Police crack down on Wall Street protests — in pictures | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR

Attempted police crackdown on Wall Street — in pictures

by Jérôme E. Roos on September 25, 2011

A week since the occupation started, the protests on Wall Street are only growing stronger. Thousands marched on Saturday. The authorities went berserk.

Dear reader: the unprecedented interest in this article has swamped our servers. We’ve unfortunately been forced to remove the pictures from the website in order to prevent further crashes. Luckily, you can still find the pictures on Paul Weiskel’s Flickr profile. Thank you for your interest and sorry for the inconvenience!

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET keeps on growing. Today marked the largest protest since the start of the movement, exactly a week ago. Signs are mounting that the authorities are starting to get increasingly anxious about the potential of the protests to spin “out of control” and go viral.

And so today, just days after Mayor Bloomberg assured protesters they would be “free to express their opinion”, the NYPD went into Mubarak mode, attacking peaceful protesters and making mass arrests of law-abiding citizens for the sole purpose of repressing political dissent. Undoubtedly, as happened in Barcelona before, the police repression will only further reinvigorate the protests.

Organizers claim that at least 80 were arrested and multiple people maced and kettled by police, including innocent bystanders, a number of photographers and also protest organizers — in direct violation of the constitutional right to the freedom of the press, of popular assembly and of political protest.

Once more, the real face of American democracy is revealed through these powerful images by Paul Weiskel. Not a single banker has been arrested for crashing the world economy in 2008, but by now, dozens of law-abiding citizens are in locked up in police stations around New York simply for expressing their inconvenient opinion.

PICTURES OF THE PEACEFUL PROTEST AND POLICE CRACKDOWN HERE.

via roarmag.org