Occupiers Assault Police; Screech “Police Brutality”
During the Occupy Wall Street protest today I started seeing tweets about a girl who was supposedly brutalized by cops and went into a seizure. There are pictures of her being taken into an ambulance.
Now this is awful no matter what the circumstance, and I truly hope the girl isn’t hurt permanently by this event.
But, as I documented earlier, the Occupy protesters are much too eager to screech “police brutality” no matter what happens, outside of any context.
This is the Occupier version of what happened:
The video above apparently shows police charging #ows activist Cecily McMillian. She left Liberty Plaza in an ambulance. Initial reports from the scene indicate that police broke her ribs; many people present and @Timcast’s livestream showed her apparently convulsing in police custody before being loaded into the ambulance.
Take a look at the video yourself. She clearly throws a nasty elbow at the cop next to her.
Here’s an edited version:
As the story develops and the truth becomes more clear, expect the Occupiers to try to muddy it up with more lies.
UPDATE
This girl is supposedly Cecily’s friend, and claims she didn’t attack an policeman:
@thejoesays44 She was skipping and swinging arms!Not hitting anyone!
— Sarah (@SarahBTweets) March 18, 2012
When confronted, she says it was another girl who elbowed the policeman.
UPDATE
Like most people, Cecily has a facebook account and a twitter account – there’s nothing since February on her twitter. Here is her avatar picture:
She tweeted only a few times, and very much about the occupy movement, while following some OWS twitter accounts.
Cecily quoted in an NY TIMES article about OWS
Cecily’s Blog post about OWS and Unions
Cecily is from a long line of protesters:
A 22-year-old government major from Atlanta, Ga., McMillan is the granddaughter of Harlon Joye, an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a 1960s organization that helped fuel the nation’s civil rights movement, fought for economic justice and participatory democracy and protested the Vietnam War.
She also either believes in conspiracies, or has insider knowledge of the leaders of Occupy. This from a Rolling Stone article:
“You don’t seriously believe this is a leaderless movement, do you?” Cecily McMillan, a 23-year-old graduate student at the New School, asks me one day. Not possible, she says, that’s an illusion crafted by the OWS secret elite, who she insists are unresponsive to the demand for a concrete agenda by the “actual 99 percent.”
And, she has a record of being violent at Occupy Wall Street protests:
“She was arrested after she charged Wall Street three times, a “direct action” that even some veteran anarchists – militant and masked – considered wildly courageous, if foolish.
More on her family’s militant Leftist past:
McMillan seems to see her role as an underground leader almost as a genetic birthright. “My grandfather is Harlon Joye,” she told me almost immediately and emphasized several times across a number of conversations. “He drafted the SDS constitution” – as in, Students for a Democratic Society, one of the key organizations of 1960s revolt. She sees herself as giving “a voice to the voiceless.” To do that, she says, the movement needs concrete demands. Any demands.
Given the pride she places in her family’s involvement in past protest issues, her obsession with protesting, and the altercations she’s already had in Wall Street protests, it’s much more likely that she purposely tried to create a “direct action” to incite a police reaction. To ignore all this is to willingly deny all the evidence that explains the real events of this night.
UPDATE
Another claim being tossed about is that police didn’t respond quickly enough to her seizure, in order to hurt her even more. But what does the evidence show?
- EMTs attend to Cicely (via Laurie Penny)
On twitter, journalist Laurie Penny of AL-Jazeera and the Nation, was an eyewitness to the events, and sent out many pictures while it happened. Her first mention of a seizure is at 12:01am. She takes pictures of the police attending to Cecily, and when the ambulance finally arrives, she sends out a tweet saying so – the time is only 6 minutes later.
