Pepper-Spray by a Cruel and Cowardly NYC Cop

[Quantum Windbag]

I beg to differ, the woman who calmly asks the police where he wanted them to go was an older woman with short blonde hair who was not one of the women who got pepper sprayed. The women that did were standing about six feet to that woman's right.

As for your comment about department policy regarding pepper spray's use? They were in the process of arresting the fat girl in black and the three "screamers" were going ballistic over it. The supervisor obviously thought they were impeding the arrest and used his pepper spray. It's what the police do everyday in every city in this country when they are trying to arrest someone and an angry crowd starts screaming at them. Just look at that video and take note of the "wall" of cell phone cameras that were recording every second of this whole scene. The entire purpose of this demonstration was to attract media attention. It was only a few hundred people in a city of millions. If it had been a peaceful demonstration it wouldn't have garnered more than a brief mention in any media outlet. Those protesters went there with the express intention of getting arrested on camera. To be honest with you after watching the video several times I was more and more impressed by the restraint that the police showed.

I see now.

The cop is so stupid that he thought someone who was not even close to the arrest, was separated from it by a wall of police holding a mesh barrier. No wonder he is brass, he is so stupid they had to promote him off the streets.

I suggest you actually watch this entire video. It won't change your mind, but you will know people are aware of your idiocy.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgr3DiqWYCI"]MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall Street Lawrence O'donnell with "The Last Word" - YouTube[/ame]

You know what's sad, Quantum? Instead of watching available clips that show EVERYTHING that happened and not just the police making arrests, you've chosen to watch MSNBC's heavily edited piece. Why would you do that?

You see if you watched the entire film footage you'd know that the people being arrested had all run out onto the street from the side walk more than one time. The first time the police let them slide...the moment they went again they got arrested. That "Keith Olbermann wannabe" Lawrence O'Donnell's rant about the guy getting assaulted because he had a camera and the police singled him out because they are afraid of cameras since Rodney King? What a LOAD of crap. Look at the footage from that protest and COUNT the number of cell phone cameras that are being used by the protesters to record the event. It was a veritable WALL of video recording devices. The police didn't single him out because he had a camera. They arrested him because he'd already been warned to stay on the sidewalk and he came back out onto the street for the second time. He was arrested after first being warned not to be there just as numerous OTHER people were arrested for doing the same thing. The whole REASON for that protest was to capture on video that media outlets like MSNBC would play. Otherwise you've got a protest of about a hundred and fifty people in a city of millions. It wouldn't get any attention at all. You'd get a bigger crowd from one subway car emptying out at rush hour.

I'm embarrassed for you that you fall for this pr stunt.

I posted 3 clips. I know some protestors were being snarky with the police. That does not give them the right to start bouncing cameramen off the hoods of cars, nor does it give them license to pepper spray people on the sidewalk.

Don't be embarrassed for me, go hide your head in the sand.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Gee, Mike...you watched the edited clips on MSNBC and thought you were getting an unbiased account of what actually happened? Are you REALLY that naive?

I normally won't draw conclusions from isolated tape segments alone. But Lawrence O'Donnell's narration seemed factually convincing, especially around the fellow with the big video camera whose head was rammed into the grille of a parked car. The guy was holding his camera with both hands in a protective manner so what happened to him seemed entirely gratuitous. As did squirting a girl who was behind a barricade in the face with pepper spray.

I will admit to being somewhat biased in my perception because I am 100% supportive of those protesters and the police are acting on behalf of the Wall Street opposition. If the cop had rammed the head of a derivative trader into a car I'm sure I would be less critical of the police.

I wouldn't.

I think the protestors are idiotic because what they are should be protesting on K Street, not Wall Street, but that still does not excuse what the police did.

 

[Oldstyle]

Gee, Mike...you watched the edited clips on MSNBC and thought you were getting an unbiased account of what actually happened? Are you REALLY that naive?

I normally won't draw conclusions from isolated tape segments alone. But Lawrence O'Donnell's narration seemed factually convincing, especially around the fellow with the big video camera whose head was rammed into the grille of a parked car. The guy was holding his camera with both hands in a protective manner so what happened to him seemed entirely gratuitous. As did squirting a girl who was behind a barricade in the face with pepper spray.

I will admit to being somewhat biased in my perception because I am 100% supportive of those protesters and the police are acting on behalf of the Wall Street opposition. If the cop had rammed the head of a derivative trader into a car I'm sure I would be less critical of the police.

You're so biased in your "perception" Mike that you've chosen to view a heavily edited version of events instead of uncut versions that give a complete story of what happened that day. Lawrence O'Donnell's narration was a joke. Go back and look at the arrest of the man with the camera one more time on the full uncut video. You'll see that he...like all of the others who were arrested...was warned by police to stay behind the mesh police lines. Everyone I saw got one warning and if they crossed that line out into the street a second time they were arrested. As for your claim that the police rammed his head into a car grill? That's horseshit as well...go look at the video. The police were taking him down to the ground and he glanced off the front of the car. You've dramatized that (as Lawrence O'Donnell did) and tried to make it appear that some thug policemen smashed his head into a parked car. I watched the police arrest numerous people and NONE of them were subjected to physical abuse of any kind. They were taken to the ground and they were cuffed. The crowd that was sprayed with pepper spray had been told to leave an area after previously breaking through police barricades...had refused to do so...and then were becoming unruly when one of their group was being arrested. They GOT what they went there for. They pushed the police to the point where they were arrested and they got air time for a protest that was so small that without the confrontations it wouldn't have warranted mention by a real news organization.

 

[Oldstyle]

I see now.

The cop is so stupid that he thought someone who was not even close to the arrest, was separated from it by a wall of police holding a mesh barrier. No wonder he is brass, he is so stupid they had to promote him off the streets.

I suggest you actually watch this entire video. It won't change your mind, but you will know people are aware of your idiocy.

MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall Street Lawrence O'donnell with "The Last Word" - YouTube

You know what's sad, Quantum? Instead of watching available clips that show EVERYTHING that happened and not just the police making arrests, you've chosen to watch MSNBC's heavily edited piece. Why would you do that?

You see if you watched the entire film footage you'd know that the people being arrested had all run out onto the street from the side walk more than one time. The first time the police let them slide...the moment they went again they got arrested. That "Keith Olbermann wannabe" Lawrence O'Donnell's rant about the guy getting assaulted because he had a camera and the police singled him out because they are afraid of cameras since Rodney King? What a LOAD of crap. Look at the footage from that protest and COUNT the number of cell phone cameras that are being used by the protesters to record the event. It was a veritable WALL of video recording devices. The police didn't single him out because he had a camera. They arrested him because he'd already been warned to stay on the sidewalk and he came back out onto the street for the second time. He was arrested after first being warned not to be there just as numerous OTHER people were arrested for doing the same thing. The whole REASON for that protest was to capture on video that media outlets like MSNBC would play. Otherwise you've got a protest of about a hundred and fifty people in a city of millions. It wouldn't get any attention at all. You'd get a bigger crowd from one subway car emptying out at rush hour.

I'm embarrassed for you that you fall for this pr stunt.

I posted 3 clips. I know some protestors were being snarky with the police. That does not give them the right to start bouncing cameramen off the hoods of cars, nor does it give them license to pepper spray people on the sidewalk.

Don't be embarrassed for me, go hide your head in the sand.

"Snarky"? The protesters deliberately provoked arrests. They deliberately broke through police barricades. If you watch the police they totally ignored "snarky". That fat, foul mouthed girl in black whose arrest sparked the pepper spraying totally went off on a policewoman and the policewoman didn't even bat an eye.

What the police did not ignore were repeated attempts by protesters to cross that street. It's quite obvious that the police gave each protester one warning when they attempted to cross the barricade and when they left the sidewalk the second time they were immediately arrested even if they tried to run away.

So now the police "bounced" camera guy off the hood of a car? You're becoming amusing at this point.

 

[Oldstyle]

It sounds reasonable.

This is the official NYPD version of the story.

Here are a few more videos of what happened.

Simultaneous perspectives on "Occupy Wall Street" kettling and pepper spray / mace incident - YouTube

Occupy Wall Street - Police Aggression - YouTube

Occupy Wall Street September 24 - YouTube

Doesn't seem so reasonable when you get a better view.

I disagree. I watched the 9 minute video. It is pretty clear what went on. At first, the crowd is relatively orderly and restrained and the police are reacting accordingly, i.e., not doing too much - merely establishing a presence.

But as time passes, the crowd gets more unruly and more aggressive. It is obvious at this point, that several members of the crowd are now intent on provoking some kind of physical incident with the police. Now, the police begin to try and tighten things up a bit. The crowd reacts with predictable actions to resist police attempts to restrict them.

By the time the pepper spray was used, the police had a potentially bad situation on their hands. Now, whether they used the pepper spray against the members of the crowd who should have had it used against them is another matter. I didn't see the "sprayees" really doing anything that deserved being sprayed. But that's not the point, and police cannot be called upon to pick and choose when they have a potential riot on their hands.

You want to belly up to the front line of a confrontation like this, you should be ready to accept the consequences. I'm sorry - I call this one for the cops.

And that is really rare for me. Many of you know what I do for a living and how I feel about police in general.

Excuse me? Why should anyone have to expect treatment like this just because they choose to exercise their rights? I honestly do not care if 99% of the protestors there were actually attacking the police, there was no reason for anyone to use pepper spray on peaceful protestors. There is no way I will accept that.

So let me see if I've got how this works... If 99% of the protesters were attacking the police and 1% of them were standing there peacefully...you'd find the police at fault for using pepper spray on the crowd as a whole? Are you serious with that?

I've got a little experience with protests, having grown up in the sixties. If you're just standing in a crowd of people breaking the law and the police show up? You'd best get your "innocent" little ass out of there or you WILL be going to jail.

 

[editec]

Hang him.

Hang 'im high

 

[Harry Dresden]

well it does not matter what we think......if the powers that be decide to investigate that Cop in white and others its going to be what they think of the footage taken......so we shall see.....

 

[peach174]

All of these people broke the law and you lefties side with them?
Unbelievable.
1st - they had a permit to protest over the weekend. They had no permit to protest on Monday.
That was the first law they broke.
2nd - they obstructed pedestrian traffic.
That was the 2nd law the broke.
3rd - they obstructed vehicle traffic.
That was the 3rd law they broke.
All of those protesters broke 3 laws and you lefties side with them?
Most of them are brainwashed college students who are believing the lies that their Progressive College Professors are feeding to them.
Yes they have to exercise their rights but they don't have the right to break the law.

 

[Article 15]

These threads are great at exposing the authoritarian douchebags of the board for who they are.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

At least they didn't beat them to death

 

[Oldstyle]

These threads are great at exposing the authoritarian douchebags of the board for who they are.

This thread once again exposes how the Left now uses the Main Stream Media's bias towards them to garner PR for their causes. It's the exact same thing that was going on when the Left accused Rand Paul supporters of "beating" an innocent protester or accused police of "beating" protesters at the Paul Ryan's Rotary Club meeting.

One just had to watch these video clips to immediately note the dozens of protesters recording everything that happens on their cell phones. They're doing so because getting usable video footage is the entire purpose of what they are there for. A group of protesters 150 strong in a city the size of New York? That's laughably small. But they get massive press coverage by staging confrontations with authorities and getting it on video.

The professional activist that stalked Ron Paul trying to get video of him with her embarrassing sign stuck in his face? The one who wore a wig to disguise herself because the Paul security people were onto her? She traveled to Kentucky determined to get embarrassing video of Paul and provoked an incident. She struck gold because some Paul supporter stepped on her head while she was being restrained. One night later she's doing MSNBC.

The protesters that stood up one at a time at Paul Ryan's Rotary Club meeting and shouted down his attempts to speak until they were arrested? They were there to get video footage of their first amendment rights being "trampled". They went there with the sole purpose of getting arrested and getting that arrest on camera so a sympathetic Main Stream Media would air the video making them look "oppressed".

I suppose my pointing this out qualifies me as an "authoritarian douchebag" though...right?

 

[manifold]

These threads are great at exposing the authoritarian douchebags of the board for who they are.

This thread once again exposes how the Left now uses the Main Stream Media's bias towards them to garner PR for their causes.

I guess you're not paying attention then.

Just as many on the right have criticized the cops in the this thread as the left.

 

[Synthaholic]

If you push yourself to the front of the line at an imbecile's "protest"

Explain why this is an imbecile's protest. Use your words, not your spittle.

 

[Synthaholic]

What's behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?

By Glenn Greenwald



It's unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists. That's just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges. As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles for WikiLeaks (and, before that, for the Iraq War protests) demonstrated: the more effectively adversarial it is, the more establishment hostility it's going to provoke.


Nor is it surprising that much of the most vocal criticisms of the Wall Street protests has come from some self-identified progressives, who one might think would be instinctively sympathetic to the substantive message of the protesters. In an excellent analysis entitled "Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street," Kevin Gosztola chronicles how much of the most scornful criticisms have come from Democratic partisans who -- like the politicians to whom they devote their fealty -- feign populist opposition to Wall Street for political gain.


Some of this anti-protest posturing is just the all-too-familiar New-Republic-ish eagerness to prove one's own Seriousness by castigating anyone to the left of, say, Dianne Feinstein or John Kerry; for such individuals, multi-term, pro-Iraq-War Democratic Senator-plutocrats define the outermost left-wing limit of respectability. Also at play is the jingoistic notion that street protests are valid in Those Bad Contries but not in free, democratic America.


A siginificant aspect of this progressive disdain is grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates, and a corresponding desire to undermine anything that distracts from that goal. Indeed, the loyalists of both parties have an interest in marginalizing anything that might serve as a vehicle for activism outside of fealty to one of the two parties (Fox News' firing of Glenn Beck was almost certainly motivated by his frequent deviation from the GOP party-line orthodoxy which Fox exists to foster).


The very idea that the one can effectively battle Wall Street's corruption and control by working for the Democratic Party is absurd on its face: Wall Street's favorite candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, whose administration -- led by a Wall Street White House Chief of Staff and Wall-Street-subservient Treasury Secretary and filled to the brim with Goldman Sachs officials -- is now working hard to protect bankers from meaningful accountability (and though he's behind Wall Street's own Mitt Romney in the Wall Street cash sweepstakes this year, Obama is still doing well); one of Wall Street's most faithful servants is Chuck Schumer, the money man of the Democratic Party; and the second-ranking Senate Democrat acknowledged -- when Democrats controlled the Congress -- that the owners of Congress are bankers. There are individuals who impressively rail against the crony capitalism and corporatism that sustains Wall Street's power, but they're no match for the party apparatus that remains fully owned and controlled by it.
​

*snip*

 

[peach174]

My criticism of the cops was they let these people protest without a permit on Monday.
They should have rounded them all up and put them jail and fined their little law breaking butts.

 

[manifold]

If you push yourself to the front of the line at an imbecile's "protest"

Explain why this is an imbecile's protest. Use your words, not your spittle.

It shouldn't matter whether one views these protests as imbecilic or otherwise. In this country we're supposed to have the freedom to protest, peacefully and within reason. The women sprayed by the cop were clearly protesting peacefully and within reason. It doesn't matter if they were imbeciles or not, they were victims of police brutality. Plain and simple.

 

[peach174]

If you push yourself to the front of the line at an imbecile's "protest"

Explain why this is an imbecile's protest. Use your words, not your spittle.

It shouldn't matter whether one views these protests as imbecilic or otherwise. In this country we're supposed to have the freedom to protest, peacefully and within reason. The women sprayed by the cop were clearly protesting peacefully and within reason. It doesn't matter if they were imbeciles or not, they were victims of police brutality. Plain and simple.

They were law breakers. Protesting without a permit.

 

[manifold]

Explain why this is an imbecile's protest. Use your words, not your spittle.

It shouldn't matter whether one views these protests as imbecilic or otherwise. In this country we're supposed to have the freedom to protest, peacefully and within reason. The women sprayed by the cop were clearly protesting peacefully and within reason. It doesn't matter if they were imbeciles or not, they were victims of police brutality. Plain and simple.

They were law breakers. Protesting without a permit.

Bullshit

 

[Xchel]

If you push yourself to the front of the line at an imbecile's "protest"

Explain why this is an imbecile's protest. Use your words, not your spittle.

It shouldn't matter whether one views these protests as imbecilic or otherwise. In this country we're supposed to have the freedom to protest, peacefully and within reason. The women sprayed by the cop were clearly protesting peacefully and within reason. It doesn't matter if they were imbeciles or not, they were victims of police brutality. Plain and simple.

yes, people can protest..the key is PEACEFUL protest is your right..not to get into an out of control situation that disrupts other people's freedoms like being able to drive down the road without protesters in the middle of it or being able to travel down the sidewalk without having people scream and shout at you. You block traffic and pedestrians you are breaking the law..it is not your right to do that. It is your right to assemble PEACEFULLY.
I rarely side with the cops...this time I am siding with the cops they were right and she was stupid for not leaving when it got out of control..if she got sprayed worse things could have happened to her...she needs to take it as a lesson learned.

 

[manifold]

Explain why this is an imbecile's protest. Use your words, not your spittle.

It shouldn't matter whether one views these protests as imbecilic or otherwise. In this country we're supposed to have the freedom to protest, peacefully and within reason. The women sprayed by the cop were clearly protesting peacefully and within reason. It doesn't matter if they were imbeciles or not, they were victims of police brutality. Plain and simple.

yes, people can protest..the key is PEACEFUL protest is your right..not to get into an out of control situation that disrupts other people's freedoms like being able to drive down the road without protesters in the middle of it or being able to travel down the sidewalk without having people scream and shout at you. You block traffic and pedestrians you are breaking the law..it is not your right to do that. It is your right to assemble PEACEFULLY.
I rarely side with the cops...this time I am siding with the cops they were right and she was stupid for not leaving when it got out of control..if she got sprayed worse things could have happened to her...she needs to take it as a lesson learned.

Watch the videos.

The girls that were sprayed were not doing any of those things. You're essentially saying that they are guilty by association and that's pure poppycock.