Good morning, and welcome to the Guardian's continuing coverage of the protests in the US. On Saturday more than 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on Brooklyn Bridge in New York, with some claiming they were led onto the road section of the bridge by police before being arrested.
Other protesters said police did offer warnings that the march should remain on the footbridge, but the warnings were not heeded, leading to the march spilling out and the subesquent arrests.
My colleague Ed Pilkington wrote yesterday:
Accounts vary as to how about 500 protesters ended up on one lane of the road across the bridge, where they were all penned in with orange netting and arrested. Some accused the police of leading them on to the road as a sort of trap.
Video clips posted on YouTube, showing a small body of officers marching on to the road ahead of the mass of demonstrators, appeared to support this view.
But the NYPD rejected those claims, saying that many warnings were given by police to protesters to stay on the pedestrian walkway that runs across the bridge at a level above the road. Paul Browne, the deputy commissioner, said protesters were clearly told that if they went on to the road they would be arrested. "Some complied and took the walkway without being arrested. Others proceeded on the Brooklyn-bound vehicular roadway and were," he said.
The police version of events was supported by some protesters.
Malcolm Harris, a blogger who took part in the march, tweeted that the police were wrong-footed. "The police didn't lead us on to the bridge. They were backing the fuck up."
While the arrests in New York dominated the news, the weekend marked a growth in similar protests across the country, with Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Washington and several other cities seeing demonstrations.
Occupy Wall Street is now into its third week, with further marches and walk outs planned for this week, while demonstrations of a different kind are planned in various cities in the US later in the week to mark the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.
We'll have a round-up of the weekend's events as well as any breaking news relating to get in touch on email – adam.gabbatt@guardian.co.uk or on Twitter @AdamGabbatt
Undeterred by the weekend's mass arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters have already staged a demonstration today, dressing up as "corporate zombies" – the very worst kind of zombie – and besieging financial workers in the area.
According to Associated Press, group spokesman Patrick Bruner urged protesters to eat Monopoly money while in zombie attire; to let financial workers "see us reflecting the metaphor of their actions."
From AP:
One camper set up a table with tubes of makeup and stacks of fake money and was applying white makeup to the face of a young woman.
As the encampment began waking up Monday morning, several dozen police officers stood in formation across the street.
Organizers said they planned an anti-police brutality protest on the steps of City Hall and a rally in support of union workers outside Sotheby's auction house.
My colleague Karen McVeigh sends a link to this Daily News report that the Transport Workers Union are to go to court today to try to stop the city from forcing bus drivers to transport Occupy Wall St protesters arrested by the NYPD.
The piece quotes John Samuelsen, president of the TWU:
"TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest - and shouldn't have been arrested in the first place."
Karen is down at Wall Street, and sends this picture of the zombie makeover desk.
Photograph: Karen McVeigh for the Guardian
Karen has been speaking to some of the undead, and has been told: "It's not a zombie march it's like a metaphor for people who don't think for themselves."
Protests are also continuing in Boston this morning, with "about 100 people" marching through downtown, according to the Boston Globe.
Accompanied by Boston Police officers who stopped traffic at key intersections, the protesters first gathered in the city's Financial District this morning and then marched to the State House where they stood on the steps, chanting slogans and holding signs.
Some of the signs included "capitalism is organized crime" and "where's my golden parachute?"
Most of the protesters appeared to be in their 20s. As they walked through the streets they called out to passersby.
"We are the 99 percent," one group would shout.
"So are you,'' another group shouted in response.
During the walk, a handful of people apparently heading to work, briefly joined the protest. One woman handed over to the marchers the cookies she had made for co-workers.
The protests are a continuation of last week's demonstrations in Boston, when protesters marched on the Bank of America to protest against corporate greed. WHDH Boston reported "an estimated 2,000" marched on Friday, with 24 arrests in a mostly peaceful demonstration. The news channel filed this video report from the protests, under the splendid heading "Fiscal frustration".
Take Back Boston, the coalition of activist groups behind the march, outline the reasons for their activity on their website.
This is good. The New York Observer has posted a video of "an interview Fox News filmed, but doesn't want you to see".
The video, which the Observer says was filmed by Kyle Christopher from Occupy Wall Street's media team, shows a Fox News producer interviewing protester Jesse LaGreca.
"Take for instance when Glenn Beck was doing his protest and he called the president a person who hates white people and white culture, and you guys kind of had a big part in it," LaGreca says.
"So I'm glad to see you coming around and kinda paying attention to what the other 99% of Americans are paying attention to, as opposed to the far right fringe who would love to just destroy the middle class entirely."
Ouch.
My colleague Patrick Kingsley was one of those on Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday.
Patrick says both police and protesters' accounts of what happened in the lead-up to the arrests are "probably true".
It seems some protestors did knowingly enter the eastbound roadway, and that the police warned some of them not to. But once the roadway had been breached, I could not see any attempt by the police to warn the hundreds of subsequent marchers that they risked arrest - and I was standing 10 metres away. In fact, when I started following the stragglers, I initially and mistakenly walked down the roadway myself, past several policemen. No one tried to stop me.
What's also gone largely unreported is how the police simultaneously also kettled those on the walkway. It'd be interesting to know the justification for this.
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein has published an interesting interview with David Graeber, one of the initial OWS organisers and an anthropologist at Goldsmiths university in London.
Graeber says the first meeting relating to shutting down Wall Street was on July 2, with weekly meetings thereafter.
He addresses the issue of demands, and the lack thereof, in the interview:
It's very similar to the globalization movement. You see the same criticisms in the press. It's a bunch of kids who don't know economics and only know what they're against. But there's a reason for that. it's pre-figurative, so to speak. You're creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it's a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you're protesting. If you make demands, you're saying, in a way, that you're asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.
Klein suggests to Graeber that: "The real running theme I'm hearing is hopelessness: that we did everything right and played by the rules and went to school or got a job and now we're buried in debt and can't make ends meet, while these folks at the top of the economy seem to just keep prospering and prospering."
Graeber responds:
Right, and Wall Street is just a beautiful illustration of that. Here we have these guys who were just greedy crooks, who crashed the global economy and did terrible things to the lives of people all over the world. None of them have paid at all. There was a debate about whether their bonuses should be lowered. On the other hand, if people point out to vigorously that this has happened, they do get arrested. And that helps to point out the essential double standard of the system.
Below the line pocketshepherd posts a link which illustrates how the Occupy Wall Street protest has spread – in this case across the Atlantic to merry old England, where an Occupy the London Stock Exchange demonstration is planned for later this month.
On the Facebook event page more than 1,200 people have indicated they will attend the occupation, scheduled for Saturday 15 October.
Matt Wells has been compiling Guardian readers' accounts of what happened on Brooklyn Bridge.
Among those who got in touch following Matt's appeal for eyewitness accounts on Sunday was Kate Shiebler, a school teacher from Boston:
The original plan was to head over the Brooklyn Bridge via the pedestrian walkway. Some people decided to take the road instead, including us. We knew there was a risk, since we were near the front of the march. We were probably a few rows back from the front, and we heard a march organizer say that we should stick to the pedestrian walkway, but we never heard or saw any NYPD say this.
Hundreds behind us didn't hear anyone make any announcement, and assumed they were following the permitted march route. NYPD waving people forward and leading the march over the bridge furthered this assumption.
Similarly New Yorker David Scorca recalled:
The march moved along smoothly until we reached the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything just suddenly jammed up and the march expanded out into a massive crowd.
Everyone was chanting "Whose streets? Our streets" as a police officer with a megaphone read something inaudibly off of a piece of paper. Then he and the 8 other officers behind him turned and started walking up onto the bridge.
The crowd followed as the police led the way and while some of them even walked beside us. And so the pressure from the jam was released onto the street portion of the bridge. As we continued, people began climbing the fence and jumping from what I then realized was the pedestrian path onto the street with the rest of the march.
"Provocateurs" were responsible for leading Saturday's Brooklyn Bridge march into illegal territory, leading to hundreds of arrests, Occupy Wall Street organisers have told the Guardian.
Karen McVeigh writes from Wall Street:
After criticisms that some of the protesters were engaging in illegal protests, such as the 700 arrested on Saturday, organizers at Occupy Wall street said that they were seeking to identify provocateurs.
Christopher Longenecker head of march planning and tactics, said marches were organized by committees with several people trained as 'pace-keepers' to ensure they are legal and safe.
He accused the police of allowing a situation to develop on Saturday's march where provocateurs led hundreds to engage in illegal protest on the road.
"We dont do illegal actions," Longenecker said. "Pace-keepers are scattered throughout marches, including the one on Saturday. One of the pace-keepers was standing between the march and the highway and she was yelling as loud as possible that what was on the road was an illegal autonomous unplanned action – that the legal route was over the walkway and they weren't supposed to take the highway."
"Normally the police block off the highway and cross streets to keep us safe but they didn't on Saturday. There was a heavy police presence on the Brooklyn side of the bridge but not on the Manhattan side. They created the situatuon for provocateurs to lead people onto the highway."
Shown video pictures of those people who appeared to be leading protesters onto the highway – which is illegal in NY – he said he did not recognize them.
Thorin Caristo, one of OWS media spokesmen, said that they were working through the videos to identify provocateurs.
"They have been pointed out as provocateurs in our midst who are trying to mislead the group.
"We are a really open democracy here. Saturdays situation happened really quick and showed the vulnerability of a group that has no leaders."
Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! has been hosting a press conference at Zuccotti Park, where she revealed the channel has received a $100,000 payout from the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and from the US secret service.
From the Democracy Now! website:
[The] federal lawsuit [was] brought by her and Democracy Now! producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar against the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the U.S. Secret Service, challenging the policies and conduct of law enforcement during the 2008 Republican National Convention held in Minneapolis-St. Paul, which resulted in the unlawful arrests of Democracy Now! journalists as they were trying to report on public protest and political dissent.
[...]
The settlement includes $100,000 in compensation paid by the St. Paul and Minneapolis police departments and the U.S. Secret Service. The settlement also includes an agreement by the St. Paul police department to implement a training program aimed at educating officers regarding the First Amendment rights of the press and public with respect to police operations, including proper procedures for dealing with the press covering demonstrations.
Thanks to our very own Karen McVeigh for the photo.
A Twitter appeal:
@ryan_penn @AdamGabbatt Please let everyone know that #occupywallstreet is NOT about the right or left. It is about the people. #occupytogether #ows
Occupy Wall Street have published the minutes from today's direct action working group, which appears to have considered how protesters can learn from Saturday.
Four new march procedures have been listed, which organisers presumably hope will help to avoid arrests on the scale we saw at the weekend:
1. Training for pacers who while help keep the march controlled and protestors safe will be held 30 minutes before each march.
2. Annouce march guidelines to protestors five minutes before march begins. If possible, hand out march guidelines flyer with legal information on it.
3. Announce the end of planned march at the endpoint.
4. Should an autonomous action take place during the march that is illegal, pacers need to immediately inform crowd of their options.
Justin Adkins is one of those who was arrested on Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday. Justi is a transgender man, and was treated differently from those who were arrested with him. Here is his rather disturbing account of his experience.
They took me away from the cellblock where they had all of the protestors locked up and brought me to a room with 2 cells and a bathroom. One small cell was empty and the large cell had about 8 men who had been arrested on charges not related to the protest. Unlike me, these men had been arrested for a variety of crimes, some violent. When I entered the room they had me sit down in a chair on the same portion of the wall as the restroom, and then handcuffed my right wrist to a metal handrail. I thought that this was a temporary arrangement as they tried to find me a separate cell as part of some protocol regarding transgender people, which I later discovered does not exist in New York City. After about an hour I realized that they had no intention of moving me. I remained handcuffed to this bar next to the bathroom for the next 8 hours.
The cells, on the other side of the precinct where they had locked up the other 69 protestors, did not have working toilets so every person who had to use the toilet was brought to the one next to where they had me locked to the railing. This was not only disgusting but also embarrassing. The smell of urine was so strong that I, and the men locked up in the cell in the room that I was in, mentioned the odor on more than one occasion.
Once they started bringing women in to use the bathrooms, a short young female officer, who was in charge of people locked up in the room where I was handcuffed, harshly turned my chair around with my arm still locked to the railing but now pinned behind my back. She said that she knew it hurt but that they were bringing in women to use the restroom and she could not have me watching. I had no interest in watching anyone use the bathroom, and every-time a male had come into use the restroom I had respectfully turned away. This process of people coming in and out to use the restroom went on for the full 8 hours.
I was distinctly treated differently than the other protestors during my entire time at Precinct 90 in Brooklyn. At one point in the night all of the protestors were given a peanut butter sandwich and water. I asked for a sandwich three times but of all of the officers who came in and out of the room where I was handcuffed never acknowledged my request. I think this was because when I asked for a sandwich the men locked up in the room I was in asked for one too. I do not know when or how long those men were being held but I was there for eight hours and had sat on the bridge for about 2 hours and was never once offered water or a sandwich when my fellow protestors received both.
Stephanie Keith, a photographer based in New York, has sent this account of Saturday's events.
The march went past City Hall and toward the bridge, where the pedestrian walkway goes up, and the traffic lane goes off to the side. Some people in part of the march stopped there and took a stand, chanting "Whose bridge is this – our bridge! Take the bridge!" This was a a small group of people who were whipped up into a fervor.
The police told them they would be arrested if they went onto the traffic lanes of the bridge. But with the noise of the chanting, there was so much confusion that I doubt more than 25 people heard the warnings. The protesters started pushing forward, gaining ground on the police.
The police then just turned around and started walking up the ramp. Once the police had turned around and started walking, the protesters then followed. The police gave the impression they would be escorting the group over the bridge.
From that point, until they stopped the march on the bridge, the police didn't say anything more about arrests. Maybe some New Yorkers would know that this wasn't allowed, but a lot of people in the back of the march would not have know that it wasn't permitted. It was only when we got about a third of the way up the bridge that the police turned round, blocked the roadway, and read from the same script – that people would be arrested.
I don't think the bridge thing was planned – it just sort of happened. These people [those who led the march onto the traffic bridge] were dissatisfied with the march on Police Plaza on Friday night, they thought it was too passive. They took it upon themselves to take it over the top.
This coverage is now finishing for the day, but we'll be back tomorrow rounding up more of the protests in New York and around the US. Thanks for reading.