The Occupy Denver protesters, who three times tried to disrupt FreedomWorks' BlogCon 2011 conference I was attending, had their tent city disrupted by the Denver Police. Actually the cops cleared out the shanties at around 5:00pm this evening. Peter "DaTechGuy" Ingemi had just finished attending mass at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, which is a couple of blocks away from the state Capitol--the Massachusetts journalist wrote this report.
The occupiers were camped out on sidewalks between the Capitol and the Denver City and County Building in Civic Center Park. You can see them in this picture that I captured this morning from the front steps of the capitol building.
Essentially, according to Ingemi and people I spoke to, around 6:30pm, a police officer, with plenty of back-up of course, told everyone to leave. If they refused they'd be arrested. It appears almost all of them left and headed towards the 16th Street Mall.
That's the edge of the police zone--near the Capitol
Tonight's show on Denver's Broadway was invitation only.
Sleeping bags, tents, and assorted rubbish were all tossed into garbage trucks as the Denver Police looked on. A couple of protesters told me that tear gas was fired at them. But that isn't true, as the Denver Post reports.
Well, he wasn't able to "Occupy Forever."
Here's what Denver's Christopher Columbus monument looked like this morning.
Well would you look at that! Graffiti! The other sides of the monument were defaced too. There is never graffiti vandalism at Tea Party events. Never.
Just as they were in Chicago, observers from the National Lawyers Guild were on the scene to keep an eye on the police. If these people are actually lawyers, my legal advice to them--I am not an attorney--would be to tell the protesters not to set up tent cities and to do what the cops say. By the way, Denver police officers are quite friendly and were very interested in learning that the best known member of the NLG is Lynne Stewart, who is serving a sentence in federal prison for illegally passing messages to Omar Abdul-Rahman (The Blind Sheikh). He was the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing. The cops thought I was friendly too, of course.
One of those officers told me that many of the occupiers had moved to the 16th Street Mall, an open air shopping area closed to cars.
I found them on the corner of 16th and Champa. Here are two of them.
This guy was loud made no sense at all.
The protesters were taunting the cops, yelling out things such as, "They are selling heroin down the street" and "You guys are milking your overtime."
Look who discovered the protesters as well. Another National Lawyers Guild observer.
Nearly all the police were in riot gear. As Gandalf would say, "You shall not pass!" The cops were impressed, by the way, that Chicago never allowed the Occupy movement there to set up a tent city. Civic Center Park, like Chicago's Grant Park, closes at 11pm and campers aren't supposed to be there.
A cop is explaining to a bicycle taxi driver that he can't take his fare pass the police gauntlet. The unfortunate guy's income is suffering because of the people who claim to represent the "99 percent." Oh, I almost forgot: "You shall not pass!"
Then around 7:30pm the cops left. Poof! Just like that. Brilliant. The air was let out of the protesters' balloon. So they scattered. When walking back to my hotel, a couple of occupiers who fell for my liberal disguise told me the cops strategically blocked off streets to separate them--another group was diverted to the fashionable Larimer Square neighborhood about a half mile away. The Post story suggests that other protesters were divided in a similar fashion.
Was that it? No. Shortly after 9:00pm, a crowd of about 50 protesters chanting "Hey, hey, ho ho"--the rest was indecipherable--marched down 14th Street while I was enjoying room service in my 18th floor hotel room at the Crowne Plaza. I was thinking that it could be just some rowdy kids having some fun, but I thought otherwise when a dozen police cars with sirens flashing drove down the same street five minutes later.
I guess they are still out there somewhere.
UPDATE 6:20am MST: The Denver Post offers more details on last night's police action. There were 17 arrests of protesters last night, including five on the 16th Street Mall.
Related posts:
Occupy Denver pics: "Need $ for marijuana," homeless, offer to buy "medicine"
Video: BlogCon11 repels Occupy Denver protesters
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