[UPDATED BELOW]
On Tuesday, one lucky group of New York City journalists were treated to an evening of drinks, pizza squares, and funny gift exchanges at Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s annual Holiday Party for local press.
In attendance this year were reporters from the New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, CBS, Fox, and other outlets. The journalists, no doubt straining to retain their “objectivity” throughout, were able to schmooze with dignitaries such as Bloomberg’s longtime partner Diana Taylor (who sits on the Board of Directors for Brookfield Properties, the retail firm that partially owns Zuccotti Park) and Paul Browne, spokesperson for the New York City Police Department.
Bloomberg made sure to crack a few jokes at the expense of Occupy Wall Street, whose encampment he ordered forcibly cleared on November 15, by way of a surprise paramilitary style raid. Reporters attempting to cover the police action were harassed, assaulted, and barred from viewing the area — for their own protection, Bloomberg later claimed. (Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who represents the Financial District, has since called on Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation.) All told, police arrested at least ten journalists.
In response, the New York Times, along with The Associated Press, the New York Post, the Daily News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, WABC, WCBS, and WNBC sent a strongly worded letter to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly denouncing the NYPD’s conduct during the raid.
None of this stopped New York City’s press corps from laughing it up with the mayor last night.
“I know only five of you in here have actual press credentials,” Bloomberg reportedly quipped, a reference to his office’s assertion that a mere five of the twenty-six journalists arrested overall displayed city-issued press passes.
“There were so many little jokes” about OWS over the course of the night, Nida Khan, a reporter/producer who attended told me. “You could see the awkward reaction from people in the room. Some laughed at these jokes, others were just uncomfortable.”
Bloomberg bestowed “gag gifts” upon a number of journalists, quipping that they “are reserved only for ‘the one percent,’” according to Fernanda Santos, an education reporter for the New York Times. Santos herself received a fake Department of Education “VIP Security Pass.”
“I had no reservations going to the party,” Santos told me. “It’s a good time and a fun tradition the mayor’s press office started some years back.”
In return, Dave Seifman, a longtime columnist for the New York Post, presented Bloomberg with gag gifts on behalf of “Room 9” — the group of journalists who regularly cover City Hall. Rich Lamb, of CBS Radio, served as his “Vanna White,” according to an attendee.
One of the gifts was a tarp that Seifman said “they picked up from the Sanitation Department on the West Side,” Khan recalled. This, of course, was a mocking reference to the NYPD’s forced seizure of tarps, tents, laptops, and many other items in Zuccotti Park, which were thrown into sanitation trucks and dumped in a massive pile at a warehouse-type facility on West 57th Street.
Bloomberg draped himself in the tarp and posed briefly with it, attendees said. Todd Maisel of the New York Daily news tweeted a photo of Bloomberg smiling from ear-to-ear.
The meeting is presumed to be off-the-record, though no formal guidelines are unstated, according to several journalists who were there. Maisel, the photographer, described the mood as “light-hearted.”
“The mayor sometimes deals with tough issues with humor,” he said. After taking the photo, Maisel told me, one of Bloomberg’s aides came over and expressed concern to him about the optics. “They try to deflect bad press from the mayor. But the mayor — he doesn’t care that much.”
And on the menu, according to an attendee?
“Pulled pork on tortilla chips, shrimp dumplings, pizza squares with sausage, pizza squares with mushrooms, and some kind of spicy (buffalo?) chicken stew, served in small white cups with a slice of jalapeno pepper on top.”
Sounds delicious!
UPDATE: This article originally stated that 26 journalists were arrested during the Nov. 15 raid on Zuccotti Park. In fact, 26 journalists have been arrested since the beginning of the movement, while at least 10 were arrested on that particular day. The article has been changed to reflect this.
The Staten Island, N.Y., hotel where Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich appeared on Saturday afternoon for a “Tea Party Town Hall” could hardly have been more nondescript. Nestled deep inside a corporate park somewhere in New York City’s most bucolic (and conservative) borough, the Hilton Garden Inn looked identical to scores of other hopelessly bland places across America — which didn’t stop Gingrich from beginning his speech with praise for the hotel’s artwork. “Very, very impressive,” he told the 600-person crowd, to applause.
The staples of Gingrich’s repertoire — aggressive rhetoric, intense self-regard, historical pomposity, and organizational chaos — were on full display. “In his world, the government is sovereign, and we are merely subjects,” Gingrich said of President Obama. “In our world, we are citizens, and the government is our servant.” He even tried his hand at a bit of theology. “All of us are flawed,” Gingrich noted when a journalist asked about his well-documented personal foibles. “The belief that only one person was perfect, and that was Christ” encapsulates “the heart of Christianity,” he affirmed.
Gingrich arrived late, causing reporters to speculate that he’d been watching Herman Cain’s withdrawal announcement. Sure enough, when Gingrich finally arrived, he wasted no time in wishing Cain well — thanking him for contributing “bold ideas” to the campaign, such as the “9-9-9 tax” plan. Before opening the floor to questions, Gingrich veered off to talk about the Middle East, asserting that Obama has failed to adequately curtail Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, which he said poses a “direct, mortal threat to the very survival of Israel.”
“The Arab Spring may well turn into a hurricane season of grave, grave danger for the United States,” he explained.
One local journalist asked Gingrich to comment on remarks by former GOP Rep. Guy Molinari, who represented Staten Island in Congress during the 1980s. Last week, Molinari called Gingrich “evil,” adding, “the thought that this man could be president of the United States is appalling.”
“I have stepped on a lot of toes,” Gingrich conceded. “One of the reasons I left Congress is, I frankly burned out a number of Republicans — because I pushed so hard for reform,” he said. “I think I represented the spirit of the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.”
Toward the beginning of his speech, as Gingrich meandered through another castigation of Obama, someone in the crowd abruptly called out “Mic check!” — the Occupy movement’s signature call for attention.
“Occupy Staten Island says …” this interloper shouted, before being drowned out by the crowd’s angry boos. “Bum!” several sneered. “Don’t worry, Newt — we got your back!” another man exclaimed. A chant of “Newt! Newt! Newt!” reached full force, and the man was escorted from the room. As he exited, someone slapped a “Newt 2012” sticker on his head.
“As I was saying,” Gingrich continued, “about who I presume was his candidate …” The crowd roared.
Gingrich did not scant, of course, the historical significance of his candidacy. “This will be the most important election since 1860,” he declared, likening himself to Abraham Lincoln twice over the course of the speech. A position paper recently posted on Newt.org – suggesting that the Federal Court of West Texas ought to be abolished — constitutes the “boldest” proposal for reforming the American judiciary “since Lincoln’s First Inaugural,” Gingrich proclaimed.
Gingrich touched on disparate themes, at once denouncing “hedonism and acquisition,” and then touting his instrumental role in launching Plan Colombia, the U.S. military’s notorious counter-narcotics interdiction program in South America. He even commented on the notion of holding banks accountable for causing the 2008 financial crisis.
“The idea of any one of us getting the attention of Bank of America is virtually impossible, because they’re so gigantic,” he said. “By the time you get to somebody with any level of power, if it’s not a billion-dollar problem, they can’t afford to pay attention to it.” He said that “too big to fail,” by his lights, means “too big to be managed.”
The man who asked the question then interjected. “I am one of the 99 percent, and I appreciate this dialogue,” he said — another invocation of the Occupy movement. This time, the crowd cheered. Gingrich nodded.
After the speech, Newt and his wife greeted supporters, signed books and posed for photos with fully uniformed Army soldiers. His fan base proved willing to look past Gingrich’s many faults.
Kevin Collins, a former police officer and Staten Island Tea Party board member, rejected Molinari’s criticism of Newt’s character. “Guy didn’t like the treatment that his daughter got from him [Gingrich] when she was in Congress,” Collins said, referring to former GOP Rep. Susan Molinari. “I know Newt Gingrich personally, and I’ve always liked him.”
I asked Frank Santarpia, a real estate investor and co-founder of the Staten Island Tea Party, about some viewpoints Gingrich has espoused only in the past few years that would seem to complicate any bid for support from “Tea Party conservatives” — namely, his endorsement both of an individual mandate in healthcare and the need to “take action on climate change.” But Santarpia was undeterred. “I am not interested in what happened 25 years ago, 15 years ago, or two years ago,” he said. “Circumstances change, people change.”
Newt’s mixture of blarney and bombast is going over well with Republican voters, especially those whose priority is the complete evisceration of Barack Obama. A Des Moines Register poll released later on Saturday showed Gingrich with the lead in Iowa, at 25 percent — followed by Ron Paul in second and Mitt Romney in third. The durability of Gingrich’s surging poll numbers remains something of a mystery; he opened his first office in Iowa just a few days ago. (Conversely, Paul’s organization is “very good,” Gingrich told me during the book signing. “He’s very formidable in Iowa.”)
If Republican primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are as conciliatory toward Gingrich as they were in Staten Island, the grandeur with which he views his presence in contemporary politics will, no doubt, continue to inflate.
In early stages of Occupy Wall Street, I sometimes encountered people who harbored a legitimate concern: Wouldn’t prolonged media attention to altercations between police and demonstrators distract from the movement’s message?
This apprehension always struck me as misguided. What could be more central to Occupy’s guiding philosophy than the idea that the rule of law has been subverted by corporate interests? In collusion with government functionaries and beyond meaningful accountability from the public, these interests have created a separate realm of law for themselves — one that orients the financial and political systems in their favor, to the detriment of everyone else. If this is indeed true, and the law itself is marred by a systemic corruption, then law enforcement — manifested physically in the form of police officers — is an appropriate focus for a social movement seeking redress of grievances.
As Occupy Wall Street grew, the New York Police Department’s “crowd control” tactics became increasingly bizarre and aggressive: historic mass arrests, motor scooter attacks, destruction of books, ramming horses into demonstrators, putting New York Post reporters in choke holds – to name only a few. And following Tuesday’s brazen raid of Zuccotti Park, carried out in the dead of night, the NYPD indicated that de-escalation is not on the horizon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Police officials at the highest ranks, under the direction of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, have taken to simply making up the rules as they go along.
In the same way that financial elites rig the political system, law enforcement elites like Bloomberg and Kelly have rigged the criminal justice system. Occupy Wall Street is hardly the only victim. The NYPD is on pace to make 700,000 extralegal “stop-and-frisks” this year alone, while its own officers skirt accountability for their misconduct. Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was sanctioned by NYPD Internal Affairs for pepper-spraying at least four demonstrators without provocation, received a maximum punishment of 10 lost vacation days on account of his actions.
If you’re an ordinary citizen, and you get caught on video dousing people with noxious gas like Bologna did, you get summarily locked up. And if you’re young and black, expect to receive the law’s full wrath. But when you’re an NYPD commanding officer responsible for all of Manhattan below 59th street, like Bologna was at the time of his attack, you get essentially a free pass.
Additionally, throughout my coverage of OWS, various police officials in plainclothes have refused to identify themselves upon request — a violation of NYPD patrol guide procedure 203-09, effective June 27, 2003, which states that all “members of the service” are required to “courteously and clearly state [their] rank, name, shield number and command, or otherwise provide them, to anyone who requests [they] do so. [They also must] allow the person ample time to note this information.”
Among the men who violated this directive are Lt. Daniel J. Albano, described in a 2009 court document as a “Lieutenant in the NYPD legal bureau and a high-level policy-making official for the NYPD.” When I asked Albano whether he was even with the NYPD, he replied, “I’m the plumber.”
Another is Sgt. Arthur Smarsch. On Tuesday morning, demonstrators were allowed back in post-powerwashed Zuccotti Park for a short time. Within what seemed like a half hour, officers began to force people out again. There was much confusion. Someone finally prodded Sgt. Arthur Smarsch to explain what was going on, and I heard him say that there was a “suspicious package” in the park. He then told an NBC4 reporter his last name upon request.
Smarsch was misinformed, because no other official ever mentioned anything about a “suspicious package,” nor was any search of the park ordered.
I recalled first seeing Smarsch at an early-morning march on Oct. 14, when he was unusually violent with demonstrators — even by NYPD standards — for no real discernible reason. He would not provide me (or several others who asked, including members of the National Lawyers Guild) with his name. I later retrieved it by other means. Smarsch is the director of Manhattan South Borough.
During the Zuccotti Park eviction, the NYPD enforced a strict no-public-access policy in both the park and its surrounding area, ensuring reporters would be virtually prohibited from observing the raid. Press, credentialed or not, were repeatedly barred from proceeding past the newly formed police line. Journalists associated with the Associated Press, the New York Times, the New York Daily News and other outlets were arrested.
At one point that morning, I got stuck in a chaotic mass of people, and was nearly battered with a baton while attempting to record video. Some NYPD officers seemed to enjoy all this immensely, especially Police Officer Toussaint — one of the several who laughed as they pummeled everyone in their path. I saw one man get smashed in the face with a riot shield; another was knocked over the hood of a taxi.
When I asked one officer why it had suddenly become unlawful to stand on that portion of the sidewalk, she answered, “You’re blocking pedestrian traffic.”
Someone called out, “We are pedestrian traffic!” The officer responded, “So are we.”
The officer’s remark, of course, was senseless. Taken at face value, it would presumably mean that those of us being impeded from standing on this normally open sidewalk were ourselves responsible for the ensuing obstruction of pedestrian traffic. As if the hundreds of amassed riot cops or newly erected metal barricades had nothing to do with the blockage that she so dryly referenced.
It is not good that NYPD officers now live in a world where coherency of argument is no longer even an aspiration. Having spoken to over a hundred police officers throughout Occupy Wall Street, about 70 percent respond to queries by saying nothing at all, another 15 percent grunt or mutter something inaudible, 10 percent make some kind of dismissive remark, and the remaining 5 percent are willing to have a human conversation.
If this is the reality of police behavior at a political demonstration in downtown New York City, what has happened to the reality of policing? The NYPD, ostensibly tasked with maintaining public order, has proven that it cannot handle political dissent without exerting anything less than military-style force. For two months, it has continuously abridged the rights of citizens to peaceably assemble, and of journalists to document these assemblies. It has lost its claim to legitimacy.
Michael Bloomberg yucks it up (Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar) 
Newt Gingrich on Staten Island, New York (Credit: Michael Tracey) 
An Occupy Wall Street demonstrator is arrested by New York City police. (Credit: Mike Segar / Reuters) 