YouTube

Anthony Bologna won't face any charges for pepper-spraying kettled protesters.

Late on a Friday afternoon is widely agreed to be the best time for sheepish newsmakers to announce the things they really really hope the media doesn't report on too much. Last Friday afternoon, coming at the end of the most exhausting and depressing news-week in recent memory, was a full-moon-high-tide-converging-low-pressure-systems super-storm of Friday news-dump oblivion.

In short, it was a great time for the Manhattan District Attorney's office to announce that it won't be bringing any charges at all against Anthony Bologna, the NYPD commander caught on video gratuitously pepper-spraying a bunch of helpless, immobilized, unarmed and nonviolent women in September of 2011.

More »

Some the library books ruined in the November 2011 police raid on Zuccotti Park.

In an agreement announced today, the City of New York will pay more than $365,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by people whose property was destroyed when the New York Police Department raided Zuccotti Park and evicted Occupy Wall Street on Nov. 15, 2011.

Occupy Wall Street had brought the suit against the city over the destruction of the People's Library, a collection of about 5,500 donated books that formed a central part of the community that sprang up for two months in the park. In the eviction, many of the books were completely destroyed, and others were so badly damaged as to be unusable. Occupy Wall Street claimed $47,000 in damages, all of which the city agreed to pay today.

More »

Jon Gerberg via Vimeo

This officer may be pointing a video-camera at the scene of Michael Premo's arrest, but police say they didn't shoot anything that night.

Many of the readers who commented on last week's story about Michael Premo, the Occupy Wall Street protester who beat his criminal charges last week thanks to video evidence, wanted to know: Would the police officer whose testimony was contradicted by the video face any consequences? Would he be charged with perjury?

The short answer is: Don't hold your breath.

But that's not to say that a closer look at Premo's trial doesn't reinforce the impression that the police testimony against him looks a lot like perjury.

In the initial complaint, Premo's arresting officer, Ron Vincent, described a version of events recounted to him by a second officer -- the one who actually handled Premo's physical arrest -- who he referred to as the "informant:"

More »

Facebook

Michael Premo was found not guilty of assaulting an officer after video evidence contradicted police testimony.

In the first jury trial stemming from an Occupy Wall Street protest, Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges yesterday after his lawyers presented video evidence directly contradicting the version of events offered by police and prosecutors.

Premo, an activist and community organizer who has in recent months been a central figure in the efforts of Occupy Sandy, was one of many hundred people who took part in a demonstration in Lower Manhattan on December 17 of 2011, when some protesters broke into a vacant lot in Duarte Square in an attempt to start a new occupation.

More »

Facebook

Morgan Gliedman was arrested with Aaron Greene, who the Post incorrectly linked to Occupy Wall Street.

When police raided the West Village apartment of Morgan Gliedman and Aaron Greene on Saturday, the New York Post was first to the story.

It was the sort of story that was right in the Post's wheelhouse. Gliedman, 27, nine months pregnant, the daughter of a prominent doctor and the product of a Park-Avenue-and-Dalton upbringing, and Greene, a Harvard alumnus, caught in a filthy den of drugs, decadence, and bomb-making materials just blocks from the townhouse where Weather Underground bomb-makers accidentally blew themselves up decades before.

The story also had another element that appears to becoming a Post signature: citing anonymous sources, apparently from within the NYPD, Post reporters Jamie Schram, Antonio Antenucci, and Matt McNulty reported that Greene had ties to Occupy Wall Street. The assertion was right up top in the story's lead sentence:

More »

Last year around this time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg sent in his force of NYPD officials to Zuccotti Park right before dawn, evicting the original Occupy Wall Street encampment that ignited a movement that would soon spread across the world. A week later, while the protestors reeled from the enforcement, hundreds of thousands of Americans descended upon department stores and Wal-Marts all over the country, stomping each other's faces (and sometimes killing each other) to grab the last piece of half-off Tubberware or whatever. We have all seen the videos.

More »

Joe Alterio

The Rolling Jubilee's campaign of debt forgiveness begins tonight.

Long before the curtain goes up on the Rolling Jubilee's kick-off telethon tonight, it was clear that the event's organizers have struck a nerve.

The Rolling Jubilee, a project of the debt-activist group Strike Debt, an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street and the people behind the Debt Resistors Operation Manual, is based on a diagnosis that Americans are struggling under an ever more complex and stifling architecture of student debt, medical debt, credit card debt, and mortgages.

The solution proposed by Strike Debt is based on the biblical institution of a the jubilee, a year in which debts were wiped clean and indentured servants released from their bondage. The Rolling Jubilee will buy debt on the debt market, where it can be had for pennies and the dollar, and then, rather than hounding the debtors for repayment, it will simply forgive the debt.

More »

C.S. Muncy

Police manhandling a minor whose shirt was torn off during arrest at a March Occupy protest.

New Yorkers, if they've been paying any attention at all, have known for a long time that the way the NYPD treats journalists and protesters doesn't exactly live up to what you'd expect in a democratic society with a free press.

Now, it looks like the NYPD's actions in relation to Occupy Wall Street have landed the United States in trouble with the international community, as a new report finds the NYPD and other police departments' actions have violated human rights law.

More »

When the filmmakers behind 99% The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film were raising money for their project last fall, they framed their project as an experiment in collective creation that mirrored their subject. As they wrote on their Kickstarter page, "In a process that mirrors the OWS movement itself, 60+ award-winning filmmakers & artists are making a film about it. Together."

Since then, the film has raised more than $20,000 on Kickstarter and won a development grant from the Sundance Institute. But the full extent of the filmmakers' commitment to the radical collectivism of Occupy Wall Street is being challenged by another filmmaker, who has used snippets of their footage in his own work without their permission and is refusing their requests to remove it.

More »

The legal aftermath of of the NYPD's crackdown on street protest over the past year continues to unfold, with another lawsuit filed against the department in federal court.

The most recent suit is filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund on behalf of two protesters, Johanne Sterling and Joshua Cartagena. Sterling was one of the young women kettled and pepper-sprayed by Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna on September 24 of last year.

More »