Raid on Zuccotti: Scenes from the end of an occupation and the middle of a movement
The police perimeter at Cortlandt Street. Tom McGeveran
10:11 am Nov. 15, 2011
The raid began at 1 a.m. on the dot. Eric Smith, a member of the kitchen crew, was sleeping in his tent, still wearing his chef’s toque.
“I heard ‘Get the fuck up! Get the fuck up! Everybody get the fuck up now!’” said Smith, 38. “And then the lights came on and we were surrounded.”
When Smith opened the flap of his tent, he saw hundreds of police officers and sanitation workers, backlit by spotlights, streaming into the park. Police in blue shirts began pulling down tents, while police captains handed out fliers stating the park constituted an ongoing health and safety risk and instructing occupiers to remove their belongings immediately. Protesters, throwing handkerchiefs across their faces, gathered in the center of the park. Some pledged to stay; others grabbed what they could and began to make for the exits.
The raid, rumored to be imminent since the first day of the occupation on Sept. 17, had finally arrived.
Within minutes, NYPD officers were blocking access to the park from all sides. People were allowed to leave but not re-enter. Protesters, many hauling backpacks, filtered out of the park in ones and twos, looking stunned.
A scrum of demonstrators, scores large, massed on the corner of Cortlandt Street and Broadway, the closest they could get to the park. Some had been in the park during the raid, but most had been nearby, trickling in from a late night meeting of the “spokes council.” Some had been sleeping in their homes, but had headed to the park after receiving an emergency text or reading the news on Twitter.
The crowd chanted “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!”
Police with plastic helmets and riot shields pushed protesters onto the sidewalk, where they chanted, “This is a peaceful protest!”
Then the police were on the sidewalk, pressing the chanters north. The crowd became a swirl of protesters tussling with blue suits.
Suddenly, the air filled with a smell like Tabasco sauce and the protesters closest to the police clutched their eyes.
“They pepper-sprayed me! They pepper-sprayed me!’” cried Hero Vincent, a 21-year-old from North Carolina who has been with the protest since September, wiping liquid from his face. “In the face! They pepper sprayed straight in the face!”
“Water!” someone else shouted, “We need water!”
The crowd scrambled backward.
A dozen protesters sat down cross-legged in the middle of the sidewalk, a line of blue-suited cops towering over them. A white shirted officer with a megaphone, his chants drowned out by cries of “You! Are! The 99 percent!,” told the protesters to clear the sidewalk.
Some cried “March!” and “Hold your ground!”
“I don’t care if I get hurt!” cried Anthony Robledo, 22. “I don’t care! You know why? Because the movement’s bigger than all of us! I’m a Colombian immigrant! If I get arrested tonight, I’m getting shipped back to my country! But guess what? I don’t give a fuck! I’m the 99 percent! And so are they!”
He flung a hand at the cops. “They just don’t know it yet!”
A bearded man called for a people’s mic.
“We need to hold this space and talk about what to do next!” he hollered. “They can’t move us from here if we stick together.”
The NYPD disagreed, and continued to press the protesters away from the park. A wall of police officers pressed again, sliding the Occupiers slowly but surely backward. Scuffles broke out.
“Shame!” the crowd chanted. “Shame!”
Officers took up flanking positions on Broadway.
“I don’t give a shit about what you have to say!” a man yelled in the direction of the police. “This is a peaceful fucking protest!”
A protester kneeled on the sidewalk as another emptied a bottle of water onto his face. He held his head back, eyes closed, mouth open, like he was receiving communion.
There was a cacophony of shouts, screams, chants, curses and pleas.
“We cannot let this become anti-police,” a stocky man whose face was a pincushion of silver jewelry yelled to the crowd. “This movement is bigger than this movement!”
He repeated this over and over, stabbing the air with his index finger. Some of the crowd cheered.
Moments later, he was approached by a handful of protesters who called him a coward.
The line of police on Broadway thickened. The protesters were pressed up the street, heading northward.
A woman bellowed, “You’re sacrificing your future and the future of your children and the future of this earth by helping the one percent create a new world order!”
The protesters moved up both sides of Broadway.
At Dey Street, a large African-American woman tried to push past police and was pulled to the ground. Protesters spilled into the street, before being pushed back onto the sidewalk.
A tiny white woman politely asked a police office whether she might be allowed to collect her shoe, which had come off in the melee and was now sitting in the middle of Broadway.
“You don’t think the country needs to change, huh?” screamed a grey-haired man. “Every time they beat up on senior citizens? Every time they beat up on children? When they send our troops to war and don’t even buy them body armor? Huh?”
A skinny man, his upper lip dusted with peach fuzz, directed his animus at a single officer.
“I wish you could look me in the eyes and tell me why,” the man said, eyes fixed on his target. “I’m 21 years old. Tell a young man why. You’re older than me, brother. Tell me. I’m not going to ask anyone else. Tell me why. Tell me why. Tell me why. Tell me. Tell me why you’re doing this to your people.”
The officer stared blankly ahead.
At around 2:40 a.m., a few protesters reconvened on Cortlandt Street. Hero Vincent was there, his face blotched with something crusty and white. Maalox and water, he said, to dissolve the pepper spray. His face still burned.
The word was that protesters would be collecting at Foley Square. Vincent set off with another protestor, Nicholas. They made their way up Broadway and past City Hall.
On Trinity, they passed a flat-screen playing above the Cortlandt Street subway stop. Hero looked around, and then gave it a hard smack.
“Fuck it,” he murmured. “Look at it. Playing commercials while this is going on? Fuck it.”
They turned onto Broadway and passed City Hall. They walked in silence, the police helicopters hovering above them.
“I’ve lost it,” said Vincent, shaking his head. “If you knew me five months ago, I never cursed. Never cursed. Now, it’s like, fuck the police. Smack ‘em back.”
Several hundred people were massed in Foley. A beam of light from one of the police choppers, hovering low, lit them up. The crowd didn’t hang around for long. Word spread that they were going to try another rendezvous at Washington Square Park.
Malik Rhasaan, the leader of Occupy the Hood, said he had been leaving the spokes council meeting, near Canal Street, when he saw police gearing up for something.
