Around 200 protesters were arrested in New York’s Zuccotti Park in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday as part of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement in Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
New York Police Department officers arrived on the scene around 1 a.m. after telling protesters that they needed to evacuate the park so it could undergo a temporary cleaning, motivated by health and fire safety hazards. Many protesters refused to cooperate and were then forced to leave or arrested.
On Tuesday afternoon, a New York Supreme Court judge ruled against the Occupy movement by refusing an extension of a restraining order against the city and the police department that had delayed the eviction earlier in the day. Under the judge’s ruling, occupiers can now return to Zuccotti Park and protest, but they can no longer camp out day after day.
In this case, the judge’s ruling was completely justified. Zuccotti Park is a privately owned property and as such needs to be kept up, especially considering its condition after people have been living there for the better part of two months. The same was true in the case of Occupy Boston invading the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a privately owned park that the city invests a significant amount of money in to maintain.
Moreover, this forced evacuation could be a turning point for the future of the Occupy movement. Perhaps now the protesters will realize that occupying a space should not be the point of their rebellion. They will never affect change on a large scale without a clear purpose or goal. If their main aim is simply occupying a public space, the movement will dwindle come winter and fizzle out without a solid direction. As John Avlon put it in The Daily Beast, “the Occupy movement has to move beyond mob actions if it hopes to influence the national debate in constructive ways going into 2012.”
That being said, one aspect of yesterday’s crackdown that was completely uncalled for was Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to ban media from the site altogether. This order was an unequivocal violation of the First Amendment, not to mention largely ineffectual. While Bloomberg tried to claim that journalists were banned for their own safety, New York officials along with the NYPD were clearly trying to keep publicity at a minimum when the arrests were being made.
What remains to be seen is where the Occupy Wall Street protesters will take their message from here. If they use this change to develop their message and establish concrete demands, they could become a significant part of the national conversation and maybe even, dare we say, accomplish something.
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