Rebecca Bulnes
New York Police officers wearing helmets and shields formed lines in the middle of a busy midtown Manhattan park as protesters and police clashed while pedestrians looked on Tuesday.
NEW YORK — NYPD officers clashed violently with protestors again Tuesday night, this time in Madison Square Park in Manhattan, leaving one woman to be taken to jail in an unmarked police vehicle and six others in a transport van.
The clashes came a week after New York Police Department officers destroyed a protest encampment at City Hall in New York in the predawn hours. Protests in the city and across the country have reignited as images of federal officers battling with protesters in Portland, Oregon have gripped the nation.
Video shot at the march shows police beating protesters with batons and an unidentified woman being thrown into a silver unmarked van by people who said they were police.
The video, posted to Instagram, shows people believed to be NYPD officers, though they weren’t wearing uniforms, pulling a woman into a tan minivan with New York license plates before speeding off. The sudden hustling of a protester into an unmarked car drew comparisons to the melee in Portland where federal officers without clear identification grab people off the street and toss them into cars.
Uniformed bike officers with the NYPD created a wall around the van as if to provide assistance.
An NYPD spokesperson later confirmed that the woman was taken into custody for allegedly destroying police cameras around City Hall during the Occupy City Hall demonstration last week. The statement did not explain why she was put into an unmarked police vehicle as opposed to the marked transport vans that are typically used.
“The cops came completely out of nowhere,” said Rebecca Bulnes, who regularly attends demonstrations. “We had been marching and holding events since like noon, and then they decided to get violent.”
Bulnes also recorded video of police as they beat an unnamed protester who was lying in the bushes of the park.
Police dressed in riot gear and holding plastic riot shields stood in a line just beyond the officers who arrested the protester on unknown charges.
Protestors like Bulnes worry that incidents like this arrest underline that the NYPD is willing to go to great lengths to find and arrest protesters, even days or weeks after they are accused of having committed minor offenses.
NYPD officers “showing up in unmarked cars like that is clearly a concern for us, because if they did it in the park they could do it anywhere,” she said.
Ba, a protester who wished to be referred to only by his last name, Ba, for fear of retaliation by police said the scene added to the frustration protesters felt toward police.
“The way they did that was totally unbelievable,” he said. “They just threw a woman into a van and sped off. I couldn’t believe it.”
