ABSTRACT
The NYPD received a raft of negative publicity for their handling of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests of 2011. Videos of police pepper spraying demonstrators, mass arrests, and constant harassment undermined the reputation of the agency. A Quinnipiac Poll showed that almost half of New Yorkers disapproved of the NYPD’s handling of the protests and more than half disapproved of Mayor Bloomberg’s handling of OWS (Taintor, 2011). Although Bloomberg’s decision to evict the encampment at Zuccotti Park was central to undermining the movement, the day-to-day policing by the NYPD created a climate of fear and hostility that hindered the movement’s growth and opened the police department to charges of stifling dissent. OWS was subjected to extensive restrictions and a variety of invasive and aggressive police tactics including pervasive surveillance, zero tolerance enforcement of minor legal violations, mass arrests, and excessive force, leading some to claim that a new militarized form of protest policing was emerging in New York City (Badish, 2011; Chiroux, 2011; Stamper, 2011; Turse, 2011). Others claimed that the NYPD was actively protecting the interests of Wall Street and the financial industry through the use of unusually repressive tactics. In reality, none of these tactics was new to the NYPD (Elliot, 2011; Wolf, 2011). Over the last 20 years the NYPD has undertaken a broad and consistent practice of restricting, micromanaging, and even pre-emptively disrupting protest.
