NYPD deliberately kept reporters and legal observers away during Zuccotti Park raid

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NYPD deliberately kept reporters and legal observers away during Zuccotti Park raid

Crackdown comes ahead of Thursday marches

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, November 15 2011, 11:49 PM

Paul Taggart/Bloomberg

Police arrest an Occupy Wall Street protester downtown Tuesday following an overnight crackdown in Zuccotti Park.

The hundreds of cops who carried out the raid on Zuccotti Park deliberately kept the press and even legal observers away from the scene — thus hiding the city’s actions from public scrutiny.

 

Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly deny that. The nighttime sweep simply aimed “to reduce the risk of confrontation in the park . . . to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood,” Bloomberg claimed Tuesday.

 

The crackdown, of course, came just ahead of major solidarity marches planned for Thursday by unions and community groups on the two-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The biggest of those marches was planned for right here. Bloomberg’s raid will likely make Thursday’s march even bigger.

“This heavy-handed act has made us more determined to support these kids,” one city union leader said yesterday.

 

There is, for instance, the case of City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Washington Heights), who rushed to Zuccotti Park when the raid started and was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

 

Several people detained with him told me Rodriguez was bleeding badly from a gash in his forehead. Still, by 6 p.m., he had not been arraigned and his lawyer, Leo Glickman, had not been allowed to see him.

 

“We’re not asking for special treatment,” Glickman said. “We’re asking for him to be treated like everyone else — and he’s not . . . It’s an effort to silence him and silence this protest.”

 

Retired Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith can’t believe what she saw this week. At the urging of her son, who joined the Zuccotti Park protests weeks ago, Smith had volunteered to be a legal observer in case of mass arrests.

 

She received a text message early Tuesday that a bust was imminent, so she got to Zuccotti around 1:30 a.m. As she exited the subway at Broadway and Dey St., she met a wall of cops in riot gear who were preventing people from getting anywhere near the park.

 

“There was a black woman standing next to me,” Smith said. “She kept frantically telling the cops her daughter was in park and she wanted to make sure the girl was okay.”

 

“All of a sudden, a cop takes his baton and cracks her in the head,” Smith said. “She hadn’t done a thing. Then they started chasing people down the street.”

 

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