Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

Serpico was the only honest cop in NY, right?

iatee: though we can swap them in and out of sentences without eroding sense, i don't think there's any sense in which police brutality and highly leveraged speculation are terribly similar. from a social engineering standpoint, they might both be described as "tactics" i suppose, but they're tactics with very different ends. one attempts to fleece, the other to control. a well matched set, perhaps, but still quite distinct from one another.

Knapp Commission findings (Serpico) in the early '70s got us a NYC civilian complaint review board... in 1993.

attempts to reform the Oakland PD, including recent actions by the Justice Department, have proven er ineffective, to say the least. I'm not sayin reform can't be done, but it is a long, long uphill battle.

and then we had Rudy G for 8 years so u know

xp

jeez you guys i go apply for jobs with the national park service and the koch brothers for 10 damn minutes and i miss all the fun

like I said upthread, I count it as a small miracle that the OPD hasn't murdered anybody from Occupy Oakland yet.

xp

*literal facepalms*

you ghave clearly never done any actual organizational work on this issue.

that's ridiculous. people have been trying to disempower rapacious capitalism in america for ages, with little success. this does not prove that someone who argues that it's possible to address capitalism's problems is ignorant.

attempts to reform the Oakland PD, including recent actions by the Justice Department, have proven er ineffective, to say the least. I'm not sayin reform can't be done, but it is a long, long uphill battle.

this i agree with. same as everything to which OWS has dedicated itself.

it is a specific tactic that is used in specific circumstances to get specific results, with total collusion by all relevant authorities (as regards OWS and demos, maybe not in general)

i mean everything i know about policing in the war on drugs suggests this ~is~ the case in general--if it isn't a matter of deliberate strategy, there's at least a deliberate blue wall

contendo I never said "ignorant", I find your statements naive and I think you are overthinking and intellectualizing these issues, to their detriment.

as much as I love a good tactics debate, I have to go do a radio show.

what thread are we on again?

smtg about Kaputt i think

fwiw the new ubiquity of 'non-lethal' weaponry, studies have shown, actually make them more likely to be deployed against 'passively resisting' people, rather than as mere non-lethal alternatives to lethal force

of course there's a blue wall! we allow cops to police themselves, and we allow them to do it badly. their union is powerful, they view themselves as under constant siege, and they have nothing to gain from failing to support one another.

this isn't conspiratorial, it's something we openly accept. i tried to explain why (imo) a ways upthread, before this went all clusterfucky. my only point here is that if we don't like the blue wall, don't like the way our governments use police brutality to get results, we need to work for a change in public attitudes towards law enforcement.

this could be done in exactly the same manner that OWS is working (successfully!) to change public attitudes about economic disparity. but only if enough people agree. that's the rub. absent some dramatic change or event, i don't imagine that this issue is going to seize the public imagination atm, and that's a shame.

as much as I love a good tactics debate, I have to go do a radio show.

― sleeve, Wednesday, February 8, 2012 1:46 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not even really talking tactics, though i did begin to slide that way towards the end. i was initially trying to counter what i saw as naivete: "cops are evil" reductionism mixed with the optimistic idea that "the truth" about police brutality might be communicated to the american people in a way that would transform their awareness.

my read is that we get the police forces we demand - or at least we get what we'll accept. and americans in general seem to demand and accept some rather brutal policing. the "awful truth" loses much of its transformative power when it's generally understood and accepted, after all...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIXEmeTRdUQ

I'm still hung up on the fact that a 3% "failure rate" is considered anything but deplorable. No industry anywhere would accept that. Like if your surgeon says there's a 3% mortality rate with this procedure, what they're actually saying is "this shit is dangerous"

it's just 3% rat feces!

3% of your coworkers being useless wastes of space?

3% of people buying into convenient good/evil binaries

THERE IT IS

so

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/dc_occupiers_tumble_as_cops_move_in/singleton/

as much as i like the idea of people using 'the battle of mcpherson' as shorthand for saturday's events, i don't think it's gonna catch on

Sadly, not if its just covered this way on Salon, as opposed to local tv news show coverage and Washington Post coverage (which I do not believe strayed from a "neutral" or pro-police and cleaning up dirty mess meme).

The anti-CPAC conservative gabfest protests coming upon Saturday will likely only get covered if there's a traffic jam and someone gets hit by a car, or if there's another altercation with the police

Ha, according to Politico, at the conference Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to launch a fierce attack on the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, calling out “liberal thugs” for intimidating their opponents in the name of political expediency.

at CPAC I advocate snatching the hairpiece off the dome of some prominent wingnut for TV time

lol

David Graeber's open-letter response to Chris Hedges criticism of Black Bloc: http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police

haha was just about to put that here

in other news, my livetweets of sunday's GA

http://storify.com/hoosteen/what-s-next-for-occupydc

It was back in 1999 that people used to pretend “the Black Bloc” was made up of nihilistic primitivist followers of John Zerzan opposed to all forms of organization. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to pretend “the Black Bloc” is made up of nihilistic insurrectionary followers of The Invisible Committee, opposed to all forms of organization. Both are absurd slurs. Yours is also 12 years out of date.

MY MAN

this is good too:

After the fiasco of Seattle, of watching some activists actively turning others over to the police—we quickly decided we needed to ensure this never happened again. What we found that if we declared “we shall all be in solidarity with one another. We will not turn in fellow protesters to the police. We will treat you as brothers and sisters. But we expect you to do the same to us”

i don't have anything useful to contribute right now but i just wanted to say it's been real interesting and informative reading the many contributions on this thread. thank you.

Same here, and kudos to Hoos.

i have no idea how to engage w the latest turn this thread had taken. i mean i just wanna be like " idk maybe read some foucault" otherwise i have to like reconstruct the entire terrain everything i think is built on. this isnt meant to be snide but the world is a terrible place where do i start?

this is all I can find so far from today (something for the celebrity-freak fans in the first 20 seconds):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4hv_4t1nQ&feature=player_embedded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4od4QQVK1o&feature=player_embedded

i don't actually know who that guy is, but its memorable. i'm sure there will be dance remixes up in a day or two.

Tune-yards show Thursday night started in Lincoln Center Allen Room and then went outside:

Before the concert ended, she announced that she would continue it outdoors in Columbus Circle, to “occupy” it. She had come prepared. Her crew had half a dozen large yellow-and-black flags and many spools of yellow-and-black tape, printed with “Occupy” instead of “Caution.” While a man (not a band member) played a baritone bugle, the gathering marched with flags around the Columbus monument and encircled it with the tape.

Eventually Ms. Garbus climbed up on the monument and delivered an oration interspersed with the chorus of her song “Bizness,” “Don’t take my life away.” Her speech was repeated by the audience in the Occupy movement’s human-microphone style.

“I will speak when I feel like speaking!” she declared. “I will be loud when I need to be loud! I will be heard when I need to be heard! I will not let a word like ‘occupy’ scare me or make me feel boxed in!” She led the crowd in a sustained chord. And by the time the police arrived, she was gone.

J*n Parel3s review

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/arts/music/tune-yards-at-the-allen-room.html?ref=arts

that AB 'person' illustrates why no one, esp libs, has to pay any attention to him ever.

(isn't he the one who called a certain columnist/erstwhile ILXor an 'appletini partyboy'?)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/occupy-dc-eviction/all/1

http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police

yeah that rulez <3 graeber

still need to read debt goddammit

this will not go well

http://rt.com/usa/news/summit-chicago-law-public-725/

part way through debt right now and it is awesome. i love graeber.

there must be some way for folks to record and anonymously upload for viewing. i can't believe that that law hasn't been struck down as unconstitutional. it's fucking ridiculous.

it isn't uploading that's the issue, it's the act of holding a camera

yah, good point. it is entirely illegal to videotape anything in chicago then?

sounds like it? i dunno