September 17, 2012

Hundreds of police barricaded the New York Stock Exchange as Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the Financial District for the movement’s one-year anniversary. Some 100 demonstrators were reportedly arrested.

Witnesses reported on Twitter that demonstrators are being arrested for "blocking pedestrian traffic." A woman named Molly Crapabble was sitting in a police van when she wrote on her Twitter page that people were being "yanked off of the sidewalk" by police.

A group of 50 protesters entered the lobby of the JPMorgan Chase building, and eight were arrested, New York Daily News reported.

The protesters’ initial plan was to surround the New York Stock Exchange and hold a sit-down protest.

Early Monday morning they converged on the lower Manhattan financial district, with some 200 people gathering in Zuccotti Park – the movement’s birthplace – by 7:00am local time, the New York Times reported.

The OWS movement, sparked by protests last year against corporate greed, income inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics, was inactive for several months. Monday’s protest comes in the wake of three days of civic activism intended to breathe new life into the movement, ahead of its one-year anniversary.

Some 200 supporters of OWS descended on New York’s Washington Square Park on Saturday to mark the movement’s one-year anniversary. Police broke up the march and arrested 25 demonstrators.

After the movement set up tents in New York City’s Zucotti Park last September, OWS spawned a number of similar ‘Occupy’ protest groups across the US, and in major cities around the world. The group’s creators dubbed themselves the voice of the ‘99 percent,’ and protested chiefly against the wide gap between rich and poor in the US.

The Occupy movement was dealt a blow in November when a police crackdown broke up the group’s main encampment at Zuccotti Park, with some 200 people arrested in the process. Many of the group’s public protests likewise saw mass arrests, and related reports of police brutality against activists.

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