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Episode 4: They Walk Among Us · OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising

• Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising Episode 4: They Walk Among Us Previously on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING: Nicole Carty: It felt like we were going to dismantle capitalism in like the next week and it felt amazing to be at the park. Union leader: Let's march on Wall Street. Show them what democracy looks like and because we're the 99% Chants: We are the 99%, we are the 99%, we are the 99% Nelini: It's a lot of like, oh, these hippies in the park with no jobs and blah, blah, blah. Like people would literally pass us by like, get a job. And I'm like, I have one. Marisa Holmes: There were thousands of people who had joined and then people started screaming, like it's a kettle! Protestor: They’re arresting people? As Occupy was rapidly growing, the battle for public opinion was in full swing. The Left had mostly gotten on board, applauding the movement even if they didn’t totally understand it. And on the Right – Wall street titans, Republican politicians, and right wing media darlings dismissed the occupiers’ claims as misguided. They said the 99% should be grateful to the 1% for paying taxes that benefit everyone. They told occupiers that they needed to stop complaining. Stop acting like victims. Stop being divisive. Rudy Giuliani: Instead of occupying Wall Street and occupying Boston and occupying Oakland, and how about you occupy a job? Newt Gingrich: Go get a job right after you take a bath. Some right wing media stars, like Glenn Beck, really hated the occupiers. Beck was one of the most powerful voices on the Right and he told his audience of millions that Occupy was out for blood. Glenn Beck: Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you're wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you. They will drag us out into the streets and kill us. If you're wealthy, they will kill you for what you have. This type of language was repeated by others who were even more extreme like Steve Bannon, who later compared Occupiers to Nazi brownshirts. It was obviously hyperbolic. Although — Nathan Schneider: Occupy always seemed right on the edge of violence, always flirting with that line. This is Nathan Schneider, a journalist who covered Occupy from day one. Occupy was founded as a nonviolent movement, but Nathan said that the language of nonviolence didn’t resonate with everyone at Zuccotti Park. Nathan Schneider: I've come to think it's not very useful to say, Oh, this thing is mostly nonviolent, or is fundamentally in some essential way nonviolent. I think it is dancing with the possibility of violence it's walking on the edge. Social movements have always been like that. That is what, in a sense, makes them powerful, the threat of the chaos they can unleash. It’s worth saying that nonviolent doesn’t necessarily mean peaceful. Social movements aren’t successful when activists politely ask for what they want. They’re successful when they disrupt daily life and force the government to pay attention with sit-ins, hunger strikes, blocking traffic, boycotts, or mass walk outs. The whole point is to be noisy and inconvenient. And that’s what the occupiers were doing as they protested a capitalist system that felt rigged against them. They continued to march twice a day to the stock exchange to try to disrupt business. They loudly protested outside CEOs homes. Some of them yelled expletives. And there was at least one instance when a group of Bay Area occupiers broke windows and graffitied a Wells Fargo bank and a Whole Foods. There was certainly a lot of rage. But planned violence against rich people the way Glenn Beck described? There were no reports of that. Still, Nathan’s feeling that things could boil over at any moment was real. Like a lot of occupiers, he said the people who were most likely to turn Occupy into a bloody riot were the police. Nathan Schneider: Police would, you know, be attacking people and there was so much, like, anger and reaction. It felt like a riot was always a few seconds away. One way to squash a movement is to convince the public that it’s violent and destructive. And that battle to control Occupy’s narrative was happening on a very public stage, with every videotaped arrest or scuffle being spun as either proof that Occupiers were potentially violent lawbreakers, or proof that the police and capitalist system were conspiring against the 99%. Another way to suppress a movement is much more invisible, and that was happening, too. There were forces at work quietly trying to bring the movement down from the inside, using a combination of surveillance, infiltration, and straight up sabotage. I'm Mila Atmos and, from Future Hindsight, this is OCCUPY: AN UNFINISHED UPRISING. Episode 4: They Walk Among Us Rick Lee: It's funny because at the very beginning, we should have just threw them outta the park. This is Detective Rick Lee. In 2011, he was an NYPD community affairs detective in Precinct 1, which includes the financial district and Zuccotti Park. He said the NYPD initially held back because it’s not city property. In fact, Zuccotti Park is what is called a privately owned public space, which means it’s owned by a private entity—in this case, a company called Brookfield Properties—but it’s legally required to remain open to the public. Rick Lee: Because there were no written legal notices as to the rules of Zuccotti Park, we as the police couldn't kick them out, nor could Brookfield press charges against them. So it was months of back and forth between lawyers, not only Brookfield, NYPD, but the Occupy lawyers. In the meantime, as a community affairs officer, Detective Lee’s job was to be the pleasant middleman. Rick Lee: We are the liaison between the precinct and the community. Normally when people demonstrate we have a meeting and we go over the rules of engagement, basically, and I would give them a permit. The occupiers didn't go through that process. Right – one important tenet of the whole movement was that you DON'T ask permission. You claim space and invite people to join you. Rick Lee: So when they occupied Zuccotti Park, I kind of was down there to find out what's going on, what is their angle, so to speak. He was out there poking around pretty much every day. And, this is important, he was a plainclothes detective, meaning he didn't wear a cop uniform. Rick Lee: I have always had the reputation of – no one realizes I'm a cop because of the way I dress. I'm big into clothes. Always have been. Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Brooks Brothers, J. Crew, stuff like that. I used to wear a lot of tweed. Occupy was mainly in the fall, in the winter. So, I didn't get to my linen suits with Occupy. In early October, a few weeks into the occupation, some occupiers realized Det. Lee was a police officer. They dubbed him “Hipster Cop.” On blogs and message boards, they shared photos of him in his cardigans and skinny ties, both making fun of him and warning one another not to get too cozy with him. Rick Lee: Every time I showed up at Zuccotti Park, someone would stop and start the people's mic saying, ‘Hello, Hipster Cop!’ GQ actually published an interview with Det. Lee, along with a photo of the 45-year-old posing at Zuccotti Park in a quilted jacket, pink shirt, and striped tie. In the interview, he described his look as more “country gentleman” than hipster, which I think is about right. It’s fair to say that, in the realm of invisible to visible tactics, this launched Detective Lee into the very visible category. He went from secretly gathering information to becoming good PR for the NYPD. Rick Lee: The New York Times picked it up and Associated Press picked it up because it was this kind of positive spin on the whole thing. Here's this cop that dresses well who’s down there kind of trying to relate to all the occupiers and that kind of thing. The NYPD truly needed some good PR after multiple videos of cops violently arresting peaceful protestors had traveled around the internet. As Detective Lee tells it, all the NYPD had been doing was trying to ensure the day-to-day safety of everyone involved. Rick Lee: We are there to protect the occupiers for their right to demonstrate, freedom of speech. We're also there to protect Brookfield Properties. We're there to protect the people walking on the sidewalks. Something else he said, though, showed that there were other motives for the large police presence at the park. Rick Lee: If you're gonna pay $5 million for a loft and you look out your window and there's Occupy in Zuccotti Park, you're gonna be like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Police are often criticized for focusing more on protecting wealthy people's quality of life and real estate values than poor people’s. It’s a consumer mentality – if you pay more, you should get more – for what is supposed to be a public service. Although Det. Lee had been outed as a cop, there were undercover officers who stayed more hidden. Rick Lee: NYPD intel had cops who went undercover in Zuccotti Park. It’s their job to basically find out what's, what's going on with this. Is it gonna be just a peaceful demonstration or are they looking to do violence? I’ll come back to that question of violence, but for now, let’s stay with the undercover cops who weren’t being scouted by GQ. Remember Manissa, the occupy supporter who halted a giant general assembly meeting to change the declaration’s wording about race? She had joined the POC group at Occupy and became a regular at the park. One day, she invited her brother to join her at a protest. Manissa Maharawal: He is, you know, an Indian man in New York City and so post 9/11, my brother started being stopped all the time in New York City by cops, just like straight up racial profiling after 9/11. So he has a lot of experience with cops, is what I'm trying to say. And he came to a protest and he was like, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ And I was like, ‘What's wrong?’ And he was like, ‘Too many cops here.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, there's a lot of cops policing the protest.’ And he was like, ‘No, there's too many cops in the crowd.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he was like, ‘There are cops everywhere in the crowd.’ And then, I was like, ‘Show me.’ They started looking around the crowd and he pointed someone out to her. Manissa Maharawal: My brother was like, cops always are wearing these like baggy jeans and like a sweatshirt or whatever. But they always get the shoes wrong. They're still wearing cop shoes. And cops like, you know, they can't wear sneakers on the job, so it's like an outfit that you would be wearing sneakers with only you're wearing weird black loafers. And he showed me and then I was like, Oh my God, you're right. There are cops everywhere. They had been there the whole time. That beautiful inclusiveness that had allowed Manissa to step in on her first day at Occupy and alter the declaration, the inclusiveness that welcomed anyone off the street to address the crowds of hundreds of people? Well, that day at the protest with her brother, Manissa realized that inclusiveness also meant infiltrators were welcomed in along with everyone else. Manissa Maharawal: This guy came up to us and he was an undercover cop. He was like, ‘Yeah, do you know where this protest is heading?’ I was like, ‘No, I don't know.’ My brother just, like, turned his back on him and somebody else, like, jumped in and was like, ‘Oh yeah, do you wanna get involved? Like, we're gonna do this and this and this.’ And I had this moment where I was like, Oh my God, like, there were a lot of, like, really earnest, like college kids who, like, really, really wanted other kinds of people to be involved. And so, like, a burley working class looking white guy, you're like, Oh, we wanna include you. And I was like, But that guy is a cop, ya know? It’s not surprising that there were undercover officers, but the level of law enforcement interest in Occupy was unusual. The true depth of the police infiltration and surveillance wouldn't be fully revealed until years later, when one organization got its hands on what would come to be called the spy files. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: Anyone who has studied the history of quote unquote law enforcement, the FBI, and police agencies in the United States in the context of progressive social justice organizing understands that law enforcement's role has historically been to oppress progressive movements, and it has done so quite actively and, frequently, quite viciously. This is Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a co-founder of Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a nonprofit legal organization. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: A lot of our work focuses at the intersection of First and Fourth Amendment rights, so support to movement organizing and activists around the United States, and also in conjunction with law enforcement repression against movements. Mara’s organization suspected that the FBI was tracking Occupy activists across the nation. And they were right. They filed records requests that eventually turned up more than 4,000 pages of heavily redacted government documents that showed that the FBI had been monitoring the Occupy movement since it was just a meme on the internet. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: What we found was that the FBI had begun coordinating, surveilling, monitoring, tracking Occupy activity a month before the first tent ever even went up in Zuccotti Park. So as early as August 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange, with banks, with Wall Street, to discuss potential Occupy Wall Street protests that weren't even going to manifest for another month. What was especially concerning to Mara was that the documents revealed a high level of coordination between the corporations that occupiers were criticizing and the FBI. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: Their focus was on meeting with business, meeting with the political objects of the protests. The financial services industry had an obvious interest in quieting Occupy activists who were criticizing their practices, their profits, and their outsized political influence. And they had a direct line to the FBI and DHS through something called the Domestic Security Alliance Council. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: – which the federal government describes as a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector. Today, membership in the Domestic Security Alliance Council is restricted to for-profit companies that quote "generate a minimum of $2 billion in annual U.S. revenue." End quote. Federal law enforcement agencies were treating the Occupy movement as a potential terrorist threat, but Mara believes the actual threat they were concerned about had nothing to do with violence. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: Any disruption to capitalism in the United States – to the way that the U.S. government, the businesses, and the corporations and corporate power in the United States function – is considered a threat to the structure of the United States. So it's not about, again, terrorism threats, threats of violence, it's about threats to economic structure and to corporate power in the United States. That's what these documents very clearly reveal. This coordination between corporate businesses and federal law enforcement was happening nationally. As occupations continued popping up in cities and towns around the U.S .. the FBI-joint-terrorism-taskforce-partners, including the NYPD, were identifying and surveilling specific activists. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: We do not have the names of those individuals, but people within those movements can identify themselves. They sure can. Here’s Sandy, the direct action team member who had helped plan the somewhat disastrous Brooklyn Bridge march: Sandy Nurse: I had cops come to my house. I had vans follow me around my block. Someone that I had started to see romantically when they got arrested, it turned out, they were on, like, a domestic joint terrorism watch force list. Marisa, the earnest midwestern anarchist who helped organize Occupy – she would later realize she was on an FBI list. And one of the livestreamers was told at some point that he was being investigated by the FBI, as well. According to Mara, law enforcement agents were doing more than just keeping tabs on people. They were borrowing from the playbook of COINTELPRO, the FBI's Cold War era Counter Intelligence Program. COINTELPRO sought to undermine the civil rights, Black liberation, and Puerto Rican independence movements by sowing division and disruption. Although it was shut down in the 1970s, Mara believes law enforcement used similar tactics against Occupy—working to weaken the movement from within by fostering distrust, paranoia, and conflict. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: The FBI Joint Terrorism Task forces coordination creates a way for the FBI to routinely use local police agencies or private sector operatives as a proxy force. And, in that way, infiltrators, undercover operatives routinely go into movement spaces and did throughout Occupy. And Occupy, because of its open nature, created a very fertile ground for infiltration and for disruption. It was that problem of structurelessness. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: When you have no accountability and just an endless open process – that's just a gift to the government and a gift to corporate infiltration and police infiltration. And it would appear that that was certainly taken advantage of. Sometimes, an occupier would throw out an idea or argue a point that seemed potentially destructive, but when everyone was trying so hard to be radically inclusive, and there were no set leaders, what do you do? Here’s Sandy again: Sandy Nurse: Somebody showed up and decided they wanted to lead a march. And we don't know who this person is. We don't know what everybody's agenda is coming in. We don't know who is a informant. We don't know anybody as far as we could throw them. And yet we are here talking about planning actions together. People were already sleeping poorly. There was already a lot of in-fighting. So when occupiers started to recognize that undercover cops and informants were in their midst, it fueled some serious paranoia. Was the occupier who argued every point at a meeting just annoying, or an informant trying to cause chaos? Some people wondered, only half-jokingly, whether the drummers in the drum circle were intentionally trying to sabotage the occupation. Nicole Carty: The fucking drum circle, like, was creating a huge political problem for us because everyone was complaining who lived near the occupation. Drumming aside, it truly was difficult to know who to trust. And, maybe worse, what if someone thought you were an informant. It was Det. Lee, Hipster Cop, of all people, who got into Nelini’s head. Nelini Stamp: Freaking hipster cop! Hipster cop had this, like this whole look, it's like, you know, he had a starter pack and like, you know, wore it and he was trying to really be nice to everybody. And I was like, I don't trust you cuz that's some psy-op stuff. I was like, that is some psychological warfare you're trying to do with coming out here, looking like a hipster, which many people in the park were. There were a lot of times he would just give me a head nod and that's like, that is psychological stuff. Where cuz then if he gives me a head nod, if I give him a head nod, I'm acknowledging it. I'm not gonna give him a head nod. But if I don't give him head nod, I could be hiding something for the rest of the people in the park. Like they did some real, real internal strife stuff. Her paranoia made sense. A month into the occupation, one Occupy participant accidentally revealed that he was a volunteer spy. He’d gotten access to an internal email list of occupiers and had been forwarding thousands of email exchanges not only to the NYPD and FBI, but also to Andrew Breitbart, the far right blogger. The paranoia crept up as the days wore on and the exhausted occupiers tried to run a small village, spread their anti-capitalist message, and protect themselves from arrests and police violence. But the energy was still high. And they were, shockingly, still there in the park, hundreds of them. Despite the behind the scenes efforts that seemed aimed at squashing the movement, city officials were publicly giving lip service to the rights of the occupiers to protest. Zuccotti Park. Day 25. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a Wall Street billionaire, came to visit the encampment. It was a Wednesday night in October when the mayor walked through the crowded park. One of the occupiers got him on camera. Mayor Michael Bloomberg: People that have a right in New York City to say, say what they wanna say and they have a right to not say what they don't want to say, and we'll protect you. Interviewer: What do you think of what they're saying? Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Uh, everybody's got a different opinion. Publicly, the mayor was certainly not a fan of Occupy Wall Street, but he had been tolerant. He had not instructed the NYPD to forcefully evict the four hundred or so people who were sleeping in the park every night. And at one point, he even said they could stay as long as they liked. It seemed clear that he didn’t want to become an enemy to the increasingly large numbers of people who supported the Occupy movement both in New York City and around the nation. In his own city, 67 percent of residents agreed with the Occupy activists. And copy cat encampments and demonstrations had sprung up in hundreds of cities across the country. A violent eviction would have been a PR nightmare for both the city and Brookfield Place, which owned both the park and several major office towers in the financial district. So they tried a more roundabout tactic to get them out. Before Mayor Bloomberg left the park that night, he announced that occupiers would have to temporarily move to make way for cleaning crews. CBS News described the official plan: Reporter: Police Commissioner Kelly says Brookfield Properties personnel will power wash Zuccotti Park a third at a time, and for four hours, the protesters from that section will be moved out. Commissioner Kelly: After it's cleaned, they'll be able to come back, but they won't be able to bring back the gear, the equipment, sleeping bags. The NYPD said they would move the occupiers out of the park if they didn’t make way for the cleaning crews. Framing it as a public health issue made it seem all very reasonable, but occupiers immediately believed that it was a trick. They knew that there were plenty of powerful people – men who had Bloomberg’s ear – who wanted them gone. After all, they had marched to several billionaires’ homes shouting that they should pay their fair share of taxes. They had protested in front of Wall Street banks. They had criticized the NYPD. They didn’t trust the city’s reassurance that they’d be allowed back in after the park was cleaned. Here’s Sandy: Sandy Nurse: We said, ‘Why do you need to clean the park? We have our own sanitation working group. So we'll clean it.’ And the whole park mobilized. I mean, it was actually a beautiful day. The next day, hundreds of supporters arrived to help the occupiers clean things up. Here's Nelini: Nelini Stamp: It's like clean up, clean up everybody everywhere. There was like, everybody's decided to clean up, cuz it was true too. Nelini says the park was kind of gross. There were cigarette butts everywhere, dirty laundry, who knows what else. Chris, who was in the kitchen working group, put people to work. Chris G: I just snapped in and I was just like, ‘Okay! Throw any dumpstered bread away, any dumpstered food! We need to wipe this down. You know, here's some bleach, here's some paper towels, you know, we gotta do this.’ Everything got moved. Everyone is just like (woosh woosh woosh woosh) you know, like we're all grabbing brooms and stuff like that. People literally scrubbed the concrete with bleach. In their newly sanitized living quarters, the occupiers prepared to hold ground when the official cleaning crews were scheduled to arrive at 7 a.m. Before the sun had fully risen, the enormous crowd gathered for a general assembly meeting. Occupier & (people's mic): Before I start, (before I start, before I start) I have one question for you all. (I have one question for you all. I have one question for you all.) Who here is ready to defend our park?! (Cheers) About 1,500 people surrounded the park. The message was: if you want to evict the occupiers, you'll have to go through us. And that included a lot of elected officials. Nelini Stamp: There's a photo of me and literally it is the current Lieutenant governor, the future mayor, Bill de Blasio showed up. Like, it's Tish James, it's half the city council behind me! Two state legislators! And the cops were trying to roll up on these people. They waited for the NYPD to show up, but then there was an announcement from the interior of the park. Nelini read a statement from her phone. Nelini Stamp & (people's mic): We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park. (We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park. We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park.) Brookfield Properties that they're postponing their cleaning. (Cheering) Collective action had worked! The occupiers felt that they’d out-maneuvered their enemies. They celebrated with a haphazard march through the financial district, brooms in hand. A brass band played “We Shall Overcome.” The roving crowds of protestors wound through the narrow streets as police tried to keep them on the sidewalks. It was a little chaotic, but mostly peaceful. Until – Police officer: Back up! back up! An officer on a scooter came racing into the crowd, honking, and then stopped suddenly. In several videos of the event, you see a man on the ground next to the scooter, screaming and writhing in pain. The officer got off the scooter and tried to shoo the crowd away. Then another officer dragged the man on the ground away from the scooter, flipped him around violently, and cuffed him. The NYPD said that the man was faking it; that he had put his legs under the scooter to look like he'd been run over. At least two other people backed up that story, though one of them said the protester had been hit, but not run over. In any case, the police charged the man with felony criminal mischief, obstructing judicial administration, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. So whose story would the public believe? The NYPD and Detective Lee? Rick Lee: There's not a cop that would purposely run over somebody. But there were a lot of occupiers who were agitators who wanted this defining moment of a cop running over an occupier. And it would get spun. ‘Look what the cops are doing. They're running us over,’ you know. They would throw themselves under scooters, that I saw at a couple of demonstrations. Or the occupiers, who said police got increasingly violent as the occupation wore on. Nelini Stamp: The escalation of police activity was, like, really, really wild. I swear to God somebody gave people permission to just go buck on us. Priscilla Grim: I saw them, like, round up all these people and just start, like, beating them up. Brendan Burke: They clubbed a young kid, homeless kid. He's like blood down his face, he's crying, you know, it's crazy. The scooter incident that morning was yet another moment that turned into a public perception battle over whose story was more believable. There had been those young women at the Union Square protest who were pepper sprayed by Officer Tony Balony. Were they actually breaking the law? Or were they kettled by the police and pepper sprayed for no reason? During the Brooklyn Bridge march, had anarchists ignored police orders and unlawfully blocked a roadway? Or had the NYPD intentionally led them onto the bridge and trapped them there to arrest them? And now, had a cop recklessly driven into a crowd and run over a peaceful protestor? Or had a conniving agitator faked an injury to make the police look bad? There was animosity between police and Occupy activists at demonstrations all over the country. Over the course of the Occupy movement, more than 7,000 activists were arrested around the nation. Some of those police actions resulted in injuries. The most notable police violence happened during an Oakland, California Occupy event. Police there fired tear gas canisters into the crowd, arrested about 100 people, and severely injured an Iraq war veteran, disabling him for life. But all that would come out later. At this moment in New York, Occupy activists began walking north. Three miles away, a Day of Global Action demonstration was starting in the bright and flashy tourist heart of Manhattan, Times Square. Nicole Carty: It was like everyone from all over Manhattan was just converging towards Times Square. And then you're in Times Square and everyone who's in Times Square is there because of Occupy. This is Nicole Carty, the young black woman from Atlanta who, in our last episode, broke down the sometimes hypocritical power dynamics within Occupy. Times Square was packed with people chanting, drumming, and waving their signs. And then a news ticker on the side of a building caught the crowd’s attention. It said “Occupy Goes Global.” Occupy demonstrations were happening across 6 continents. Chants: The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! Nicole Carty: It felt like the world was coming to a halt around this huge issue and we were winning. Crowd: Happy new world! Nicole Carty: It was the highest moment of triumph in the entire occupation that day. It felt like we were completely unstoppable. Although the occupiers were celebrating their victories and continuing to gather support, back at Zuccotti Park, they felt more and more under attack. And then, a new wave of arrivals added another set of challenges. Kate: Every couple of days I would encounter somebody and they would ask, ‘Oh, where can I get this or that? Can I find food?’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, it's over there. Where are you coming from?’ And they'd say, ‘Oh, the police dropped me off.’ This is Kate, who had seen her friend pepper sprayed by Officer Tony Baloney. She’d become a regular at the park. Kate: The NYPD couldn't really fight what was happening in the park because of that private/public designation of the space. And so they tried their very hardest to just make it collapse from the inside. And what they would do is when they would pick people up on the street for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something, they would drop them off in the park and say, ‘Oh, you need a, you need a hot meal? You need a blanket? You need a coat? Go down to Zuccotti Park.’ And so we wound up having a lot of people that needed more care than we could offer them. The NYPD denied claims that it was bringing drunk people or those experiencing homelessness to Zuccotti Park, despite a report from at least two men who said the police told them to take their drinking to the park. Whatever the official claims were, Nelini, like all the other occupiers we asked about this, said the new arrivals came right out and said they were being herded to Zuccotti Park by the police. And it was becoming a problem. Nelini Stamp: Folks who were houseless that they were trying to get off the street, folks who were dealing with some drug problems that they didn't wanna deal with, they would send them to park and say there’s free food. And I'm not saying that, like, that makes conditions unsafe, but we were not prepared to handle – I mean, this is when like some people, you know, they call us out on our shit. It's like, you wanna build alternatives? Well, show me, you could build alternatives. It’s no surprise that a group of mostly 20-something activists living in a tiny park couldn’t manage the problems of mental illness and addiction any better than the city could. There wasn’t enough support or structure, and the rules they did have started to break down. Organizers had posted signs around the park with a few basic rules: don’t trample the flowerbeds. Please recycle. Quiet hours start at 10 p.m. No alcohol and drug use. Nelini Stamp: There was supposed to be no drinking, no drugs, no all this stuff. And then people would be like, ‘Why can't I drink? I thought this was a free space.’ And I just like, I love to drink, just to be very clear. I just am not trying to be in a public, you know, like, community building thing. It wasn't just like, oh, you're deprived of having a drink. It's like, go drink then come back. That's fine. But like actively with bottles and stuff like that, like, it just felt like just, I thought I was like, something's gonna happen. Like something's gonna happen. And, like, the park started to feel more and more unsafe. As people with mental health issues and addictions arrived, the weather was getting colder. Tents had been forbidden – it’s against city law to camp in public spaces– so occupiers had been using sleeping bags and tarps. But in mid-October the occupiers tested a loophole. A tent went up, then another and another. When the police didn’t take them down, it felt like another win to some occupiers. But not everyone. Brendan Burke: I'm sorry, may I say one thing about the tents? I believe that the police didn't mind that the tents went up, someone very intelligent upstairs said, let them build tents because this is when problems are gonna happen. They'll take care of themselves. Watch. Because as soon as we isolate from each other, bad shit happens and that's what's gonna happen. And they were right. They were right. That’s next time on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING.