Capital New York

Meg Robertson, who works for MSNBC, said unreasonable interference is exactly what she found when she sought to cover the protest near the corner of 53rd Street and 7th Avenue, where demonstrators had been corraled into a “free-speech zone,” demarcated by police barricades, near the Obama event.

“I identified myself to a number of NYPD as a member of the press and they would not let me close to the penned in area,” she wrote to Capital in an email account of the events last night.

“I was told to stay in Maison restaurant or exit the restaurant to be escorted outside security fencing on Broadway and 53rd. NYPD outside of Maison refused to escort me to the street to speak with anyone from NYPD Community Relations, even after I identified myself as a member of the media.”

Kachel had four hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred and fifty, you could travel to New York City on a Greyhound bus. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, and so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely find a place to exist. On the last night of September, he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear thought: This is exactly what I’m going to do.

Kachel didn’t tell his few friends about his plan. But on the night of October 3rd, on a Wordpress blog that he had set up, he wrote, “About to board a bus to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle… . I have had some moments of panic, asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was travelling with only a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes of clothes, a portable hard drive with some of his movies, and a “relatively stupid” cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight. At five in the morning on October 6th, Kachel arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, in Manhattan. By 10 A.M., he had made his way downtown to the occupation.

(via the-feature)

“For us,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, the situation “reflects the lack of meaningful oversight of the N.Y.P.D., and I think it will be time for the City Council to weigh in and figure out whether there’s a legislative response.”

Also signing the letter, which takes the NYPD to task for a failure to reply to several previous letters of complaint, are signatories from the New York Post, the Daily News, the Associated Press, NBC Universal and WNBC-TV, Dow Jones, WCBS-TV, WABC-TV, Thomson Reuters and others. The New York Civil Liberties Union has sent a companion letter to the mayor’s office.

The letter reads in part: “The signatories below wish to express their profound displeasure, disappointment and concern over the recent actions taken against the media. … Over the past few months we have tried to work with [the Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information] to improve police-press relations. However, if anything, the police actions of the last week have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.”