Saturday morning around 4:30 Boston Police removed the Occupy Boston protesters encamped at Dewey Square. From what I’ve heard so far, the police seem to have behaved with more restraint than in other cities: no injuries among the 46 or so arrests. My Veterans For Peace chapter, which has openly supported and stood beside Occupy Boston, credits an ongoing relationship between Boston Police Superintendent Evans and the Occupy Boston protesters with avoidance of the excesses we’ve come to see around the country. Well and good; peaceful protests should not be met with heavy-handed tactics.
Nevertheless, some of the tactics employed by the BPD should still be causes of concern. Early morning raids seem to have become the modus operandi these days. These have always struck me as troubling; we know from history that totalitarian regimes use this tactic–think Gestapo, STASI, Stalin’s Internal Security, Peron’s and Pinochet’s secret police, and a host of other regimes. Nighttime raids guarantee a degree of cover, and once the deed is over & done with it’s easier to spin the event. Or at least it used to be. Now we have the internet, mobile phones, social media, and so on, so the night no longer hides everything. Still, Occupy members report that…
“Credentialed press, citizen journalists, academic researchers, and #OccupyBoston media members were repeatedly corralled and moved to surrounding areas 50 feet away or more, prohibiting many from thoroughly covering the raid. From pointing lights in photographers’ lenses to targeting the two official #OccupyBoston USTREAM live videographers for removal, officials went to great lengths to block media access.”
Clearly there’s an attempt to adapt on the part of the police, though it’s self-evident that such efforts are not completely effectual. The point, however, is that this country’s police forces are behaving less like community-centered constabulary, which one would like to believe takes a narrow and restrained view of “keeping the peace,” and more like a national force intent on controlling the unruly masses.
The fact that Occupy Boston has ultimately been “dealt with” like other Occupy protests raises a number of points, not the least of which is the self-evident coordination between mayors and police around the country. While not in itself a bad thing (witness the successful spread of community policing over the past two decades), the fact that such coordination was done in response to citizens exercising their Constitutional right to protest against both their government and the corporate world should at the very least raise a flag. As the examiner.com reported last month, the coordination was not about so much about responding to specific & local legal issues as finding the procedural means and rhetorical cover to end the protests. The apparent participation of the FBI & Homeland Security should make us all concerned about the attitude of those in political and social power towards ordinary American citizens. Developing a consistent, nationwide set of talking-points, willingly and uncritically disseminated by the media, to justify heavy-handed, even militaristic police tactics is not to be taken lightly.
The extent to which all of this reflects a unified, systematic process to silence dialogue, debate, and protest on the status quois an open question. Yet one does not have to delve into the murk of conspiracy theories to be understand that the effects are the same. Whether the cause is an oligarchic group of power elites or an institutionalized attitude of distrust of the people, one of the fundamental pillars of our democracy–the right to petition the government for redress of grievances–is threatened.
This issue is neither left nor right. While my own politics and social sensibilities are certainly left-of-liberal, I try to listen to and understand those who consider self-identify as conservatives (or at least those who articulate their beliefs using reason rather than emotion & aggressive jingoism). The Occupy and Tea Party movements have some fundamental similarities; though they often advocate for different solutions, both movements spring from long-term frustrations over our governmental institutions’ increasing inability to serve the interest of the citizenry. The Tea Party has not engaged in direct actions as the Occupy Movement has, and as such has not been targeted by authorities (though we can probably guess that many of its members have been kept under surveillance). And much of the libertarian sensibilities of Tea Party members has played well into the hands of politicians whose loyalties lie more with the corporate world than with the American people. Still, it seems to me that Tea Partiers should be upset at how their legitimate anger over the corruption of our government by wealth and power has been co-opted & effectively neutralized by disingenuous politicians and irresponsible media organizations. I think we can be assured that if those on the right took a more activist approach to their protests, they would be handled in much the same manner as those on the left.
The problems that lead to both the Tea Party and Occupy movements show no signs of going away. Nor does the default, heavy-handed response. But when we consider that the anger & distrust is not just an American phenomena but is surfacing in countries around the world, it seems clear that confrontations will both continue and escalate, here and abroad. It’s critical that protests remain non-violent, though that will become more and more of a challenge as the reactions become more and more harsh (which I have no doubt they will once it becomes clear that the protests will not end with the removal of tents). If we are to have a more peaceful & just society, peace and justice must be practiced from the start.
