In Chapel Hill, NC, a SWAT team brandishing assault rifles arrested members of the press and protesters who had taken over a long vacant used car dealership (via boingboing.net),
One demonstrator said they were acting in the tradition of working-class squatters’ movements around the world that some say inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots across the United States.
The group printed a flier that proposed a possible new use for the space that would include a free clinic, kitchen, child care, library and dormitories, among other uses. The flier acknowledged they were breaking the law by entering the building.
“Make no mistake: this occupation is illegal,” it said, “as are most of the other occupations taking place around the U.S., as were many of the other acts of defiance that won the little freedom and equality we appreciate today.”
Paramilitary blues ready for action at UC Berkeley: "Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy."
As increasingly military-style police tactics are being deployed to deal with Occupy at the expense of civil liberties, Norm Stamper, chief of the Seattle Police Department during the WTO protests in 1999, speaks out in the Nation (“Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street,” Nov. 9, 2011).
Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”
The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country. . .
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