> The march from Times Square along Broadway was wrapping up just west of
> Washington Square Park shortly after 4 p.m., the march's scheduled end,
> when about a dozen demonstrators circled and started burning American
> flags, witnesses said.
>
> Police wearing riot gear moved in and started arresting demonstrators
> and pushing the crowd toward Waverly Place and the park. The crowd
> responded by chanting "Go fight crime!" and pushing back at police.
> Several demonstrators threw water bottles at officers and pepper spray
> fire was fired. It was not immediately clear by whom.
>
Around 4 pm, I was walking west along the Park, passing by a line of policemen with plastic cuffs attached to their belt hooks. A few minutes later, I was standing on the steps of one of the buildings across from Washington Square Park, right beside the packed intersection of Waverly and Washington Square Park North to get a better view.
A group of riot geared, helmeted policemen marched into the center of the intersection forming a circle in the middle and pushing protesters east along the outskirts of the Park. At the same time, a fresh army of policemen and several large police trucks were moving towards the intersection from the opposite direction, effectively penning people in while supposedly trying to get them to disperse.
What followed was a five to ten minute standoff between police and protesters with protesters chanting - 'We all live in a military state, military state, military state - to the tune of 'Yellow Submarine'.
Then, all of a sudden the police trucks started backing up. The protesters thought they'd won out and started chanting 'whose streets our streets, whose cops our cops' to the retreating police force. Fresh protesters were arriving into the area from behind those retreating cops. There were also a significant number of protesters trying to leave the area at that point (I was one of them).
Simultaneously, police reinforcements had been called in, including more trucks and buses, and were making their way across 8th street, down Broadway and toward the park. At that point, camera crews were pushing their way into the crowd. Which would have been just before the pepper spray / arrest incident.
The tension would probably not have reached the height it did, if the city had just allowed marchers to continue west towards 6th avenue, instead of trying to disperse way too many people from a tight intersection.
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