The Occupy Wall Street protest kicked off on September 17 as activists answered the call of the culture-jamming group AdBusters and allied organizations. Their goal is to occupy Wall Street for several months. The protesters have set up tents, kitchens, and other infrastructure to support a long-term occupation.

My colleague Joe Macare of In These Times has a good synopsis of the intensifying police pressure on the demonstrators.

So far, most of the media coverage has focused on the police reaction to the protesters, as opposed to the protesters’ anti-capitalist agenda. To be fair, the protesters’ leaderless approach makes it difficult to distill any unified message, beyond a shared frustration with the power of banks and big business.

More than 80 people were arrested on Saturday during a breakaway march towards Union Square. Some of of them were committing civil disobedience by walking on the street, while others were apparently arrested on the sidewalk, according to Democracy Now!. The police used orange mesh and physical force to break up the crowd. A video released by the protesters and reposted on the New York Times’s City Room appears to show a high-ranking NYPD officer pepper spraying a group of women whom the police have already corralled on the sidewalk with orange mesh (a crowd control tactic known as “kettling”).

James Fallows posted a slowed down, annotated version of the video at Atlantic.com. Fallows describes what he sees in the video:

He walks up; unprovoked he shoots Mace or pepper spray straight into the eyes of women held inside a police enclosure; he turns and walks away quickly (as they scream, wail, and fall to the ground clawing at their eyes) in a way familiar from hitmen in crime movies; and he discreetly reholsters his spray can.

You may have already seen this. If you haven’t, it is worth knowing about. If this is what it looks like, it is outrageous. The mayor and others should say something. And this man can certainly be identified.

The pepper spray incident was a big story for the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid.

Zucotti Park, where the protesters are encamped, is a privately-owned public park. The landlord, Brookfield Office Properties Inc., wants the protesters evicted, but surprisingly, the NYPD wants them to stay put, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

[Photo credit: David Shankbone, Creative Commons.]