Mudflats ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Coverage

TheMudflats.net and yours truly have been singled out for honor by the prestigious magazine The Atlantic this week.

Was it for our amazing investigative reporting?

For the awesome photo spreads we do?

In depth coverage of the proposed Pebble Mine?

Unfortunately, no.

It’s because I nearly got my head beat in at Occupy Wall Street.

I’ve written about 15,000 words, and taken about a terabyte of photos at OWS over the past year – witnessed the worst and best of America, broke news stories, got shots that no one else did – and yet this is what we get singled out for… OK, we’ll take it.

A newly released report compiled by the law clinics at NYU, Fordham, Harvard, and Stanford detailed over 130 specific incidents by the New York Police Department that “warrant investigation by authorities.”

The report finds that the “[NYPD] response has thus, in some individual cases and considered cumulatively, undermined basic assembly and expression freedoms. At times, it has itself also presented a threat to the safety of New Yorkers.”

I think anyone here at The Mudflats, or the listeners of The Shannyn Moore Show could have told you that, without involving any lawyers… or Ivy League schools.

The Atlantic went through the report – all 195 pages of it – and found the 14 most egregious. Among the 14 that they cited was my run-in with the police (near trampling and beating) on St. Patricks Day, aka #M17.

Here’s the excerpt directly from the report:

A journalist reported that officers threw down and beat a photographer with batons, even after he had shown his press pass. The journalist reported that the photographer “yelled several times, ‘I’m PRESS! PRESS!’ yet was slammed on the head [with a baton] twice after he’d been thrown to the ground when the police shoved back the protesters.” In the same report, the photographer stated: “there was another push from the police — they saw me fall …. Just didn’t care …. Then came the batons. I couldn’t see if the people that were on top of me previously got hit at all but I certainly did, twice to the back and once on the head.”

You can read the original piece that details that night “Return of Occupy: Beaten, but Not Down” on the Mudflats at this link here.  (I’ll work on the photo issue…until then check out the flickr gallery of that nights photos here)

Also if you feel like losing all faith in the future of our Democracy you can read the full report “Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street” here.

Or read the brief from The Atlantic, and just lose a little bit of faith here.

Comments

comments