Latest / OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising / Episode 5: The Question of Safety

Transcript

Episode 5: The Question of Safety · OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising

• Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising Episode 5: The Question of Safety Previously on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING: Brooke Lehman: Literally anyone could walk in off the street and put theirselves on the line and speak to thousands of people. Nicole Carty: It was a lot of dudes. Like Occupy had a total dude problem. They didn't listen to women really. You know, like, they just would talk to themselves. 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, like, the park started to feel more and more unsafe. This episode includes mentions of sexual violence. Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where to listen. Kara Demetropoulos: I'm not exaggerating when I say when I look back on my life that was the most I think excited I've ever been. This is Kara Demetropoulos. In the fall of 2011, she was living in Alabama waiting tables and recovering from an opioid addiction. She had just gotten out of rehab when she decided to join the occupiers in New York. The night before she left she had a kind of vision. Kara Demetropoulos: All these like beams of light that were people that were coming from all of their hometowns or various you know places that they'd lived and experiences that they'd had and they were all kind of into this beautiful mecca almost that was Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park. Kara took a train to New York City and walked into Zuccotti Park with just a duffle bag and $75. Kara Demetropoulos: The place was like a zoo because there were so many reporters and so many gawkers that were there just to kind of see what was going on. Celebrities were randomly walking through the park at all times. She’d arrived four weeks into the occupation. The park was incredibly full and making national news every day. Kara Demetropoulos: There was almost this territorial vibe where it was like ‘Hey I've been here for a while; you don't sleep here, I sleep here’ you know. I just got this sleeping bag from the free store and curled up next to a trash can. And yet I slept like a baby. She learned a lot about wealth inequality, but she wasn't so interested in the hours-long meetings about strategy or how to organize; instead, she mostly hung out and smoked cigarettes, went dumpster diving with fellow occupiers, wandered the city, and joined the marches. Kara Demetropoulos: For me, it was like equal parts self exploration and being a part of something really big and cool. And it was possible because Occupy took care of her day-to-day needs. The kitchen provided three meals a day. A nearby church and a few fast-food restaurants served as the occupation's bathrooms until, 48 days into the occupation, they finally got Porta Potties. Occasionally, supporters who lived in the city would take groups of occupiers to their apartments for hot showers. It was all going well for Kara until the weather turned. Reporter: Protesters are bracing themselves for the first cold snap of their six-week demonstration. Reporter: Right now the temperature is 43 degrees. The wind chill is making it feel like 37 and forecasters are calling for more than an inch of snow in some parts of New York City later today. The news anchors suggested that the authorities and some surrounding businesses were hoping that the freezing weather would force occupiers to clear out. It didn’t help that the FDNY confiscated six generators that had been powering heaters. Kara huddled in her sleeping bag next to a friend – a guy – who had also come up from Alabama. As the wind picked up, they fell asleep with a tarp over them. And then. Kara Demetropoulos: We woke up freezing and we were like ‘Oh my God, it's actually snowing.’ They went to a 24-hour McDonald's to stay warm. Other occupiers were being treated for hypothermia in the medical tent. Some were leaving the park. Kara and her friend sat in the McDonald’s for hours, sharing fries and trying to figure out their next move. Kara Demetropoulos: The park was soaked. Everything was wet and we happened to meet this guy who said ‘Oh yeah I'm staying over at Zuccotti and, uh, I have a tent so if you guys wanna help me, like, towel it out, make it dry, you guys can sleep there tonight.’ We're like ‘sweet’ cuz we haven't gotten good sleep in a day. Kara, along with her friend and another male friend, agreed to share a tent with this new person. Because she was with two men she knew and trusted, she felt safe joining the new guy in his tent. Kara Demetropoulos: I was sleeping next to the guy who had offered the tent and I woke up to him with his hand under my shirt groping me and I just kind of popped awake and I was like ‘What the fuck.’ And just jumped up and jumped out of the tent and my friends followed me and I was like running, and they were like ‘Hey are you okay?’ And I was like, ‘No that guy, I think that guy was feeling me up’ you know, and they were like, ‘Oh my God well we gotta get outta here.’ It was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. Of course, safety was never guaranteed at the park. But when police started letting occupiers put up tents, the incidents of sexual assault spiked. The question was: how would the movement respond? Was it possible to protect people and hold perpetrators accountable without damaging the movement itself? This is a question that seems to come up in every movement. No matter how idealistic a movement is, its members are still products of the culture they come from. And, unfortunately, sexual harassment and violence is part of our culture. So, sure, Occupy was trying to replace an exploitative capitalist system — but would it also be able to stop its own members from harming one another? I'm Mila Atmos and from Future Hindsight this is OCCUPY: AN UNFINISHED UPRISING. Episode 5: The Question of Safety When Kara was assaulted, it was 6 weeks into the occupation. We’ll come back to her – but don't worry, she did end up finding a safer place to sleep. But first, I want to rewind the clock a little bit because, since the beginning, there were Occupy activists who had been trying to make the park as safe as possible. People like Suzy Exposito. Suzy Exposito: I think that any organizer, no matter what cause you work around, you always have to factor in the potential of violence, especially interpersonal violence. That is a no brainer. Suzy was already a fixture at the park when Kara arrived. She had recently graduated college with $70,000 in student loan debt, but she hadn't been able to find a job in her field so she was working as a nanny for a Manhattan family. Suzy Exposito: I could barely hold my head above water. So when Occupy Wall Street came about, I was like, ‘Oh hell yeah. Like, I need to yell about this.’ And, while she was excited about Occupy, she was not willing to sleep in the park. Suzy Exposito: As a woman, as a survivor, I just, like, couldn't bring myself to, um, sleep at the camp. After work, she'd come to Occupy’s general assembly meetings and helped out wherever she could. There were working groups devoted to labor unions and alternative banking, discussions about wealth inequality and direct democracy – all the things that felt important to tackle if you wanted to change the world. But Suzy found herself more focused on the way people inside the park were behaving after an experience during the very first week of the occupation. Suzy Exposito: I was just hanging out with my friend one afternoon in the park and we were standing by the drum circle and just noticing this guy like, you know, slyly make his way over to this girl who, who didn't realize that he was dancing behind her. And then eventually he started dancing up on her. And me and my friend just looked at each other. We were like, ‘Ew. Oh no.’ He's like, starting to dry hump this girl in front of us. They did the classic girl code thing where they pretended to know the young woman who was getting this unwanted male attention. Suzy Exposito: We just kind of walked up to her like, you know, she was our friend and just wanted to see if she was doing all right. And in that, you know, we also got the guy to back off a little bit because it turns out that she didn’t know him and she was really creeped out and I just thought to myself, okay, this is probably happening like 10, 20 times over in the park, you know, where men are, like, vastly outnumbering women. Suzy was right. Just like in the outside world, sexist behavior was pretty rampant at Zuccotti. Remember, this was pre-MeToo. Lots of men didn't think twice about objectifying young women's bodies. They gawked, made comments, gave unwanted hugs. One guy even made a quote "hot chicks of Occupy" blog, where people – mostly men, I assume – could submit photos of women they thought were attractive. It was a slap in the face for Suzy and many other women who were drawn in by the idealism of Occupy. Suzy Exposito: I had a couple of run-ins with guys catcalling me in the park, and I'm like, What are you doing here? Like, I know why I'm here and I know why a lot of other women are here. We're here because we're also affected by this. You know, some of us are, like, trying to support families and we're drowning in student debt. And the way that these men would, like, treat me and my friends, what it was telling us is that we, we didn't count, you know? That the movement wasn't for us. And I don't think a lot of people think about that. What catcalling does, what sexual harassment does is, it ultimately dehumanizes you. It shows the person, like, your voice is not warranted here. You're just an object. So it was really disheartening to me, you know, and then hearing other friends stories about people being creepy in the park, like invasive, pushy, touchy feely, those kinds of things, just invasions of personal boundaries, were happening quite a bit. And so that's when me and my friends decided to start what we called the Safer Spaces Committee. Multiple people we interviewed echoed Suzy's belief that the sexual violence in the park wasn't a product of Occupy, specifically. It’s just what happened when hundreds of people who were socialized in the existing world were packed together. But that didn't mean it was inevitable. The Safer Spaces Committee hoped to change the norms about what was considered acceptable behavior. At a general assembly meeting in late September, one of the Safer Spaces Committee's founding members stood next to Suzy and explained to the crowd why the committee was needed. Occupier & (People’s Mic): I support safe spaces (I support safe spaces) because America is already a safe space (because America is already a safe space) for white (for white) middle class, heterosexual (middle class, heterosexual) cisgendered males (cisgender males) and I don't fit under (I don't fit under) all of those categories (all of those categories). The Safer Spaces committee goal was to quote “make Occupy Wall Street an anti-oppressive place for everyone including, but not limited to: women, people of color, elders, youth, and people who are queer, trans, gender non-conforming, differently-abled, undocumented, immigrants, houseless, and/or those with less structural power and privilege.” End quote. They started offering trainings on safety and consent. Safer Spaces committee members also walked around the park wearing pink armbands to indicate they were the point people for complaints about sexual assault, or any kind of oppressive language or behavior. They invited people to meetings to share their experiences. And plenty of people did. Suzy Exposito: I found that a lot of the battle was really, like, affirming people. People would come to meetings sometimes and be like, ‘I was grabbed by this man in the park and I'm really upset about it.’ And we would basically workshop with them like, ‘Okay, how are you feeling right now? What do you think is the best course of action? Or like, what do you need in this moment?’ They decided they needed to create community agreements. Basically, rules that everyone in the park would have to agree to in order to stay there. They asked people to break into small groups to discuss safety. The guiding questions were: What does safety mean to you? What are safety concerns for you and others at this space? What agreements can we make as a community to ensure safety? They were using the direct democracy process to create their community agreements which meant it was also very slow going. More urgent things kept coming up. But then a new development changed the whole energy of the park and made it harder to keep people safe. Zak Solomon: Initially they, the police, were extremely strict on this, like, ‘No tents!’ They're like, ‘You can't have any tents.’ This is Zak Solomon. He worked with what was basically Occupy's internal security team. Zak Solomon: I'm six foot 4, 240 pounds. I was a middle linebacker. I, I just kind of carry that energy with me. Zak said things felt more controlled when the police were enforcing a “no tents” policy, which was the case for about the first month of the occupation. The NYPD did allow them to cover their equipment with tarps, but that was it for a while. Then, after a short stand-off, they allowed the medical team to keep a tent up to provide shelter to people receiving medical treatment. And then came the Jewish holiday Sukkot, which commemorates the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt. A traditional part of the celebration is to put up shelter, or sukkah – basically a tent. A group called Jews for Racial and Economic Justice came to Zuccotti Park to do exactly that. [Jewish Sukkot prayer] The crowd participated in a prayer as they erected their sukkah which, in this case, was a small navy colored pop up tent. The police let them keep it there. Here’s Zak again: Zak Solomon: And then one tent after another just started popping up and they just stopped enforcing it. Everyone was excited about the tents, initially. We all wanted a place to sleep. It was getting cold. We wanted privacy. We'd been literally living in a park with a thousand people, like a tiny little space for a month. People weren't showering, shaving, like it was getting intense. Soon, the sleeping bags with tarps over them were replaced by a sea of tents of all colors. Zak Solomon: Nobody foresaw what it would lead to. I don't even think the police did. I think it was a happy accident for them, too. They, like, stumbled into this brilliant strategic move. Brendan Burke, one of the men who comprised Occupy's security team, agreed with Zak’s assessment. Brendan Burke: 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 the real, 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. Both Zak and Brendan described how the energy shifted when tents started going up. Before tents, the park had felt like an open bazaar almost. Everything was out in the open. There was an electricity in the air that was palpable. Zak again: Zak Solomon: We thought we were gonna be there forever. Once you start hearing about occupation popped up here and here and here and here, and they're replicating this. And we started doing things, coordinated actions of, like, Boston and D.C. and you know, we got Archbishop Desmond Tutu writing letters and we're having, you know, direct action planning sessions with Cornell West and you're just like, ‘Oh, this is it! This is the universe kind of opening up, like, this is where we turn the tide.’ And to be a part of that, it was exhilarating and everything else takes a backseat: sleep, hygiene, calls to your mom, like whatever else is going on. Sleeping outdoors on cardboard with few comforts — those limitations actually helped people stay focused. Once there were private spaces where people could basically set up homes, things started to feel more stagnate and less community-minded. Brendan: Brendan Burke: They took the visibility away, the approachability of it as a place of people, and it started becoming exclusive. Everyone's separate and they're in their tents. And I just, I didn't like it. I didn't like it. So, the tents were up, for better or worse. Although the Safer Spaces Committee and the security team worked together, they had very different styles. Safer Spaces tried to hash out community agreements and talk through concerns. The security team had a slightly different approach. I should say, though, that they didn't actually call themselves "security.” Brendan Burke: When we were asked to name the working group, I called it deescalation. I didn't wanna call it security because I don't want people to think I can tell you what to do, but I can tell you is that if something goes off the rails, I will be there and I will do my best to help you manage the situation and we can synthesize a good outcome together. The security crew was about 9 or 10 guys. Big dudes. Brendan Burke: It just kind of attracted a certain kind of guy – not a meathead, but a guy that could throw down, but didn't wanna throw down, but could throw down and was also like an honest person that wanted to help that wanted to do this. Brendan, himself, is a burly Irish Catholic man. He’d worked security for punk bands. He’s also an actor who plays a certain kind of part. Brendan Burke: I usually play cops and bad guys. Um, you know, that, ‘get on the ground!’ or ‘You're not gonna live to see tomorrow’ and then shoot them. Most days, Breandan was in the park from 6:30 in the morning until 10 or 11 p.m. Then the overnight crew came in. Every now and then he'd have to take a few days off to work. He had a gig driving trucks at the time. The objective, Brendan says, was to keep things calm in the park so the cops had no reason to bust in. From the beginning, the police had pretty much stayed on the periphery of Zuccotti, not interfering with what was happening inside the park. The arrests and police violence tended to happen when occupiers left the park to march or protest. A lot of the occupiers were understandably hesitant to report anything to the police force that had been arresting them, pepper spraying them, infiltrating them and, seemingly, directing people experiencing homelessness, mental illnesses, and addiction into the park. So Brendan and the de-escalation team tried to deal with the problems internally. Unfortunately, there was plenty of drama in one particular area of the park. Brendan Burke: The homeless kids with all the face tattoos are there. All the grimies are down there. The kids are taking drugs are down there. Drinking cough medicine all day, they're down there. So there was constantly dust ups happening down there. Kids throwing stuff at each other, starting to take each other's laptops or, or phones, and then fighting and wrestling and you just go in there, just pull 'em off each other and you're ‘oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Break it up. Everything's cool. We love each other. We're in the movement.’ It's really basic crowd management on a, uh, dude basis. Like, yo, calm down, bro. We have to bounce you. You could get bounced for any behavior that would give the cops a reason to come in. Brendan Burke: Putting your hands on someone. Causing a disturbance. Weapons brandishing and crazy wasted behavior. Sometimes Brendan would approach things like a friend, just trying to calm another friend down. And sometimes he was more forceful. He described an interaction with a particularly disruptive guy – a young man who was known to the team as a drug user who regularly caused trouble. He'd been throwing things at people. So Brendan went up to him and said: Brendan Burke: ‘I will fucking kill you. I will make you disappear. No one will ever, ever look for you, bro.’ I almost made him cry. And then I was like, ‘You gonna fucking calm down or what?’ And he was like, you know, just got upset. So I gave him a hug and then I noticed his tattoo. Brendan showed everyone the young man's tattoo, got them all to shower him with compliments about it. Brendan Burke: I said, ‘It's the best tattoo in New York City.’ And then – Brendan Burke: He never gave a problem again. They were able to address conflict as it was happening, but that’s about it. The de-escalation team was not the police. They weren’t going to lock anyone up. And they certainly weren't going to investigate crimes. Brendan Burke: I had kids approach me, ‘Someone stole my laptop.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ ‘Well, what are you gonna do about it?’ ‘What am I gonna do about it? I'm not gonna do shit about it. I don't give a shit that someone stole your laptop.’ And they're like, ‘Oh my God, you're terrible. You're fucking’ blah. And I'm like, ‘Where do you think we are? We're in the middle of the street! This isn't an organization! We're outside in New York City. Yo, there are mad, crazy people walking through here once in a while. So just keep your eyes open.’ When it came to sexual assault, that was also beyond what Brendan felt they could handle on their own. Brendan Burke: There's only two women that approach me directly. Then I told them the same thing. ‘We need to go to the police. I'll go with you. Cuz if you're being raped or you were being assaulted, let's report it. And I will go with you to the police.’ They didn't wanna do that. So I wasn't pushing them. I was just like, ‘I will go with you if you're afraid.’ One woman who did report a sexual assault to the police said she felt "more victimized" by the police "than by the assaulter." Apparently, the police had made her wait for hours and then told her the assault was her fault for sleeping outside. In another case, the security team kicked out a kitchen volunteer after he was accused of groping one young woman. Zak Solomon: He basically kept coming back to the park and he wouldn't leave. We kept telling him, like, ‘You have to leave, like you can't be here anymore.’ But it was tough to keep him out. Zak Solomon: We were in this totally free space where it's like everybody can come and go. You could enter from any side and that was part of its beauty and it allowed a lot of people to engage and become a part of it that wouldn't otherwise cuz there were no barriers to access. But it also was a huge vulnerability and one that we didn't patch up in time. And it directly resulted in the unraveling of the movement and of the space. The man returned and raped another young woman. The de-escalation team ended up surrounding him and handing him off to the police at the periphery of the park. Zak Solomon: We had some protocols in place for how to forcibly remove someone from the space. You know, there was a six-step deescalation protocol. You communicate with someone first, and then you go through this process, where the ultimate step is you have, let's say six people surrounding someone, encircling them so they're not making physical contact and then they escort them out of the space. All of this takes us back to Kara, the 20-year-old from Alabama who had been groped by a man in a tent the night it started snowing. She did not alert the de-escalation team, and she didn’t report it to the police. But she did tell one person she wishes she didn’t. After Kara was groped and ran out of the park, she wandered around the city with her two friends looking for somewhere else to sleep. They ended up sleeping on a rooftop. Eventually, Kara returned to the park, where she got her own tent. The man who had groped her was still in the park, too, but she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Kara Demetropoulos: My internal moral compass says err on the side of ‘This guy made a mistake and I don't wanna deprive him of his ability to sleep here.’ At 20 years old I was much more inclined to be like ‘Well, maybe I was kind of flirty when I asked him if I could sleep in his tent to shield me from the elements,’ you know? And now I'm like ‘Mm no, that's not an excuse to stick your hand up someone's shirt just because they're trying to find refuge from snow.’ You know, that was before we had a national dialogue regarding consent, too. A week after the incident, Kara was in the park talking with another woman about a new initiative by the Safer Spaces committee. They were putting up two big, military grade, winterized tents that would be only for women. Kara was saying to this fellow occupier that she thought it was a good idea. Kara Demetropoulos: I was like ‘Yeah, you know, I support this because I had a negative experience.’ And all of a sudden this, like, reporter showed up out of nowhere and he was like, ‘Excuse me, did I hear you just say that you had a negative experience here with, uh, someone molested you?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, actually I did.’ And he said, ‘Oh, well, I'm doing a piece on uh on the new women's tent and we'd love to get your opinion on this new feature at Occupy.’ And so I said, ‘Sure.’ And I talked to this reporter and he was smooth and he was sweet and he was very like, ‘Yeah, I'm totally on your side. I love everything you're saying.’ And so I, I told him that, you know, the situation that happened to me was not all that aggressive, I mean it wasn’t ideal, but it certainly wasn't something that had caused me to feel unsafe at the park. I had still come back and slept here and that I thought security was doing a good job. I'd seen security diffuse a couple situations at that point and they had done it very politely and very reasonably. They were very kind. The reporter was from the New York Post, which had published several pretty negative stories about the Occupy movement already. The next morning, the story came out. It started like this, quote: "It’s a safe house from the sex fiends. Zuccotti Park has become so overrun by sexual predators attacking women in the night that organizers felt compelled to set up a female-only sleeping tent today to keep the sickos away." End quote. Kara Demetropoulos: I was shocked when the article came out. They were like ‘Zuccotti Park is a hotbed for sexual predators. Just hear this girl's story!’ That was just, I mean, in my opinion, that was shady journalism. All of this brought up how a movement or organization responds to its internal problems. How do you keep people safe, and hold people accountable, not silence people, without undermining the larger cause? We still don’t know how to adequately respond to allegations of sexual violence, but there is a common reaction. To blame the victim. Kara started receiving Facebook messages about the New York Post story from other occupiers – a couple notes of support, but most of the messages were angry. Kara Demetropoulos: Definitely 10 or more messages from people that were irritated that I had said anything at all. I got a message that was like ‘go back to Alabama, you dumb hick. Like, what are you even doing here?’ Or, like, ‘How dare you make the movement look bad.’ One person trolled her for several weeks. Kara had never felt like she belonged anywhere until she arrived in Zuccotti Park. Being part of the movement was the happiest she’d ever been. Until now. Kara Demetropoulos: To all of a sudden be hit with, like, a barrage of negativity from people that were like ‘You don't belong here’ – I felt like, ‘well shit, where do I belong then?’ And I had people from back home who – you know my family obviously they're worried about me I'm 20 years old I just packed a bag, I just got out of rehab, and I'm like I'm going to Occupy Wall Street in New York City and sleeping on the street, Ha ha, you know, like I'm gonna be fine.’ And then within like three weeks they're like ‘Oh and now there's an article about Kara being a sexual assault victim.’ Awesome. Things were dicey. By this point it was November. The weather was cold and getting colder. In-fighting continued. The energy was waning. A number of the regulars developed what they called the Occu-cough, which was pneumonia. Slowly, the numbers of occupiers who slept at the park started dropping. Even some of the hard core people, now burnt out and exhausted, were only showing up during the daytime. Including Nelini. Nelini Stamp: When I started to feel kind of unsafe I started to be like – I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna go. There was this, the stayers and like the goers, like there was this divide where people who were staying there were like ‘[what] the hell, like we're staying here and we're keeping this space physically.’ And the goers were like, ‘oh, well I need to, like, balance my life or whatever.’ And there was, like, a lot of different dynamics on it. People who had housing, people who didn't have housing, people who had the privilege to just leave or whatever. Some activists started questioning whether Occupy needed a physical space, or if the ideas of Occupy Wall Street, now that they’d taken hold, would be powerful enough to continue on without the camp in Zuccotti Park. Here’s Brendan: Brendan Burke: What's the logical extent of this? Are we gonna stay here through January, February, March? Can we stay here for two years? Can we really deal with the amount of human crisis that could happen in here as it gets more crowded and more, I mean, what's the end result? And Nelini: Nelini Stamp: We can still have a general assembly every day. We can still have direct actions every Saturday, but what if nobody stays overnight? What if we get rid of that part? Because we're trying, like, what – are we gonna take this forever until the government falls? Like, I don't think so. And I just felt like we were keeping the park just to keep it. Like, I remember honestly hoping that the cops were gonna kick us out at the end. And, well, that’s pretty much what happened. By mid-November, Kara had been at the park for about a month. She had a routine, which included a nighttime dumpster diving expedition for salvageable food. Kara Demetropoulos: Like, you know, bagels and pastries and stuff and just bring him to the kitchen in the morning for breakfast. So we were doing that. And we were on our way back to Zuccotti and I saw a mass of people running away from the park. After almost two months, the police had made a move. It was the middle of the night, and, without warning, there were suddenly hundreds of police surrounding the park. Kara Demetropoulos: There were, like, sirens coming. People were just running and, like, screaming And they were like, ‘They're raiding the park They're raiding the park!’ Kara was at a crossroads. She could walk away, or she could enter the park and face the police crackdown with the other 100 or so occupiers. Kara Demetropoulos: I gotta see this through the end. So I ran back in. She found one of her friends from Alabama and they huddled together. Kara Demetropoulos: We're ready! Right? Like we're gonna hold this down. And the two of us were on like literally the front line. The cops are like right in front of us and there's like a wall of cops, uh, in riot gear. They've got the you know the shields and they're fully weaponized and we look like a bunch of hippies. Someone was playing guitar – John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Someone else was chaining themselves to the kitchen equipment so the police couldn’t drag them away. The call for support went out on the livestream. Lorenzo Serna: We're being raided at Occupy Wall Street. Please, uh, start tweeting as many people as possible and letting folks know, uh, Occupy Wall Street is being raided. The police are coming in from all sides of the park. It was a total surprise to even the most dedicated, plugged-in activists. Marisa, one of the anarchists who had organized it from the beginning – she was home sick with pneumonia, but she put herself in a cab and headed toward the financial district. Nelini Stamp, who had gotten union support for Occupy – she was celebrating her birthday at home when she heard what was happening. Sandy Nurse from the direct action working group; Chris G., who had worked the kitchen; Nicole Carty, from the facilitation group – they were all racing toward Zuccotti Park, along with hundreds of others. Occupy Wall Street wasn’t going to go down quietly. That’s next time on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING.