Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Is Anything But True

There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a “coordinated,” nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word “coordinated” is too vague to offer any analytic value. The difference between local officials talking to each other — or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as “best practices” for evicting local occupations — and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coercing municipalities to do so when they would not otherwise be so inclined is not a minor one. It’s not a matter of semantics or a distinction without difference. As I wrote recently, “if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.” But there has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark ruminations that such an effort is underway – notably by Naomi Wolf in an error-filled blog-post and a somewhat bizarre column for The Guardian in which Wolf takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege. Before digging into Wolf’s claims, let’s review what has actually been reported. 1. Five major occupations were evicted in different cities in a span of less than a week. Although they didn’t follow the same pattern, there were similarities in the tactics employed by these different municipalities. 2. A police membership organization called the Police Executive Research Forum, PERF, organized two conference calls between local law enforcement officials to share information on OWS, including, presumably, how best to evict them. 3. The US Conference of Mayors organized two conference calls between various city officials to discuss the same issues. 4. The Examiner, quoting an anonymous source in the Justice Department, reported that DHS and the FBI were sharing information and advice with local law enforcement agencies. But the source stated quite clearly that “while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.” 5. Chris Hayes reported that a lobbying firm had offered a plan to the American Bankers Association to vilify and marginalize the Occupy Movement. The ABA insisted that it hadn’t acted on the proposal. 6. DHS vehicles were reportedly spotted near at least one eviction. Among the “advice” reportedly disseminated by DHS was that cities should demonize their occupations by highlighting health and safety violations, and evict them without warning in the dead of night. As a supporter of the Occupy Movement and a civil libertarian, I find that offensive and inappropriate – DHS should be worried about terrorism, not political dissent. But missing here is any suggestion that cities are being compelled to crack down on their Occupations in any way – mayors of all of the municipalities that evicted camps in recent weeks had made it very clear that they were going to do so. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan held three press conferences urging people to leave Frank Ogawa Plaza and promising that they would be removed by force if they didn’t comply. Local officials have an agenda, but it is not a hidden agenda, and thus not a particularly shocking story. I don’t find it in the least bit surprising that law enforcement officials communicate with each other, and such communication is in no way an assault on local communities’ autonomy. Every day professionals dealing with similar issues get on conference calls, send messages to list-servs or otherwise talk shop – it’s just part of our “interconnected world.” Having established a baseline of reality, let’s turn to Wolf’s claims. Here’s how she opens her blog-post:

Now is the time to get cops on board with the OWS movement — especially now that Alternet has broken the story that municipal police are being pushed around by a shadowy private policing consultancy affiliated with DHS. If you study any closing society decent people get handed monstrous orders and are forced to comply, and right now municipal police are being forced to comply with brutal orders from this corporate police consultancy, by economic pressure.

AlterNet has “broken” no such story – nobody has. We have asked Wolf to retract this claim, but as of this writing, it still remains on her site several days later. PERF is not “shadowy” – they are quite happy to talk to the media and recently sent a spokesperson to appear on Democracy, Now! PERF is a membership organization without any actual police powers. It can’t “order” anybody to do anything and has no means to apply “economic pressure.” Its only “affiliation” with DHS is that PERF’s Executive Director, Chuck Wexler, also sits on a DHS “advisory board” (along with a dozen police chiefs, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton). PERF organizes conference calls among police officials to discuss areas of common concern. Last year, it held a conference call among police chiefs who were worried that Arizona’s harsh immigration law, SB 1070, would drive a wedge between law enforcement agencies and the immigrant communities they are supposed to protect and serve. Fox “News” ran a story at the time alleging that PERF was some sort of far-left police organization and therefore illegitimate. Now we’re getting a similar story from progressives, which is discouraging. Having basically invented a tale of arm-twisting at the national level – of a “shadowy” police organization affiliated with DHS issuing “brutal orders” to hapless mayors – Wolf then leaps even further afield with her Guardian column, in which she adds the dark accusation that Congress is involved, and is ordering this national crackdown to preserve a grift from which law-makers are profiting. The headline of the piece is “The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy,” but there is nothing truthful about what follows. Here, we should pause to add another credible report to our factual baseline. CBS recently ran a report showing that members of Congress were using information that wasn’t available to the public to make tidy profits on the stock market. It’s insider-trading when ordinary citizens do it, but a loophole in the law makes it perfectly legal – if wholly corrupt on its face – for legislators to engage in the exact same practices. This is extremely troubling, but wholly unrelated to Occupy Wall Street unless one engages in the kind of intellectual contortionism Wolf attempts. Indeed, the Guardianpiece borders on incoherence as it is, in the literal sense, a series of non-sequiturs – unrelated claims that simply do not follow one another. She opens by recounting some of the more outrageous examples of police violence in recent weeks. Then she adds, “just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened.” Did we have the picture or were we asking a lot of questions? Either way, what follows should address this in some way. But it doesn’t:

The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests.

This is a disturbing story pertaining specifically to New York. It’s a non-sequitur here.