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Our earlier article on Occupy Boston missed a few key points. Reports indicate that the police showed up to the scene and after five minutes began arresting people. Due to the calamity of the situation, some occupiers claimed they could not hear the police’s warning that if they did not vacate the area in five minutes they would be arrested.
From WNEM in Flint, Michigan:
“They used physical force that was completely unnecessary and damaging,” said Urszula Mansy-Latos, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild of Massachusetts. “Many of us were injured and are suffering pain.”
Stephen Squibb, a spokesman for Occupy Boston, said protesters were placed on their stomachs, then drug off after their arms were tied with cables. He also said police used long, white, flexible batons on the protesters, which were very painful.
As if this weren’t enough, according to The Young Turks, Boston Police decided they had the right to break the law by throwing away tents, sleeping bags, supplies and other items owned, in some cases, by people who had been arrested and could not reach their property to remove it.
If true, the Boston Police Department made an at once despicable and hypocritical decision to go against the law. So far, this negligence has not been reported on by any major media outlet.
Occupy Boston members weren’t only disrespected by police, though. In addition to his insinuation that anarchists were poised to take over the protest, a claim which has since been rebuked by organizers and members of the occupation, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had other undue words.
“I will not tolerate civil disobedience,” said Menino in an interview with the Boston Globe. By using this phrase, Menino has thrown himself in the history books with F.W. de Klerk, who led the apartheid government in South Africa, pro-segregationist George Wallace, governor of a segregated Alabama in the middle of the civil rights era, and Bull Connor, who before Wallace famously ordered police to spray demonstrators with fire hoses in Alabama.
All four men used the same phrase, and in a further clarification of his position, Menino again echoed exact words used by Connor: “When it comes to civil disobedience, I will not tolerate that at all.”
The layers of irony are thick in Menino’s refusal to allow peaceful protests and free speech. ”Thoreau must be turning in his grave,” remarked The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur. Thoreau, a seminal figure in civil disobedience who inspired Martin Luther King Jr. among others, lived and died in Massachusetts (albeit Concord).
Moreover the Greenway Conservancy, who paid for the Ferrari worth of shrubberies that were supposedly so paramount in the police deciding to start the violent arrests, is a private non-profit organization funded by many of the wealthiest residents of Boston. Now who are the Boston Police really protecting: the interests of the people, or the flowers of the rich?
I’m not from Boston and thus cannot speak to Mr. Menino’s impact on that community. He may be a wonderful mayor, he may be a tyrant; either way, concerning the Occupy movement, he is going down a path with Mayor Bloomberg on the wrong side of history.
Guess what? Despite the 200 riot gear clad police making scores of arrests, an out of touch mayor and the many obstacles that come along with occupation, Occupy Boston is still strong and growing stronger. They has a spike in cash donations today and have plans to purchase a generator, fearing the city may discontinue power supply at their location.
