Over 50 protesters [Ed: as of 2 p.m. today the count is 97] were arrested yesterday during a series of demonstrations organized by Occupy Wall Street to commemorate May Day. Prematurely dubbed a "dud" by Reuters, the long series of events that spanned many hours and much of the city itself culminated in tens of thousands of union members, students, and other demonstrators marching at a snail's pace down Broadway. Later that night, several thousand protesters massed at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in Lower Manhattan before the police forced them to disperse or face arrest.
The causes of yesterday's arrests varied wildly: some protesters on the Wildcat March in the early afternoon were detained as they destroyed property, while others were bloodied for setting foot off the sidewalk. The police also continued the practice of plucking demonstrators out of a crowd and arresting them seemingly at random.
It appeared as if the NYPD planned to conduct mass arrests after thousands of protesters, still riding the euphoria of the march down Broadway, held a massive General Assembly at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza past its 10 p.m. curfew. But hundreds of officers forcefully cleared the park, causing the demonstrators to scatter throughout the Financial District on smaller marches that were in turn broken up by police barricades and systematic arrests.
Several hours earlier, the mood in Union Square during the performances of Tom Morello, Das Racist, Dan Deacon, Immortal Technique and a union-affiliated choir was exceedingly festive. "No one really knew who I was or where my music was coming from, but they all seemed to enjoy it," Deacon told us. "It was pretty cool to see so many people dancing and coming together. Just performing while that choir was sitting behind me, it was kind of surreal and wonderful."
The march from Union Square to Beaver Street was supposed to end by 7 p.m., but at 6 there were still thousands of protesters stuck in Union Square behind a byzantine labyrinth of NYPD barricades. While it's often routine for police to barricade a parade route, police forced the protesters to backtrack down Union Square West and only permitted participants to leave from two exits. The crush of the crowd combined with the heat made the waiting unbearable.
Yet once on Broadway, the demonstrators savored the car-free streets and the march slowed to a crawl, with unions leading the way. Several protesters were arrested, one for climbing the statue of the bull, but the arrests wouldn't pick up again until police shut down the memorial plaza at 55 Water Street.
Shortly before the plaza was closed, City Councilmembers Ydanis Rodriguez and Jumaane Williams held an impromptu press conference of sorts. Asked if he had any message for the hundreds of police officers tasked with policing the protest, Williams said, "There are many NYPD officers who don't want to follow orders. The mayor has said that this is his personal army, and claimed it's the seventh largest police department in the world. It should not be used at his personal whim. I hate the fact that the officers who are part of the 99 percent are being used in this way."
And with that, the Councilmembers were escorted across the street and up Pearl, into a chaotic and crowded march, surrounded by a small contingent of Community Affairs officers. (Their friendly escort made for a police-friendly photo op the Bloomberg administration presumably wouldn't mind seeing on Time magazine's website.) For the next hour and a half, police would chase protesters through the narrow streets of the Financial District, occasionally arresting them when they refused to clear a sidewalk or engaged in shoving matches.
By 10:30 p.m., police were using Hanover Square and Pearl Street as a drop point for arrests in the area, loading a half dozen protesters into a paddy wagon as they trickled in in handcuffs. One protester who identified himself as Prince Dagon-Bey was bleeding from the head, and shouted that police had beat him on his head and hands. He went limp outside the paddy wagon, and officers loaded his seemingly semi-conscious body into the back.
NYPD officers would order a sidewalk to be cleared, shoving anyone in the way, only to abandon the job of clearing the sidewalk seconds later. We asked one officer why they were clearing a seemingly empty sidewalk with no pedestrian traffic. They replied, "Why do you wanna know?" The tactic was clearly designed to cut apart a march and disperse the crowd, and it worked. By 11 p.m., most protesters had been dispersed and divided into small groups that gathered at Zuccotti Park and on Water Street.
Listen to the NYPD's effective "MOVE" chant at the outset, and at the 2:00 mark of this video.
After midnight, some 250 protesters lingered in Zuccotti Park, as police and private security looked wearily on. "What's the point?" Community Affairs officer Rick Lee, a.k.a. Hipster Cop, asked us. "They need to get organized. This is pointless." Little by little, as the clock neared 1 a.m., the crowd in the park had boiled down to its more eccentric characters. It was understandable that most of the activists were calling it quits as May Day turned into May 2nd: the day's actions began at 7 a.m. and proceeded at a breakneck pace. "We understand that the media responds to crowds, so today I think that we spoke the media's language," Occupy Wall Street media liaison Mark Bray said. "We certainly haven't died."
Additional reporting by John Del Signore, Carrie Dennis, and James Thilman
