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Cecily McMillan Speaks Out On Abuse Endured During Arrest

July 10, 2014 Kira Brekke, www.huffingtonpost.com , , , ,
The Occupy Wall Street protester who was jailed for elbowing an officer in the face was released just last Wednesday, and she is now speaking out about the brutality she faced while incarcerated. Her arrest sparked outrage and for the 58 days that she served, she said she endured serious brutality, including sexual assault: I was locked up, hands and feet with my legs spread open, exposed in a storage closet with bloody rags all around. Officers were using this space to charge their cell phones, coming in and out, talking about how I needed a good hard you-know-what because I was obviously so out of control as a woman. It was not an environment in which I could have said, ‘Hey, you know what, you guys ought to listen to me, I was sexually assaulted by a police officer.'

City Agrees To Largest Occupy Wall Street Settlement Ever

June 11, 2014 Nick Pinto, www.gothamist.com , , ,
During Occupy Wall Street’s heyday in 2011 and 2012, the NYPD made them pay, again and again and again, for exercising their right to assembly and free speech. Nearly three years later, New York City taxpayers are still paying for the NYPD's approach to policing lawful protest. Today, lawyers announced the largest settlement with New York City yet, with the city paying out $583,024 to 14 protesters who were arrested for disorderly conduct on January 1st of 2012. Sources familiar with today’s settlement said that that the case was ready to go to trial before Judge Shira Scheindlin until a few months ago, when, while being deposed for the trial, a senior NYPD official who was present during the arrests was unable to point out in videos of the event a single moment when any of the defendants committed any act of disorderly conduct. According to the protesters' complaint, the demonstrators were part of a march passing through the East Village that night when police ordered them to disperse. “This was a constitutionally unlawful order,” said Wylie Stecklow, a lawyer for the protesters, at a press conference at City Hall today. “The march was not yet blocking the sidewalk, and just minutes before this unlawful dispersal order, the police had ordered the marchers to keep walking.”

NYPD Inspector General Facing Call To Investigate Spying

May 29, 2014 Christopher Robbins, www.gothamist.com , ,
Philip Eure, the NYPD's new Inspector General, begins his job today with a complaint against the department's practice of spying on political organizations. The AP revealed what many had known for decades: NYPD operatives attend meetings of groups like the Jena Coalition, the International Solidarity Movement Chapter, and Occupy Wall Street. A police memo obtained by the AP [PDF] showed that a spy even traveled to New Orleans in 2008 to sit in on meetings for a variety of social justice groups. Some of the groups mentioned in the report are responsible for today's complaint. “We need tangible, concrete proposals of how we can ensure the NYPD does not target an entire group, set of groups, or political activists in general based on their participation in political advocacy,” the complaint states. Technically, those guidelines already exist: the NYPD is supposed to abide by the Handschu Decree, which since 1986 has stated that police may not spy on political groups when there is no "reasonable indication" of unlawful activity. Evidence can be collected on groups where there is no evidence of criminal activity, but only if the City gets the approval of a three-member oversight board. After 9/11, a judge allowed the NYPD to bypass that panel and significantly loosened the "reasonable indication" rule, allowing police to spy but only note conversations that concern possible criminal activity. But it appears that the department has even ignored this guideline: the memo detailing the actions of the political groups obtained by the AP has details of innocuous plans for demonstrations, not illegal activity.

In Complaint, Activists Seek Audit Of New York Police Surveillance

May 28, 2014 Marc Santora, www.nytimes.com , , ,
Several groups plan to file a formal complaint on Tuesday seeking an audit of the New York Police Department’s intelligence gathering operations, after recent revelations that the department had been monitoring political activists, sending undercover officers to their meetings and filing reports on their plans. The groups said the complaint would be the first over surveillance to be filed with the department’s new office of inspector general; it is likely be a closely watched test for the office, whose duty is to oversee the tactics and the policies of the police. The City Council, despite opposition from former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, created the office last year after complaints about the overuse of stop-and-frisk tactics and surveillance of Muslim communities. The complaint being filed on Tuesday follows the release of documents by The Associated Press this spring revealing that undercover police officers had attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists. Several of the groups mentioned, including Friends of Brad Will, worked together to draft the complaint.

Post-Occupy, #myNYPD Makes New York’s Blood Boil

April 26, 2014 Sarah Jaffe, www.inthesetimes.com ,
On Tuesday, April 22, the New York City Police Department had a very bad idea. Someone at the NYPD decided that the department could be doing better with its social media engagement and asked people to tweet photos of themselves with NYPD officers using the hashtag #myNYPD. Perhaps predictably, the photos were not what they wanted. Activists quickly flooded the hashtag with photos of violent arrests, many of them from the days of Occupy Wall Street. The result was that the hashtag trended, with activists around the world joining in, prompting spinoff hashtags and even garnering the notice of the tabloids and the New York Times. It seems the NYPD doesn't quite understand the depth of the city’s anger toward the department, even with a new (well, new-old) commissioner under a new mayor who ran a campaign against stop-and-frisk. Mayor Bill de Blasio even went so far as to declare: “Now that we've moved away from that broken policy, and we've settled the lawsuits, and we are changing the dynamics on the ground between police and community, I think the average officer's having a much better experience.”

Cecily McMillan Felony Trial Begins Today

April 7, 2014 Staff, www.popularresistance.org , ,
After two years of delays, the trial of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan will begin in Manhattan Criminal Court, Monday April 7th at 9:30am, 100 Centre St. – Room1116 Part 41. In a notorious high profile incident Ms. McMillan, a New School University graduate student, was arrested, sexually assaulted and beaten into a seizure by police on March 17, 2012. Turning a blind eye to obvious police misconduct, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is prosecuting McMillan; she faces a 2nd degree felony assault charge with a possible seven (7) year prison sentence. This is one of the last unresolved Occupy Wall Street-related criminal cases. Before court begins Justice for Cecily will hold a press conference at 9am Monday April 7th outside 100 Centre St.; Cecily McMillan and her attorney Martin R. Stolar will discuss the case. DA Vance has adamantly insisted on harsh treatment – a felony prosecution – for McMillan while ignoring NYPD wrongdoing.

The Case Against Bill Bratton

March 12, 2014 Josmar Trujillo, www.blackagendareport.com , ,
If Bill de Blasio is really a progressive, why did he bring back the architect of Stop-and-Frisk as his police commissioner? When it comes to aggressive policing gospel Bratton is the “pastor of the flock.” Bratton seems the least qualified to make the changes that are “desperately needed to relieve communities of color living in what many see as a racialized police state.”

NYPD: You Can’t Submit FOIA Requests for Our FOIA Manual

March 9, 2014 Staff www.muckrock.com ,
Unless NYPD prepared their FOIL manuals solely for litigation, this ruling is a concise page of babbling pseudo-legalese. Mirroring the initial rejection, NYPD's appeal rejection starkly undercuts Commissioner Bratton's commitment to "do more to open up the organization, to make it more inclusive, to make our information more readily available to the public." Here, the department has dug in its heels: to get the NYPD Freedom of Information unit to divulge how it understands and applies principles of transparency, a freedom of information request apparently is not enough.
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