PREVENTION AND CONFLICT

Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street

Suppressing Protest traces the response of U.S. authorities, particularly in New York City, to the Occupy Wall Street protests through the lens of assembly and expression rights, situating it in the broader framework of international human rights law and evaluating the systematic policing abuses—including excessive force, surveillance, unlawful arrests, and obstruction of press freedom—that have undermined protesters’ fundamental freedoms. This report argues that the abusive and unlawful protest regulation documented across U.S. cities carries profound human rights significance through the compounding dynamics of institutional impunity, disproportionate policing in minority communities, and the chilling of collective democratic participation, generating an urgent need for independent review, accountability, and reform to bring U.S. authorities’ practices into line with their binding international legal obligations.

In September 2011, waves of protests against mounting socioeconomic injustice broke out across the United States, capturing the attention of the country. The Occupy Wall Street movement, inspired by similar protests around the globe, used the occupation of public space and mass demonstrations to call attention to a wide array of shared concerns. The movement also used public assemblies to debate concerns and promote direct democratic participation. Within weeks of their emergence, the protests dramatically expanded and deepened U.S. political discourse around the widening gap between rich and poor, bank bailouts and impunity for financial crimes, and the role of money in politics.

The response of U.S. authorities to the protests also received significant attention. Images of police using pepper spray on seated students, the arrests of thousands of peaceful protesters across the country, midnight raids on encampments, baton-swinging officers, marches accompanied by phalanxes of riot police, and officers obstructing and arresting journalists were beamed around the world.

Through an eight-month-long study of the response in New York City, together with comparative data collected from cities across the U.S., this report highlights major policy concerns and serious violations of the rights of protesters. 

Additionally, the  report followed  a review of thousands of news reports and hundreds of hours of video, extensive firsthand observation, and detailed witness interviews. In New York City, some of the worst practices documented include:

• Aggressive, unnecessary and excessive police force against peaceful protesters, bystanders, legal observers, and journalists
• Obstruction of press freedoms and independent legal monitoring
• Pervasive surveillance of peaceful political activity
• Violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments
• Unjustified closure of public space, dispersal of peaceful assemblies, and kettling (corralling and trapping) of protesters
• Arbitrary and selective rule enforcement and baseless arrests
• Failures to ensure transparency about applicable government policies
• Failures to ensure accountability for those allegedly responsible for abuses

These practices violate assembly and expression rights and breach the U.S. government’s international legal obligations to respect those rights. In New York City, protest policing concerns were  extensive and existed against a backdrop of disproportionate and well-documented abusive policing practices in poor and minority communities outside of the protest context.