hope, more people will soon begin to realize this, so that needless injuries can be avoided, and perhaps even lives saved.