NYTimes | The New York Police Department puts an endless list of tasks on the shoulders of its so-called white shirts — the commanders atop an army of lesser-ranking officers in dark blue.But the portfolio of the white shirt has now unexpectedly grown to include the role of enforcer.
As the Occupy Wall Street protests, which began on Sept. 17, lurch into their third week, it is often the white shirts who lay hands on protesters or initiate arrests. Video recordings of clashes have shown white shirts — lieutenants, captains or inspectors — leading underlings into the fray.
White shirts led the face-off with protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon. The episode provided no viral YouTube moments, as the senior officers avoided confrontations with the demonstrators. Yet as hundreds of arrests were made, chants of “white shirts, white shirts” could be heard.
And a white shirt is the antagonist in the demonstrations’ defining image: Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna’s dousing of some penned-in women with pepper spray on Sept. 24, which seemed to surprise at least one of the blue shirts standing near him on East 12th Street, near University Place. The department is investigating the spraying.
Martin R. Stolar, a member of the National Lawyers Guild who is representing protesters, said, “It appears that it is white shirts that are directing the rough arrests.” To him, their actions constitute a policy from on high. Even the chief of department, Joseph J. Esposito, the highest-ranking officer, was mixing with marchers last Saturday, briefly holding two people by the arm and directing their arrests.
Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, did not return a call to discuss the department’s strategy, but in an e-mail he said most of the roughly 80 arrests made last Saturday “were made by police officers directed by supervisors.”
In everyday policing situations, the one-two punch of uniformed response usually goes like this: Blue shirts form the first wave, with white shirts following. But those roles seem reversed in the police response to the Wall Street protests.
3 comments:
The nation's
10 largest financial institutions hold 54 percent of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held
20 percent. In the meantime, the number of banks has dropped from more than 12,500
to about 8,000. Some major mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 years:
Mother Jones
Connection between Wall St and Economic Growth dis-connected long ago. Marx was correct about the National Gambling machine.
The extraordinarily sophisticated gamification of trading - replete with hackers and physical/infrastructural/locational advantage - has turned it all into a signal intelligence and processing challenge completely dissociated from underlying fundamentals. This is strictly compute power, network advantage, hacking, and cutting edge game theoretical application gone wild.
I know I posted at least 6 fairly detailed articles about this topic, but it's "gambling" only in the sense that casinos gamble. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2009/09/sec-trys-to-ban-goldman-sachs-favorite.html the flash trading racket is such a ludicrously stacked deck, a purely technological arms race, that to call the non-insider participants anything other than marks, suckers, dubs, tricks, johns, etc..., is ridiculous on the face of it.
Post a Comment