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By Dave Lindorff
Police Supervisor Anthony Bologna pepper sprays retreating demonstrators by ThisCantBeHappening
Probably the biggest accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street movement to date has not been the light these courageous and indomitable young activists have shined on the gangsters of Wall Street, as important as that has been. Rather it has been how they have exposed the police of the nation's financial capital as the centurions of the ruling class, and not the gauzy "people's heroes" that they have been posing as since some of their number, along with many more firefighters, nobly gave their lives trying to rescue people in the World Trade Center towers on 9-11.
That image of cops as heroes was always largely a PR creation. Not that many cops actually died in the towers (23 from the NYPD and 37 from the Port Authority Police, vs. 343 firefighters). Most of the city's cops that day and every day before and since 9-11 have spent their time patrolling the streets of the city as usual, harassing young people, poor people and people of color, conducting random stop-and-frisk searches, handing out parking tickets (often undeserved) and making the occasional arrest of actual criminals.
There are certainly good cops and bad cops, but the good cops are for the most part not heroes. They're decent people doing their job properly, just like most of the rest of us in this society, whether we're janitors, teachers or even journalists. The problem is that the bad cops -- and there are way too many of them in police departments across America -- are a menace because of the unchecked authority they wield and the weapons they carry.
As MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell put it in an opinion piece called "Last Word" on the cable network that was sadly unique for television for its brutal honesty, "Every day in America police are too tough, every day in America police cross the line and abuse citizens, every day in America police get away with that," and nothing is done about it. It gets covered up by any "internal investigations" that get done.
The gratuitous brutality on display by New York police during a Saturday march that was part of this Wall Street Occupation action, and the hundreds of wrongful arrests, the excessive police presence, the countless beatings of young people who are doing nothing but expressing their disgust with the nation's economic ruling elite, the battering of people with cameras who try to exercise their First Amendment right to videotape police officers abusing others, the spraying of toxic chemicals into the eyes of young women who are just standing behing police lines doing nothing, that went on that day and through the night, and the automatic justifying of all these atrocities by police authorities and the office of the mayor, are, to put it gracefully, the actions of pigs...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/794
