Is NYPD Running a Hamsterdam Operation to Destroy Zuccotti Park?
The Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park has been under strain recently, with growing numbers of visitors putting new demands on OWS’s ad-hoc infrastructure. Now some are charging that the New York Police Department is intentionally adding to the stress in an attempt to bring the occupation down.
Zuccotti’s activists and agitators have been joined by an increasingly visible contingent of folks drawn by the plaza’s free food and other attractions, a group that Harry Siegel in the New York Daily News describedyesterday as “a fast-growing contingent of lawbreakers and lowlifes, many of whom seem to have come to Zuccotti in the last week with the cynical encouragement of the NYPD.” The Daily News describes a growing division in the park between an activist east and a “non-participant” west, the latter representing “a shady mélange of crusty punks, angry drunks, drug dealers and the city’s many varieties of park denizens.” (Tabloid
