Occupy Wall Street, Day 21. (Image by David Shankbone.)

From a smart oral history about the Occupy Wall Street movement, via Max Chafkin at Vanity Fair:

“CHELSEA ELLIOTT
Freelance graphic designer
I’d gone there the first week, and I was telling my friends about it: ‘Oh, there’s this great march on Saturday. Marches are so fun. We dance, and there’s music, and we laugh the whole time.’ I mean, parts of it were like that, but it was huge and there was chaos.

RAYMOND W. KELLY
New York City police commissioner
You need a permit to have a parade—that’s 50 or more people. In our minds, if you’re not having an actual parade, we’ll let you walk on the sidewalk. But on Saturday in Union Square Park, they decided to violate the tacit understanding that they would stay on the sidewalk. It was at University Place where they ran down the street and started blocking traffic. I happened to be in the area that day and I actually saw people doing this. That’s where the first large number of arrests took place.

CHELSEA ELLIOTT
I was on the sidewalk at 12th Street and University, and this group of cops stood in front of me and said, ‘You can’t go past here.’ There was this girl behind me who was getting upset, screaming ‘Fascists.’ A cop came and slammed her down on the ground and dragged her by her hair. I just started screaming. Then another officer walked over and pepper-sprayed us. It took a few seconds to actually feel it. I was like, ‘What happened? Why am I wet?’ And then all of a sudden it hurts to open your eyes and you can’t really breathe. It’s this horrible burning all over your face.

Elliott was never arrested. She fell to the ground and was attended by volunteer medics. The officer who sprayed her was later identified by Anonymous as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. A Police Department review found that he had broken protocol and docked him 10 vacation days as punishment.

CHELSEA ELLIOTT
I walked back to the park. I talked to some of the people I knew, and they were like, ‘Yeah, there’s already a video online.’

VLAD TEICHBERG
Former derivatives trader; co-founder, Global Revolution
When the pepper-spray video came out, that was the hook. That’s what made people focus on [Occupy Wall Street]. The video showed that we weren’t just a bunch of quote-unquote anarchists. It showed our humanity.”

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