Police in Riot Gear Clear Month-Long 'Occupy City Hall' Camp in NYC

BILL BLASIO'S BULLY BOYS DO BARR'S WORK FOR HIM
New York police officers standby as sanitation workers remove graffiti at the site of Occupy City Hall protest on July 22, 2020, in New York.
Timothy A. Clary—AFP/Getty Images

BY KAREN MATTHEWS AND JENNIFER PELTZ / AP
JULY 22, 2020

(NEW YORK) — Police in riot gear moved in early Wednesday to clear a month-long encampment of protesters and homeless people from a park near New York’s City Hall.

A line of officers with helmets and shields entered City Hall Park shortly before 4 a.m. and forced the remaining people who were camped there out.

The decision to clear what Mayor Bill de Blasio called the increasingly unruly camp was made at about 10 p.m. Tuesday.

“We do always respect the right to protest, but we have to think about health and safety first, and the health and safety issues were growing,” de Blasio said. “So it was time to take action.”

Video from the predawn action shows officers moving through the camp taking down tents and other temporary structures and tossing them into garbage trucks to be hauled away. Cleaning crews arrived later to scrub graffiti from buildings in the area.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, who joined de Blasio at his daily briefing, said officers instructed people to leave, and many did, but “about six” people were given summonses for refusing to disperse. One person was arrested for throwing a brick at an officer, denting his shield, Shea said. The commissioner said no injuries to officers or protesters were reported.

De Blasio said shelter services were offered to homeless people at the encampment.

The encampment in City Hall Park started in late June following weeks of protests sparked by the May death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The “Occupy City Hall” protest was part of a national “defund the police” movement seeking to redirect funds from policing to community needs like housing and education.


Protesters said they would camp out until the city reduced the New York Police Department’s budget by $1 billion. The City Council responded by passing a budget that shifts roughly $1 billion from the police department, but some activists criticized the funding cuts as cosmetic or insufficient.

The encampment swelled to several hundred people at its height but had lately dwindled to fewer than 100, many of them homeless people.

De Blasio, a Democrat, had earlier resisted calls to move the protesters out of the park that adjoins the historic building where he works.

The mayor said Wednesday that the timing of the predawn raid was unrelated to President Donald Trump’s threats to send federal law enforcers to New York as the president has done in Portland. “We were waiting to really understand the facts and specifics and came to the conclusion this was the right time,” de Blasio said.

De Blasio said he sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf opposing any unsolicited deployment of federal officers to New York. “We’re New Yorkers. We will not take something like this lying down,” de Blasio said.

He said he will add his signature to a letter to Barr and Wolf from dozens of other mayors “to make clear that none of our cities wants this intrusion.”


The NYPD Raided The "Occupy City Hall" Encampment In The Middle Of The Night
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the site had become "less and less about protest, and more and more became an area where homeless folks were gathering."

Julia Reinstein BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on July 22, 2020,

Timothy A. Clary / Getty Images

New York City police raided Occupy City Hall before dawn on Wednesday, arresting seven demonstrators and clearing out the encampment that sprung up nearly a month ago in lower Manhattan as part of a campaign to defund the NYPD.

Video of the incident shows masses of police in riot gear descending upon the small tent city before 4 a.m.

Police told BuzzFeed News seven people were arrested but had not been charged.



Max Hornig@swarmofgaybees
YPD is now attacking the City Hall occupancy protest. Tearing down the community service tents. #nycprotest07:47 AM - 22 Jul 2020
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As the sun rose, sanitation workers hosed off graffiti left on the plaza reading "defund the police," "BLM," and other anti-racist and anti-police messages. Tents were taken down and thrown into garbage trucks.

Jawanza James Williams, the director of organizing for Vocal New York, which originally organized Occupy City Hall, told BuzzFeed News the city was "pressure- washing away the messages of freedom, Black Lives, a world without police and prisons, in the same ways that workers pressure-wash away the spilled blood of Black people murdered by police for now hundreds of years."


"The De Blasio administration allowed this to happen, even amid CDC recommendations not to break up encampments with homeless folks to prevent COVID-19 spread, indicating this raid had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with being politically expedient," said Williams.
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Occupy City Hall began in late June as a protest calling for a billion-dollar cut to the New York Police Department's $6 billion budget. Protesters camped out on a small patch of grass near City Hall ahead of the June 30 deadline to finalize next year's city budget.


While the new budget technically shifts $1 billion out of the NYPD budget, it has been widely criticized for not making meaningful change due to the plan's reallocation of money to departments that also fund police.

“Defunding police means defunding police. It does not mean budget tricks or funny math," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement. "It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education's budget so that the exact same police remain in schools."


David Dee Delgado / Getty Images

After the budget was passed, many people remained in the Occupy City Hall encampment, and it became a refuge for New Yorkers experiencing homelessness. Dubbed "Abolition Park," the encampment provided shelter, food, clothing, medical and mental health assistance, and even a library to those staying there.

“It’s summertime, it’s not cold. There’s a lot of people, there’s food, clothes,” one person who was living there, 37-year-old Benigno Perez, told Gothamist in early July. “Most of the people’s going through the same thing. I love it. If you look around you see the unity...the unity of the people.”

Williams said his organization, Vocal, did not remain officially involved in Occupy City Hall after the budget was passed, but that he has returned frequently to the site. Even as the plaza turned from a protest encampment to one more focused on supporting people experiencing homelessness, he said activism at the site remained.

"[P]eople were self-organizing for accountability and safety, and also to respond to the potential influx of police infiltrating the camp," Williams said. "But the activities of political education continued, direct actions outside of the camp continued, celebrations and performances continued, art creation, and cultural production in general."

In a press conference on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio did not indicate there were plans to break up the encampment. He had said doing so would be the NYPD's decision.

"There is a balance we always strike between the right to protest and especially public safety, and I always put public safety first while respecting constitutional rights," de Blasio said.

But on Wednesday, following the raid, de Blasio said he'd changed his mind due to the encampment's shift in purpose.

"What we saw change over the last few weeks was the gathering there got smaller and smaller, was less and less about protest, and more and more became an area where homeless folks were gathering," he said. "We do always respect the right to protest but we do have to think about health and safety first, and the healthy and safety issues were growing."


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Julia Reinstein is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.