NYPD officers in riot gear, armed with shields and helmets, cleared out the weeks-long ‘Occupy City Hall’ encampment in Manhattan's City Hall Park overnight. According to the police, it was a planned operation.
Footage from the scene shows the moment officers descended on the camp and warned protesters to leave or be arrested.
There were no reports of major clashes, though some local media say there were at least four arrests during the operation, citing an unnamed NYPD spokesperson. Additional video uploaded to social media shows city workers and garbage trucks clearing the area of debris and trash.
Some small groups of protesters lingered and confronted the police but it appears that, for now at least, the follow-up to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, which took place just a few blocks away, is over.
Protesters had been camped out for weeks in a tense standoff with city authorities, as they called for the police to be defunded amid the groundswell of anti-police brutality protests across the country in recent weeks.
Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed he had stripped $1 billion from the NYPD budget but many felt it was just politicking and cooking the books rather than any meaningful change.
There had been repeated scuffles and clashes leading to multiple arrests since the ‘Occupy City Hall’ encampment took shape in late June amid mass Black Lives Matter protests across the US and beyond in the wake of the George Floyd killing by the police in Minneapolis.
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