Mayor Nutter busted up the #OccupyPhilly encampments last night at about one in the morning. It wasn’t any great surprise. He had set a 5pm deadline on Sunday for the protesters to leave or face arrest. There was a little drama for a few hours as the protesters wound themselves around Center City, and then about 44 of them were arrested as dawn approached. Now they will try to figure out how to keep the movement going.
There’s been talk that the attention-grabbing encampments and accompanying sit-ins and marches have already served the purpose of kickstarting Occupy, so the next phase of the movement should involve giving up the protest sites and migrating to the Internet, where information can be more efficiently disseminated and the movement’s energy redirected into more pragmatic pursuits like voter education and mobilization.
Chris Faraone—a reporter with The Boston Phoenix who’s been covering Occupy Boston and has spent time at a dozen more Occupy sites around the country the past two months—disagrees. “Whether it’s occupation-camping mode or not, I see a physical presence being the watermark of this movement,” says Faraone. “People really need to get together in person to make plans for these events and marches, which I really think are working. I think it’s now in the back of these CEOs’ minds that, ‘Fuck, 3,000 people are gonna show up at my office.’ The head of Bank of America in Boston does not like the fact that 500 people show up at his house once a week. That kind of thing isn’t gonna happen if you move everything to the Internet.”
More realistic answers came from veterans of the Philly protests.
“It gets pretty fuckin’ cold in the winter, so good luck if you can’t have any kind of shelter,” says Roman Reznichenko, who spent a week at Occupy Philly in late October. He adds that there are transportation issues, too. “If you’re not camping down there, you gotta get there and I know I couldn’t afford that,” he says. “I know a lot of [Occupiers] who are from Jersey or out in the sticks and they don’t have the money to go back and forth every day.”
And if the encampment itself has been part of the message, then having to pack up shop every night could kill the momentum. “Out of sight is out of mind,” says Zuccotti Park mainstay John Nicholson, a 25-year-old EMT worker. “The press isn’t gonna cover it nearly as much without the camping and some of the drama that’s gone along with that, so if people aren’t devoted to sticking around all night and keeping it going and challenging them when they say you can’t be there, then this could all fade away pretty fast,” he says.
For the record, the Philly police and the mayor have had a cordial and respectful attitude toward the Occupiers. And they deserve credit for dispersing the camps without firing teargas or wading into the crowds with billy clubs. And no pepper spray!! See? All that heavy-handed crap is unnecessary. (You can view 293 photos from last night here). There were a few instances of bike-cops getting too aggressive and causing injury, and horse-cops stomped on at least one woman’s feet. But compared to how New York and Oakland have behaved, it was almost without incident.
Los Angeles busted up their Occupy encampment last night, too. The weather in LA will present no obstacle to setting up camp somewhere else.
Where do you think the Occupy movement is heading?
