The Policing of Occupy Wall Street: The Conflict between Defiance and Order

The Occupy Wall Street movement has presented a series of challenges to local law enforcement agencies. In response, many of them have relied on a variety of aggressive tactics, which in some cases have shocked public opinion, putting the issue of protest policing on the national agenda. Three main narratives have emerged to explain these tactics: 1) there has been a broad “militarization” of the police brought on by the Federal War on Drugs and anti-terrorism spending. 2) There has been a nationally coordinated effort to repress the OWS movement because of the threat it poses to existing political and economic arrangements. 3) local police have been forced to act because OWS encampments have been a source of permit violations, sanitations problems, and secondary criminality. Each of these explanations holds important truths, but they all fail to capture the underlying nature of the conflict between OWS and the police. Reviewing accounts and videos of police actions and protestor tactics in ten major US cities, journalist commentaries on these actions, and publically available official documents, I conclude that there is a fundamental conflict between the strong orientation of OWS demonstrators in favor of defiant non-violent protest and the current orientation of many US police forces towards zero-tolerance order maintenance policing.