Post by Bozur on Jan 1, 2012 22:05:57 GMT -5
Cops arrest 68 as Occupy Wall Street protesters try to ‘retake’ Zuccotti Park
Actress Ellen Barkin tweets against cops, for OWS
BY BARRY PADDOCK & HELEN KENNEDY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Originally Published: Sunday, January 1 2012, 3:15 PM
Updated: Sunday, January 1 2012, 8:28 PM
James Keivom/New York Daily NewsSupporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement moved police barricades to the center of Zuccotti Park to celebrate the new year.
Video of a cop shoving actress Ellen Barkin was burning up the internet Sunday after she got caught up in the chaos surrounding a New Year’s police roundup of Occupy Wall Street protesters.
“I have never been afraid of an NY policeman until last nite. What I saw was random & senseless arrests and unnecessarily threatening behavior,” she said on Twitter.
Barkin, 57, said she was walking home when she saw mass arrests at 13th Street and 5th Avenue.
“It was upsetting, and looked unnecessarily aggressive & random,” she tweeted.
Barkin said she tried to make her way to a young woman who had been put into a police van and was screaming for help.
“She was not a protester. Was not drunk. She was walking home,” Barkin said on Twitter.
At that point, video shot by her companion, 26-year-old actor Sam Levinson, shows a police officer herding her from the street to the sidewalk and then pushing her by the shoulders.
“Take your (expletive) hands off me,” she can be heard saying furiously.
Then she tweeted again: “Is it a crime 2 stand in the street in NY? WTF is going on here?”
Barkin is a prolific Twitterer who is profanely outspoken in her support of the Occupy movement.
The NYPD had no immediate comment Sunday night on her tirade.
Barkin’s tweets became more angry as the night went on: “I cannot believe what I am seeing. U protect nothing. U ARE the violence in my city.”
In all, 68 people were arrested when cops shut down an Occupy Wall Street march near Union Square.
The arrests came after protesters
in Zuccotti Park pulled down the metal police barricades sealing off the public park and “retook” it while the NYPD’s focus was uptown at Times Square.
They danced on a giant mound of the barricades, waved signs and projected a message in light — “Whose year? Our year!!” — until police regrouped and shut them down.
Most of the 68 arrests were for disorderly conduct, though some protesters were also hit with charges of trespassing and obstructing governmental administration.
In the tussle, Zachary Miller, 28, of Berkeley, Calif., allegedly attacked a cop with a pair of scissors. He was charged with assaulting an officer.
The officer was treated at Bellevue Hospital. Protesters said the police responded by pepper spraying them.
Miller, a Berkeley graduate, is an organizer of the so-called Rolling University, a California student movement fighting to make education more accessible to the poor.
His rabble-rousing predates Occupy Wall Street: He was one of two people arrested in early 2010 for inciting a riot after a melee at UC Berkley in which students broke windows at a Subway restaurant and set a garbage bin on fire.
He was initially denied bail because of three outstanding probation violations, according to an account in the Daily Californian.
Miller and his co-defendant were found not guilty by a jury after a two-week trial in November 2010, the paper reported.
In March 2011, Miller helped organize a dramatic demonstration at Berkeley in which eight students chained themselves to a fourth-floor ledge on the facade of a campus building.
They were wearing adult diapers and were in it for the long haul, but came down after a day after the university agreed to some of their demands.
Miller’s lawyer could not immediately be reached.
www.nydailynews.com/news/national/cops-arrest-68-occupy-wall-street-protesters-retake-zuccotti-park-year-article-1.999479