Showdown looms between Wall Street protesters and cops

NEW YORK (AP) ― Officials moved to end Wall Street protesters’ monthlong occupation of a park that spawned similar gatherings across America and is going global, setting up a potential confrontation Friday with police and an uncertain future for a movement that claims to speak for the disillusioned middle class.

Demonstrators at the 0.2 hectare park in lower Manhattan have said they won’t go anywhere at the Friday morning deadline when the park’s owners, their patience worn thin, want them to clear out and stop pitching tents or using sleeping bags.

The company that owns the private park where the demonstrators have camped out said it has become trashed and unsanitary. Brookfield Office Properties planned to begin a section-by-section power-washing of Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, at 7 a.m.

“They’re going to use the cleanup to get us out of here,” said Justin Wedes, a 25-year-old part-time public high school science teacher from Brooklyn who was one of about 400 people in the park Thursday night. “It’s a de facto eviction notice.”

The demand that protesters clear out sets up a turning point in a movement that began Sept. 17 with a small group of activists and has swelled to include several thousand people at times, from many walks of life.

Occupy Wall Street has inspired similar demonstrations across America, is spreading to Canada and Britain, and become an issue in the Republican presidential primary race.

The protesters’ demands are amorphous, but they are united in blaming Wall Street and corporate interests for the economic pain they say all but the wealthiest Americans have endured since the financial meltdown.

There was a frantic scramble of activity in the park Thursday. Hundreds of demonstrators scrubbed benches and mopped the park’s stone flooring in an attempt to get Brookfield to abandon its plan. A last-ditch protest was planned to begin at midnight.

Protesters would be allowed to return after the cleaning, which was expected to take 12 hours, but Brookfield said it plans to start enforcing regulations that have been ignored.

No more tarps, no more sleeping bags, no more storing personal property on the ground. In other words, no more camping out for the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who have been living at Zuccotti Park for weeks. The park is privately owned but is required to be open to the public 24 hours per day.

A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose girlfriend is a member of Brookfield’s board of directors, said Brookfield has requested the city’s assistance in maintaining the park.

“We will continue to defend and guarantee their free speech rights, but those rights do not include the ability to infringe on the rights of others,” Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna said, “which is why the rules governing the park will be enforced.”

Protesters say the only way they will leave is by force. Organizers sent out a mass email asking supporters to “defend the occupation from eviction.”

“We are doubling up on our determination to stay here as a result of this,” said 26-year-old Sophie Mascia, a Queens resident who has been living in Zuccotti Park for three weeks and intends to sleep there Friday night. “I think this is only going to strengthen our movement.”

Protesters have had some run-ins with police, but mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and an incident in which some protesters were pepper-sprayed by police seemed to energize their movement.

The New York Police Department says it will make arrests if Brookfield requests it and laws are broken. Brookfield would not comment on how it will ensure that protesters do not try to set up camp again, only saying that the cleaning was necessary because conditions in the park had become unsanitary due to the occupation.

Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, expressed concern over the city’s actions as he inspected the park Thursday afternoon and listened to protesters’ complaints.