As I mentioned in my previous entry, the 15th of October was one hell of a tough act to follow. I had people coming up to me all that day with encouraging words, offers of donations, asking to volunteer etc. It was amazing to see how this all had captured hearts and minds. I had several police officers that day mention how well everything was going, some mentioned that they supported what we were doing, others made their feelings known with sneers of contempt.
A Lieutenant in the Orlando police mentioned that this was one of the biggest political actions he had ever seen from a “grassroots” group with literally NO funding. He asked me during the march if we could get people moving a bit faster as we were blocking significant amounts of traffic, my response was something along the lines of “Well we could, but we have seniors, and parents with children in the march, and I don’t want to cause any injuries or contribute any more to heat injuries or fatigue then we have to.” He offered us the street to walk on, and we graciously accepted. “Who’s Streets? OUR Streets!” became a literal truth in that march.
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The first week of the Occupation was in many ways a honeymoon period for us, the police protected and served and did their jobs in a respectful and courteous manner, and we returned the courtesy by giving them a heads-up when and where we were deciding to march and whatnot. It was pretty nice, donations poured in faster than we had room to store and/or use them all, and we were the recipients of an incredible amount of good will. Things were looking really peachy, the cops gave us immense amounts of latitude, not really enforcing a lot of the “rules” of the park, they let us keep all of our supplies and materials in the park overnight, and rarely checked on us. They constantly were complimentary as far as our behavior, and allowed us to throw up shelters when it rained. The tarps of course were the beginnings of our problems.
It had been a rainy couple of days, and we had some pretty ingenious shelters set up, Media tents, food tents, as well as sleeping shelters. Technically we were not allowed to occupy the park between 11PM and 6AM, but enforcement of that at first was a pretty low key thing. Around 1 am the first week or so, the police would come check in on us, and we would all grab our stuff and act like we were leaving, and they would be all “no, no its ok. Just checking to make sure everything was ok” So we got an immense amount of grace in that initial period. We didn’t really have the numbers to actually OCCUPY the park, so we did our next best thing, which was marching all around the sidewalk all night in shifts while some people crashed either in the park, in cars or wherever they could catch some winks.
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We called it “Sidewalk Solidarity” and it seemed to work pretty well as a compromise. That is until the rain stopped, and we had a forecast of a pleasant sunny day. The police showed up early that afternoon, and told us that “structures were not permitted in the park” and that we had to get rid of them. At this point, we were extremely and stupidly new to all of the politics that surround stuff like this and to be fair, Orlando as a town, has never seen a political (or apolitical depending on who you talk to) protest like this before. We decided, in an informal consensus, that we would not be taking down the tarps. So in this we interpreted it as “ok the man wants to shove us a bit, let’s see what happens when we decline nicely” Well we gathered our supporters in sidewalk solidarity, and kept the tents up, and around 11PM or so, the police came back out, and said something along the lines of “oh, well we didn’t actually mean for you to take them down anyways, so it’s no big deal.”
We thought of that in a way as a baby win, little did we know the level of the game we were playing. Up until this point, we had an “informal” agreement with the city of Orlando that we could keep all of our possessions, equipment and supplies in the park. They didn’t insist on us moving it, and had been really nice and polite up until this point, and we had tried to remain on the best terms with the city as possible, despite protesting the state of affairs both locally and nationally. That all changed the second they pushed at us, and we refused (albeit politely, and nicely) to back down.