Happy Thanksgiving! Here are the Balloons!!

Well we know it's the Macy's Day parade on Thanksgiving.... and here in NYC, the night before means joining what seemed like billions to see the balloons getting inflated.

You think Disney has lines? You have no idea. The line of thousands to see the balloons never got shorter... but it flowed at a great rate and kept moving... So here's what I saw

It's the Thanksgiving turkey... ok well it's what he looks like when lying on his side....



Sailor Mickey - face down.... Funny, since many of them are facedown and netted when they are being blown up, someone said it looked like all the characters were arrestees :)



Kool-Aid!!!



AFLAC!!!



Sonic



Snoopy



Larry Brewer (from my WMMB days in Melbourne) and Spiderman...



It's the Energizer bunny!



And of course we had to stop for the tourist picture in front of the poster!




And it may not be the perfect picture, but even the Empire State Building is colored for Thanksgiving!!




Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!!

OWS Day of Action

Ok, so it took me a day to recover from the OWS Day of action before posting.... Thursday was a long day.... and I only covered part of it.

My morning started with me at Zuccotti Park at 6am. The occupiers were planning to close down Wall Street by literally putting so many bodies in the way that people could not get in or out of the area.


It took a while to get everyone together across the street from the park. There were many sharpie markers going around so people could write the legal aid # on their skin in case they got arrested. There was also a 'breakfast' offering. That was a man with a bag of bread passing it around, another man with a bag of grapefruit and a guy walking around with cases of water.

Once everyone had breakfast the march began. As the protesters marched to areas where they thought they could get into the Wall Street or Exchange Plaza, they found they had already been barricaded off and there was a massive police presence. Workers who needed to get in had to show a work ID to get past the barricades. It was a no win for the protesters...so they kept marching...



Once they made it to 60 Wall Street, in front of Deutche Bank, everyone took to the street, did a couple bank -bashing chants and then started marching again. Now they were trying to come up the other side of the plaza to see if there was a way in... no such luck.

I should mention here there were three different groups marching. I was in the first group. So, after not being able to get in anywhere on three sides of the plaza, there was a lot of confusion of what to do.



It truly seemed no one had considered the police would have barricaded the road off and stopped them from accomplishing their goal. I even heard people say -'Where the hell are we going", "What should we do now?". There was a lot of confusion and disorganization. This surprised me since I knew this was a planned event. At the protest I was in on Tuesday, which was an unplanned protest, they seemed to keep things together better than they were at thier 2-month anniversary event. Go figure.

So, we went down Broadway to the entrance of Exchange Plaza there, and that is where more police were waiting. They were again, letting people in only if they showed thier ID. Now, here is what I kind of chuckled at. The idea of OWS was to 'stop wall street' on Thursday. But as the Wall Street workers came up to the crowd and said, "Excuse me, I need to get through", they let them through. I am not saying anyone should be taking their anger out on people who just happen to have a job there, but if your goal is to stop Wall Street, then letting the workers get in is not going to accomplish that goal. Just saying.....



This was the first area where there were major clashes. After a while, the police got sick of the crowd of protesters in front of the barricades and told everyone to make some space. They didn't. So, after a few warnings the officers started pushing the crowd.



The way they do this is to hold thier nightsticks sideways, and literally push against the crowd of people, pushing the crowd back. They also tend to have some pretty good sized officers take the lead on this, so it's pretty effective. Well, usually I am 3-4 people back in the crowd. Not this time. I was right at the front taking pictures and grabbing audio....so... when the night stick came out and I turned to get out of the way, it was my back that it got pushed into. That was a new one.

Did I get hurt? No. It was not slammed into my back or anything, just set up against my back and he leaned in pushing me, and thereby pushing the crowd as I let the people in front of me know they needed to move by my pushing into them. It worked. the crowd moved back about 10 feet this way.

Here I am doing to take a side jaunt. Someone already asked me "But didn't they know you were a reporter?". Doesn't matter. When there is a crowd of hundreds of thousands, you cannot and I do not expect the police to stop and say 'excuse me, who are you before I decide whether to treat you like everyone else?'. I am a part of the crowd and therefore amd treated just like the rest. If I am in the wrong place and there is an action against the crowd, I'm going to get it too... Perhaps that's why I didn't see a lot of other on-air reporters in the crowd. But I think if I am going to cover something, the more I can understand what is happening, the better I can tell the story...

After the 10-foot gap was made, there was a little lull. The officers went back to their stations and we were standing about 10-feet away, with protesters plotting the next move. That's when their roit gear came out. They had made their own sheilds and such to create a wall and approach the PD with.



By the way, the police did not have shields. a few fights broke out at this time and I watched a couple protesters go down and get arrested.





Then we stood. It seemed like a long time that we were there with no one knowing what to do... more of that confusion I mentioned earlier, and then someone decided we should go back the way we came and see who was at the intersection on the south side of the plaza. Well it just so happened EVERYONE was there. The other marches had shown up and this is where the most of the clashes against police happened.







At least one time watching this unfold I was truly terrified for a pair of police officers. They were swallowed by the crowd. That's really the only way I can describe it. The officers were suddenly enveloped and cut off from the rest, with protesters on all sides. I know I have described this before, but the crowd truly seems like a living breathing creature at times like this, constricting around the officers and everyone tightening in on them. It is frightening to behold. Other officers then pushed through the crowd to get them out.




We spent a while at this intersection and I can only imagine how frightening it also was for traffic. A vehicle would pull down the street and then suddenly would be swarmed by protesters who had taken ot the street. There were regular calls of 'take the streets' where everyone would rush into the streets, only to be told by police to get on the sidewalk and then to get into fights with police when they didn't.





This off and on fighting with police went on for an hour or more and then everyone started getting bored, me included. I had the same stuff to report over and over again. About that time they decided to move back up to Broadway and to Zuccotti Park again. So we marched...




When we got back to the park, there was a quick 10 minute celebration where people cheered what they called a victory... but I am not really sure what they were victorious over... and then decided to march again. Ok.... where to this time? The subways... to clog them up.

Once again I started reporting as we left the park. We started marching down Broadway and got about three blocks up when the leaders of the pack turned around and started retracing their steps. Were they going the wrong way? Did they just not know where they were going? I'm not sure, but we switched directions. We back-tracked a few blocks then everyone stopped again. Once again we were milling about in the road with no one knowing where the protest was going to go. Just about that time, things got really ugly. You see this budget truck?



It seems it belonged to the protesters and had all their tents and supplies in it. They saw the police getting into it and confiscating it and got into a brawl. Now, I don't know why the police targeted it. Did they know it was the protesters? Maybe. But it was in a no parking area so, well ask anyone who has been ticketed or towed... that's what happens in the city. That was not good enough for protesters. They were livid. And it took many more officers to bring things under control.

I mentioned before I usually stay towards the front of the pack, but as I saw a 5-person deep police line in riot gear moving in, I stepped back a bit. In a few moments it was under control, with, yes, a handful more arrests.

The marchers still seemed confused as to what to do and circled back to Zuccotti Park to regroup once again. Well, by this time it started raining. I am not sure if it was that they were hungry, tired, or didn't like freezing rain, but the numbers dropped, substantially....to half or less of what had been there before....

My shift was over so I started to head out.... and my impression of this days protest was that it was so disorganized compared to what I had seen in the past, even earlier in the week. I know Thursday evening was a massive event with the march over the Brooklyn Bridge and I know almost 250 people were arrested over the course of the day. From the helicopter shots of what was going on it may have looked like they knew what they were doing, but from the inside, it was a mess. From in the crowd, no one had an idea of where they should be going or what to do... and it makes me wonder if the movement has turned into a number of angry people, but without the focus it had not long ago...

Occupy Wall Street Nov 15 Part 2

March #2

At just after 8 am, we got underway on the second march of the day. This was not to be as long as the 10 miles or so overnight. It was just over a mile. It left Foley Square and went south. The idea was to circle city hall and give Mayor Bloomberg a piece of their mind as he was speaking.

Usually there were just police on one side of us as we marched, along the street side, keeping protesters on the sidewalk and out of the road...



but since City Hall was on the other side, there was now a police presence on both sides


You'll note the ones right by the gates of City Hall were in riot gear, just in case.



If you have seen any of the footage of the protests, there is always a lot of chanting. This makes for great background as I am doing live reports. I usually cannot hear a darn thing being said from the studio. I just desperately listen to hear my name and hope I am supposed to talk, but it sounds great with the chanting in the background.

However... as they marched around City hall the chanting changed from the typical "We are the 99%" and "Whose street? Our Street!" to this....



Yes, just seconds before they went live to me the "Fuck you Bloomberg" chant erupted and was the backdrop for my report. I mentioned it in my report... that they had turned to a less-than friendly chant for the mayor that the listeners may or may not have been able to hear...

We continued onwards and ended up at Canal and 6th Ave. It was an open lot that belonged to a church that was friendly with the protesters. So they were welcome to hang out there. It was used as a gathering / regrouping / demonstration spot and a large crowd showed up.



This is where I got bored again. There was a lot of message passing going on. If you have not heard how that works... well... they have what they call the 'people's microphone'.



You hear a female voice. She is in the middle of the crowd starting the information chain. It is then repeated in 'waves' by the people in the crowd so everyone can get the information and hear. It's a very effective way to communicate in such a massive crowd, but it takes forever to get a couple sentences across and I can be impatient. I used this time to interview people off to the side as well as talk to some of the police officers.

What did I talk to them about? Well I told them that there was a reason they were cops and I was not and that after watching them be insulted, ridiculed, spit on, hit with trash bags, I would have decked someone and I was impressed with their restraint. The officers I talked to smiled, said thanks, and otherwise did not say much. I don't blame them, I am the media... they have to be careful.

After a lot of 'people's mic' talk, a decision was made that some of the group was going to march back to Zuccotti Park to see if the police were indeed allowing them back in, as the court order said they should. Frankly, they wanted to test them and see if they could find the police in contempt of court.

So, we got in formation behind a banner and American flag and started marching again. This was another march of about a mile.




Along the way we saw a lot of support for the occupiers. There were people standing the doorways of businesses waving and taking pictures. Cars would honk their horns. People were even waving from their apartment windows, including the baby in this picture.



The Return to Zuccotti Park

When we arrived at the park there were two layers of police barricades set up - one on the edge of the sidewalk by the street and one surrounding the park itself. We were on the outside of both to start... and the police were not letting anyone through...



The protesters started pulling out copies of the restraining order that said they were allowed to return to the park and waving them at police..



The crowd kept pouring in, but with no where to go, it got tighter and tighter. Think sardines.

Katie and I both felt like cattle that had once again been kettled. We both had the same hope... that things would not get out of hand and pepper spray or tear gas be used because we could not move and would have been stuck in the cloud.

Then they started jumping the first barricade.


Police in riot gear still held the line around the park



and the protesters started marching around the park trying to find a way in. Every now and then someone would break through the police line and run into the park, only to get arrested.

This is also where I saw another piece of evidence that the media is not exempt from being arrested. There was a reporter on top of a covered bus stop with a video camera. You know, one of those big TV cameras. He was told to get down, did not, and there were hands of two police officers pulling him and the camera down from the roof. I was mortified to see him come tumbling off the roof. The police did catch both him and the camera, so there was no thud of the person or crash of the camera, but it was horrible to watch.

The protesters kept circling the park, trying to get in....This I found was a perfect time to get my next chunks of audio. As people walked by me, I asked them to react to what was happening and that they were not being allowed back into the park. I was getting great answers until some fresh, newer protester (who maybe did the later morning marches, not the major overnight one) decided to get snippy with me. She yelled at me 'maybe you should join us and not just stand there recording us!'. I shot back "I don't know where you have been, but I have been marching all night!" and had some of the other protesters jump in and backing me, yelling 'Yeah! she has been here all night'. They were defending me against one of their own. I must say I enjoyed that moment. And yes, that also illustrates that no, I do not know how to keep quiet, even when in an angry mob.

Katie and my coverage should have already ended, and we were getting tired. So, we started to leave.... Ok, to be honest, it took about an hour to leave. We kept being pulled back in by things going on and not wanting to miss history in the making...

But eventually, better judgment made us realize an 11 hour day was enough and it was time to let someone else take over. I will mention here, we were the ONLY radio reporters who did all the marches. Others were stationed at the parks and meeting points points, but were not in the midst of all the mobile protesting that was going on. I really feel they missed out. The energy and emotion was in being apart of the moving and breathing protest. The stopping points were not nearly as intense or alive-feeling as the marches.

That said... on my damage report is shin splints from running too many blocks in shoes that were not made for running and a bruised shin from the tumble over the chair in the police vs protester tumble.

Tomorrow I am going to wrap this up with a few more thoughts and give you a chance to hear what it sounds like to be in the crowd, in the march, in the melee...

Occupy Wall Street Nov 15 Part 1

My alarm usually goes off at about 3 am on Tuesdays... but on the 15th the phone beat out the alarm clock by almost an hour and a half. It was our overnight editor saying police were in riot gear raiding Zuccotti park and that I needed to get there. I was out the door in 15 minutes, picked up Katie Moore who was shadowing me for the day and we were on our way.

We were trying to get to Zuccotti Park, but on our way, saw a crowd of people going towards Foley Park. We parked and ran to see what was up and as we got closer we saw the police perimeter.

I called the newsroom to ask if they had someone from ABC (we are an affiliate) at Zuccotti Park because I wanted to stay here and see what would happen. Many of the people gathering here were protesters who had run from Zuccotti to keep from being arrested as the park was being cleared out...

Shortly after we arrived they worried about being kettled (where the police surround everyone and start arresting the group) so they wanted to move. And like that, Katie and I were in the midst of a mobile protest of about 5-600 people...

In the beginning there was some violence. Again, just as in the past. Everyone that got arrested at this time did something they knew not to do. Some would run off the sidewalk and taunt the police, hit hats off, toss bags of garbage, etc... And the police would grab them and arrest them. Well, not quite. None of the protesters went easily in the early morning. They would try to run from the police into the crowd, with the help of others pulling them and then the police would rush into the crowd to try and get them.

Katie and I got barreled over a couple times. The running protester would push right past us, the police would plow through to get to them and voila, we were crushed.

At one time, we slowed down in an area where there was some scaffolding set up and I told Katie to stay close to the railing, to keep us on the sidewalk, but less likely to be dragged with the crowd if they surged. Surges tend to happen when someone gets into it with a police officer and is getting arrested. The crowd surges towards the officer(s), things are often thrown, and they try to pull that person back into the crowd with them. It's easy to get swept away in the crowd, kind of like a rip tide, but you can't swim out of this one. Katie found a piece of rail to lean on, but I pointed out it had a bolt sticking out, and depending on the direction of the surge, she could have had the bolt cutting into her back, so she moved down the rail. It's interesting the things you have to think of to keep from getting injured.

That is not to say there were no injuries. During one of the 'bowling' down events we were in, I saw the surge coming and she didn't so I pulled her towards me, but there was no getting out of the way. We were literally shoved into the street by the impact of the running protesters and the police trying to stop them. For some reason there was a folding chair that was half folded in the street.... It connected squarely with my shin as I tried to keep my balance during the melee. I was thankful I had tall boots on about then. It hurt, but not as bad as it could have.

After a couple arrests, things got calmer and there was chanting and walking... a lot of walking... We walked... and walked...and walked....



The idea being the police would have a tougher time stopping a moving target. I believe we walked about 10 miles in the almost 3 hours we were walking. Now the police responded to what was happening with a divide and conquer approach. They would let half the group cross an intersection and then close the road and tell the other half they had to go another way...do that a couple times and each smaller group becomes more manageable. It was as this was happening that we were kettled.

We got to a crosswalk and were part of that second half and told to stop. We turned around and there were a line of police behind us too.


And within seconds the group of us were surrounded. I was not sure exactly what was happening, so I went to an officer towards the edge, politely introduced myself, asked if we could get out of the 'containment area' and was given a stern 'no'. Got it. I told Katie we should get against the wall and stay calm and quiet and I called the newsroom to ask a question I have never asked before "Who do I call if we get arrested?"

We didn't. After about 10-15 minutes we were allowed to move on.

A couple more times our group was pared down and at one point we found that we were far from any of the larger groups, and we wanted to catch up, so we took a side street and started running to get ahead of the crowd. Now, I was dressed to be outside all day, but not to run. Honestly I don't there was anything I could have worn to make me feel better about running. And no, I don't mean jogging. I mean sweating, huffing, running. At one point, I told Katie and the other young NYU student who was running with us that I was too old for this running crap and that I was not that far from 40... They both told me I did not look like I was that old and seemed more liked their age... which seemed to give me some of that young, foolish energy, and I was back to running...

We ran down one side street, up four blocks, then cut back, and made it just in front of the larger group and the police so we were back in the bigger part of the march.

The police continued following the groups through the streets, trying to keep them in contained areas as they walked.. this is when 'Occupy Walgreens' happened. There were a number of protesters who saw there was a Walgreens store with two exits and dashed in, trying to come out the other side and get out of the police containment area. I'm not sure if it worked as I kept on moving.

It was interesting to see how information is sent around in the streets as these groups were being divided. There were a few methods of communication. First, they quickly set up a twitter group and those with phones and iPads were sending out updates for everyone. Then there were the bicycles. Bicyclists would ride from one group to the next passing on information of what they were planning to do and when.

Now that there were a lot of small groups all over town, the decision was made to go back to Foley Square and try to regroup.

There was a large crowd that just kept growing when we arrived. Many of them were tired and hungry. They had been moving all night, as we had, after leaving Zuccotti Park. Someone was coming around with bagels, bananas and water and many of them grabbed something to snack on. Others threw their bags and packs on the ground and decided to lie down for a couple minutes or take a nap.



At one point we saw a pair of NYPD buses go by. They were packed with protesters that had already been arrested and that led the crowd to get riled up again. I believe there were a few more arrests around this time.



Also while we were at Foley Square Katie spotted actor Joseph Gordon Levitt. He was doing his own documentation of what was going on and she grabbed a quick interview.




I will admit... this is when we got bored. At Foley, as they were regrouping there was a lot of down time and it hit Katie and I like a brick. They were discussing proposals of what to do for well over and hour...and well it was like sitting through any meeting... even worse, sitting through a meeting after a couple hours of marching and intensity of the situation.



It was an adrenalin drop and we both felt it. She was nice enough to go grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks for each of us to keep us awake...and back on the job we went!

A decision was finally made on the next course of action. The Mayor was going to speak about the protests at 8 am, so the protesters decided they were going to march past city hall to give him a piece of their mind.... and then onto another location where they were meeting up with other groups for a larger demonstration at 9... and the march was on again....

And that part of the story will be continued in part two of this blog...