Will the 1%'s security thugs (aka "local law enforcement") put the screws to protesters and photojournalists in Chicago this weekend?

Flags fly in Chicago for this weekend's NATO summit.

”Since Occupy Wall Street began last September, more than 75 journalists have been arrested. My colleague Josh Stearns has chronicled these arrests since the movement's earliest days. Stearns expects to see an uptick in arrests as thousands of protesters and reporters converge on Chicago.”

-- Timothy Karr, in “The Police, the iPhone
and Your Right to Record,” on HuffPost

by Ken

This afternoon Reuters' Ann Saphir and Mary Winiewski reported from Chicago that, despite the gathered presence of "thousands of security personnel," "the mood was mostly festive . . . with groups of nurses dancing and singing."

An estimated 2,500 people, including hundreds of nurses, protested peacefully in a downtown Chicago plaza under the watchful eye of police Friday, chanting mostly about economic issues that have little to do with the summit of the NATO military alliance starting this weekend.

The rally, which Chicago police estimated at about 2,500, was the largest so far in a week of daily protests before representatives from 60 countries arrive for the two-day summit to discuss the war in Afghanistan.

Some 150 blue-uniformed Chicago police officers ringed the square, named after Chicago's legendary former Mayor Richard J. Daley, who presided over bloody clashes between police and anti-Vietnam War protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention.

The nurses mentioned by the Reuters reporters, who are "holding a convention at a nearby hotel, paid for a dozen buses carrying hundreds more protesters from around the country."

The nurses called for what they term a "Robin Hood" tax on financial institutions' transactions to offset government funding cuts that have affected healthcare, education and social services. Many sported green hats and masks.

"The solution is a tiny, tiny tax," said Deborah Burger, president of the nurses' group, who complained that healthcare patients are skimping on care because of the cost.

"What we want to say is our priorities are upside down and we need to make sure we focus on our communities," she said.

A banner reading, "Nurses campaign to heal the world, An economy for the 99 percent, Tax Wall Street, National Nurses United," was displayed in the plaza.

Perhaps the most tangible legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the regrouping of the security apparatus of the 1%, which has learned how easily and effectively it can mobilize law-enforcement personnel at all levels to serve as their private paramilitary force. They've learned to expect no serious opposition among law-enforcement officials or the civilian authorities who command them, like NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who put the NYPD at the corporate elites' disposal.

The most luscious part is that we the people get to pay for the forcible repression of those folks trying to stick up for our interests. Just today DNAinfo.com's Julie Shapiro reports ("NYC Spent $30 Million Policing Occupy Wall Street, Officials Say") that "the total [police] overtime cost has ballooned over the past two months from $17 million in March to nearly double that on Thursday," according to the testimony of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at a City Council budget hearing yesterday.

The Occupy Wall Street protests -- along with Hurricane Irene, which cost the NYPD $7 million in overtime pay -- have busted the NYPD's overtime budget, pushing it up to $604 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, Kelly said.

That's $53 million more in police overtime than the city paid the previous year, he said.

The new "public-private security partnership" should be on display this weekend in Chicago. And our colleague Tim Karr, who keeps tabs on media-openness issues as campaign director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com, is calling particular attention to the security apparatus's pretty much unopposed crackdown on the "new breed of journalists and onlookers" who use modern technology like micro-photography to cover protests. For example --

[Photojournalist Carlos Miller] has been arrested three times. His "crime?" Photographing the police. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

In twist that's become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez [a “public information officer”!], who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

"The ubiquity of camera-ready smartphones," Tim Karr reports, "has spawned legions of 'live-streamers' who can be found at every large-scale protest streaming a close-up account of almost every arrest. It's a new form of journalism that's open to anyone with a mobile phone and the resolve to get between police and protesters."

In the chaos of these events, many live-streamers have been snared in mass arrests. Others are deliberately targeted by officers who aren't accustomed to the radical transparency of the smartphone era.

Tim Pool has seen the live-streaming phenomenon grow exponentially since he first started streaming Occupy Wall Street protests using a live-linked Galaxy S2 phone. "Most of the people are live-streaming because they think the mainstream media isn't telling the story that needs to be told," he says.

The audience for Pool's smartphone stream peaked above 30,000 simultaneous viewers during last year's Occupy evictions, making Pool's raw and unedited reporting a model hundreds of other live-streamers have followed.

Pool plans to organize a global collective of live-streamers to create an alternative news network that gets the story live on the streets before the traditional news vans arrive. "There are not enough streamers for breaking 24-hour global news coverage," he says, "but we're getting pretty close."

As the new breed of journalists find themselves increasingly subject to harassment by law enforcers ("Police departments," Tim notes,"like having a degree of flexibility in interpreting the law as it gives their officers loose rein to arrest anyone they deem a nuisance, even when they know their case will collapse before the courts"), the Justice Department and the courts are beginning to push back, but not much relief has found its way to photojournalists on the ground. Tim Karr again:

"When I have been confronted by officers the implicit threat is that if I continued to videotape, they would take away my liberty," says advocacy journalist Bill Huston. Police have harassed Huston as he's attempted to record public events related to the fracking controversy in Pennsylvania and New York.

"Even though this is constitutionally protected behavior, the police will intimidate you and demand that you follow their orders," he said. "Even though we may get a legal remedy in the courts we are still prevented from videotaping on the scene. Our rights are still violated. This is not how the system is supposed to work."

So far, at least, "most of the lower courts have found a rock-solid First Amendment argument for taking photos and video of law enforcement officers in public." The issue is surely bound for the Supreme Court, but who knows what will bring?

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