Reports:

21 – 09 – 2011: According to Occupy Wall St:

Four people have been arrested so far (as of 1:28 PM EST) on day 5 of the Occupy Wall Street protest. The first arrest took place this morning during Opening Bell March. At 10:10 AM, Isaac Wilder was taken into police custody and is being held at W. 154 St. New York, NY. One firsthand witness has informed us he was at the front of the peaceful march taking place on a public sidewalk when police demanded protesters turned left. When Isaac asserted his right to continue marching forward in public space, he was immediately arrested.

Two other arrests took place at 12:30 PM EST at Liberty Plaza. Two first-hand witnesses have confirmed the following story:

People were peacefully assembling on the sidewalk and the police told the public that they could not stand on public sidewalks. one person, was standing peacefully on the sidewalk and holding up a sign and the police swarmed him and arrested him. he peacefully went with them, without resisting in any way. People then peacefully walked with him and chanted in solidarity. And the police ran into the middle of the crowd and tackled one of the people there, and arrested him.

Below is the statement of Adrianna, a demonstrator who was assaulted by the police:

I was picketing at Broadway and Liberty St. and heard shouts and swarms of people come down the block, so I knew it must have been an arrest. I stayed up there because I knew that’s where they were going to bring the arrested people. So a huge crowd started approaching and getting louder while holding up peace signs. They pulled one guy at random and after they put him in the van, Officer Caradona and other officers rushed the crowd standing on the corner, pulled one guy from random, and started to pull him and shove him to the ground.

That’s when I started to try to push everyone back when somebody, it might have been Caradona, grabbed and swung me around and punched me in the face and I fell down. Luckily someone was there to pull me back up again and I know they pushed and shoved other people too. They were pushing and shoving everyone, but none of us resisted. We kept backing up, trying to get out of their way and continued holding up our peace signs.

20 -09 -2011: Arrests at Wall Street this morning:  “Police drag a protester across the ground, cutting his hands. You can clearly hear a police officer say that the young man will receive medical attention – in spite of this, it was our medics who bandaged him when he was released. Later, you can see the police deny a young man an inhaler during an asthma attack which the crowd explains may kill him”, reports Occupy Wall St.“We “export” “Democracy” by force to other countries, but we surely don’t have it at home!” said a protester…

18 – 09 – 2011: Yesterday, tens of thousands of activists and outraged Americans marched on Wall Street, the heart of the U.S. financial district, as part of a global day of action against the banks. The number varies between 10.000 to 30.000. The protest was, mainly, organised by the counterculture group AdBusters. Kalle Lasn, co-founder of AdBusters magazine has helped via Tweeter and other websites to organize an anti-banks campaign encouraging tens of thousands of Americans to hold a non-violent protest in Lower Manhattan. “What we are hoping for is to have a very large number of people turn up in Lower Manhattan and start walking toward Wall Street peacefully, signs in hand,” Lasn said on Common Dreams. “If we have peaceful assemblies and debates about what our demands to President Obama should be, then bit by bit we can create a situation that will rival what happened in Egypt.”

As Julia Riber Pitt reports:

All of us walked over to Bowling Green. The number of cops surrounding the streets kept increasing. Once we arrived at the park we assimilated into the large crowd that had already shown up. All sorts of people were there: anarchist comrades, union activists, members of bolshevik-style political groups, generic anti-war/anti-corporate activists, Ron Paul nuts, Larouche’s douches, everyone. Activists handed out pamphlets which mapped out where we were going to march and occupy.

Police blocked off Charging Bull…

Meanwhile, mobile phones were blocked around the Wall Street area, while there are many rumours that the police did not allow some journalists to approach the protesters.

#Fascism RT @victorialane: @tommy_waters: Interesting. heard on Manhattan police scanner, “keep streets clear of the media”. #takewallstreet

— Cascadian Zapatista (@PDXZapatista) September 17, 2011

Soon afterwards, the police set up barricades all around us. Wall Street was blocked off completely. Just shut down. We were told that “location 1″ on the map that was given to us when we first arrived was changed because we would be risking arrest if we marched over there. In response, we retreated into the park and the sidewalk outside the Museum, where we gathered into a bunch and chanted, “No justice, no peace, FUCK CORPORATE GREED,” and, “This is what hypocrisy looks like,” as we pointed towards the office buildings where the corporate fatcats lurk on weekdays.

(Julia Riber Pitt, See also: Occupy Wall Street)

On Saturday afternoon about 700 people, many carrying sleeping bags and tents, were seen moving into a camp space, under the disturbing presence of hundreds of police officers who had blocked from early access to the stock market.

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