To give you an idea of how big the encampment is, a friend of mine's daughter has been there for a while. I had in mind to look for her and I found her very quickly because she was at the training. But even if she hadn't been I think I could have found her without much problem by just walking around (although I almost missed her because she was about to take a nap in her tent.)
I asked her about reports I mentioned here before of bizarro tales of public masturbation and assaults. She said there had been some strange behavior but not that much.
And stuff like that will continue to happen even after Occupy is gone because you've got the largest homeless concentration in the country downtown. When we left a couple blocks away a guy was dry-humping the sidewalk. I'm sure my daughter saw it but she didn't say anything and I decided to leave it alone. It did momentarily interrupt my trying to explain to her what was going on with the Occupy story. It's a good exercise trying to explain this stuff to a 13-year-old. She said none of her teachers have talked about it.
My friend's daughter said she had made a lot of friends there, after arriving not knowing anyone. She said there were some problems with "egos" but mostly people were just normal and nice. I saw one example of the ego thing when a guy at the training was saying that the police have been taking pictures of the encampment and surveying it with helicopters. He said "they probably know this place better than we do" and suggested that before the deadline if everyone moved their tents a few feet it would throw the police off. He was politely told that this training was about resisting arrest and such like and he got pissed and stormed off, saying "you have individual will, use it!" It was funny because the idea that cops are going to be confused by moving a bunch of ramshackle tents is just ludicrous. The guy struck me as one of those people who likes to think that he (usually he) is attracting the attention of entire government agencies.
One other thing. I was at Joshua Tree National Park over Thanksgiving. Like U2, we didn't camp out but stayed in a motel nearby. But we did do some hiking in the park and it struck me today that what is happening at City Hall looks a lot like a campground at Joshua Tree. All the worries on Fox News or wherever about hygiene are just complete horseshit. I heard Rebecca Solnit on the radio the other day saying that they're complaining about hygiene because that's all they've got.
I think chances are good the police won't get out of control because the city only recently paid out a big settlement to victims of police brutality at a 2007 demonstration. Of course they've paid out a lot of such settlements so it could mean nothing when the boots hit the ground.
A day after officials announced that they would begin clearing out the Occupy L.A. camp Monday morning, there was a sense at the City Hall camp Saturday that eviction was a foregone conclusion.
The question was how many people would stay behind to resist, and would they do so peacefully. On Saturday morning, Clark Davis, an activist, walked among the encampments and reminded people about the city’s deadline to move, informed them about civil disobedience training taking place later in the day and told them there would be an early evening screening of a documentary, “A Force More Powerful,” about international nonviolent resistance movements.
“The mood I’m getting is that everyone is pretty much ready for this thing and obviously they’re going to behave in a way they deem appropriate for this situation,” he said. “But I do get a sense that even if they’re not really part of the movement, they’re hopefully going to stick with this concept of nonviolence
Most people are aware of what’s going on and most people seem intent on not caving in and just surrendering and packing their stuff and getting out of here. In the next 24 hours, I think we’ll have a better sense of how many people are really committed to this idea of staying behind and getting arrested.”
[...]
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2009/feb/05/local/me-lapd-settlement5
Los Angeles to pay $13 million to settle May Day melee lawsuits
The agreement covers most of the claims filed over LAPD actions at the mostly peaceful immigration demonstration at MacArthur Park in 2007.
February 05, 2009|Maeve Reston and Joel Rubin
The City Council on Wednesday agreed to pay nearly $13 million to people injured or mistreated in a May Day melee in MacArthur Park, bringing to more than $30 million the money spent over the last two weeks to settle lawsuits alleging LAPD misconduct.
The action served as a reminder of the Los Angeles Police Department's troubled past and its continuing path toward regaining the trust of some city residents and elected officials.
For the LAPD, Wednesday's $12.85-million payout -- covering most of the claims by immigration demonstrators and bystanders injured May 1, 2007, in MacArthur Park -- has a few strings attached.
Under the settlement, the department must submit to court oversight of its crowd control procedures -- another layer of federal involvement that comes as LAPD leaders are impatient to be free of a long-standing and more onerous monitoring program imposed after the Rampart Division corruption scandal.
The May Day settlement, approved unanimously by the council, comes a week after members agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle civil rights lawsuits filed by four current and former LAPD officers, three of whom were awarded $15 million by a federal jury after claiming to have been falsely arrested and maliciously prosecuted during the Rampart probe. That sum was on top of more than $75 million the city has paid to civilians affected by the 1999 scandal.
"Over $32 million in these last two weeks on Police Department litigation cases -- that's a tremendous amount of money," Councilman Dennis Zine said after the 11-0 public vote. "My concern is that the Police Department needs to be held accountable and responsible. . . . There are still other cases pending. This isn't the end."
He added, "While crime's down, we respect that, the conduct of the officers is important, and the management of the department is ultimately responsible for that."
Council President Eric Garcetti noted that the cost of the May Day agreement was enough to hire almost 130 police officers. "It underscores why police reform is as important as police hiring," Garcetti said. "A handful of officers can cost the city millions of dollars. We saw that in Rampart; we're seeing that here -- more than a handful here."
The settlement approved Wednesday will resolve a class action lawsuit and more than half a dozen individual lawsuits in federal court. It accounts for a large portion of the more than 300 May Day claims against the city.
The allegations of police mistreatment and excessive force resulted from clashes in MacArthur Park as an immigration march wound down. Officers from the LAPD's elite Metro Division used batons and fired rubber bullets to disperse what was a predominantly peaceful gathering. Officials said the confrontations were prompted by a group of agitators who threw bottles and other objects at police. Dozens of people, including a number of journalists and police officers, were injured.