Listen on the go: Four Days investigation, narrated by Kevin Donovan
From our archives: The FBI and Occupy
By the time we published “Six Days” last Spring, nearly three months after the events in New York, nearly a year and a half after Occupy Wall Street was declared illegal by Zuccotti Park occupiers, and nearly a year, four months, and five days after the police raid at Zuccotti, the movement itself remained fragmented. It was hard to imagine that when the occupiers were arrested, they’d all be released on the same day in the week following Occupy Wall Street.
The NYPD announced that it’d issued nearly two dozen criminal summonses–they ranged from disorderly conduct to riot to disorderly conduct to riot. It was an enormous show of force.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke at the New York State Democratic Convention, where he described our movement as “unruly and unruly,” and declared that “the time has arrived to stop this violence and bring back order in this square.” The New York Daily News reported that he was the “first politician to address the protests and use the word ‘unruly’ since Bloomberg took office.”
A few days later, Bloomberg signed New Yorkers’ and the movement’s petition against the $3.4 billion in bail being doled out to protesters in connection with their arrest. As it turns out, that number was almost certainly far smaller than the figure that Mayor Bloomberg himself gave the press.
Then, on May 21, while people around the world were looking at headlines like “Occupy Wall Street,” the FBI announced that it had opened an investigation into the “Occupy Wall Street” protest area in Zuccotti Park, and had asked the New York Police Department to conduct a “thorough investigation of alleged misconduct.” (Zuccotti Park occupations have repeatedly been declared illegal by police.)
