NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of police officers in riot gear before dawn Tuesday raided the New York City park where the Occupy Wall Street protests began, evicting and arresting hundreds of protesters from what has become the epicenter of the worldwide movement protesting corporate greed and economic inequality.
Hours later, the status of the now-empty park remained uncertain as National Lawyers Guild obtained a court order allowing the protesters to return with their tents. A state court judge called an 11:30 a.m. hearing on the legality of the surprise eviction.
At a morning news conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the evacuation of the two-month-old encampment was conducted in the middle of the night "to reduce the risk of confrontation in the park, and to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood."
Hundreds of police officers surrounded the park overnight in riot gear, holding plastic shields and batons which in some cases were used on protesters. Police flooded the park with klieg lights and used bull horns to announce that everyone had to leave.
"I was bleeding profusely. They shoved a lot of people’s faces into the ground," said protester Max Luisdaniel Santos, 31, looking shaken. He pulled open his cheek to show where his teeth had cut into flesh. He said he lost his shoes in the scuffle but wasn’t arrested.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said around 200 people were arrested, including dozens who tried to resist by linking arms at the center of the park or chaining themselves together with bicycle locks.
As the workday began, hundreds of protesters marched through lower Manhattan, looking for a new space to gather. Some chanted, "This is what democracy looks like" and others chanted: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, our billionaire mayor has got to go."
The park itself remained surrounded by police barricades.
Protesters in New York fought back the threat of a similiar sweep weeks ago, but momentum against the camps appears to be growing as authorities across the U.S. grow impatient with the self-proclaimed leaderless movement and its lack of a focused demand.
Bloomberg said the city knew about the court order Tuesday but had not seen it and would go to court to fight it.
"From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals: guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protestors’ First Amendment rights" to free speech, he said in a statement. "But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority."
The city told protesters they could come back after the cleaning, but under new tougher rules, including no tents, sleeping bags or tarps, which would effectively put an end to the encampment if enforced.
Concerns about health and safety issues at Occupy Wall Street camps around the U.S. have intensified, and protesters have been ordered to take down their shelters, adhere to curfews and relocate so that parks can be cleaned.
Police have made similiar sweeps and arrests in recent days in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon. Two camps had fatal shootings last week, including a suicide, and bodies were found at two other camps.
At about 1 a.m. Tuesday, New York City police handed out notices from Brookfield Office Properties, owner of Zuccotti Park, and the city saying that the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous.
Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, said the park had been cleared by 4:30 a.m.
Notices given to the protesters said tents, sleeping bags and other items had to be removed because "the storage of these materials at this location is not allowed."
Alex Hall, 21, said police walked into the park "stepping on tents and ripping them out."
A rift had been growing in recent weeks between the park’s full-time residents and the movement’s power players, most of whom no longer lived in the park.
The protesters who planned marches and rallies and set plans into motion held meetings in donated office space high above the park, in skyscrapers just like the ones housing the bankers they were protesting.
Elsewhere in the U.S., anti-Wall Street activists planned to converge at the University of California, Berkeley on Tuesday for another attempt to set up an Occupy camp, less than a week after police arrested dozens of protesters who tried to pitch tents on campus. They will be joined by Occupy Oakland activists who were cleared by police from a tent city before dawn Monday.
In London, authorities said they were resuming legal action to evict a protest camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral after talks with the demonstrators stalled.
More than 200 tents have been pitched outside the iconic church for a month in a protest inspired by the New York demonstration.
In Toronto, eviction notices were delivered Tuesday to Occupy protesters who have been camped in a downtown park since mid-October.
