Occupy protestors arrested nationwide
A demonstrator with Occupy Chicago protests outside the Federal Reserve Bank building in Chicago, Ill., on Oct. 5, 2011.
Occupy Wall Street movement protestors were arrested in the hundreds in Chicago, Denver, and other cities in addition to New York on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, CNN reports.
Most of the arrests occurred after protestors refused to leave when permits to demonstrate expired or public spaces closed for the evening.
In Chicago at 11:30 p.m. Saturday night, police told the 500 or so protestors who had erected tents in Congress Plaza that they had to leave since the park closed at 11 p.m., the Chicago Tribune reports. Between 1 a.m. and 3:30 a.m., the police arrested about 175 Occupy Chicago protestors for violating municipal code.
"I'd like to ask why (New York Mayor Michael) Bloomberg let the people stay in the park peacefully and clean up their own mess, and (Chicago Mayor) Rahm Emanuel won’t let us do the same, Joseph Eichler, 23, remarked to the Chicago Tribune.
In Denver, police arrested 24 people who pitched dining tents in a corner of Civic Center after the Occupy Denver march officially ended around 2 p.m., the Denver Post reports. The authorities began making arrests at 6:20 p.m., using pepper spray to disperse protestors as they knocked down the tents.
Other cities where Occupy protestors were arrested overnight include Phoenix, Ariz., where 40 protestors refused to leave a park, and Raleigh, N.C., where 19 people were arrested after their protesting permit expired, the New York Daily News reports.
In New York, police arrested 14 people at Washington Square Park for violating a midnight curfew, CNN reports. During the day on Saturday, 78 demonstrators had been arrested.
In many cases, the protestors didn’t seem to mind their arrests. "It was a culmination of us pushing against the system and the system pushing back," Andrew Smith, 27, told the Chicago Tribune upon his release from Chicago’s Central District police station on Sunday morning. "We took a stand and tonight and we’re going to take a stand tomorrow."
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