[PAA-Discuss] Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?

[Juli3 at aol.com]

_Financial  Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll » Counterpunch: 
Tells the Facts,  Names the Names_ 
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/financial-giants-put-new-york-city-cops-on-their-payroll/)  
 
 
 
Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their  Payroll
by PAM MARTENS
 
Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of 
the  New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the typical 
NYPD blue  uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful, nonthreatening 
protestors  attempting to take part in the Occupy Wall Street marches. 
Corporate media are  reporting that these white shirts are police supervisors as 
opposed to rank and  file. Recently discovered documents suggest something 
else may be at work. 
If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to  
privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in  
bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained 
below  the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in 
New York  City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New 
York Stock  Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those 
repeatedly charged with  crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the 
ease of dialing the  deli for a pastrami on rye. 
The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension  
benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the 
 ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the  
corporation. 
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per 
hour  paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid 
Detail  fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 
million to police  participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more 
than doubled in  revenue to the city since 2002. 
The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and  
gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police  
personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits  
have already sprung up from the program. 
When the program was first rolled out, one insightful member of the NYPD  
posted the following on a forum: “… regarding the officer working for, and 
being  paid by, some of the richest people and organizations in the City, if 
not the  world, enforcing the mandates of the private employer, and in 
effect, allowing  the officer to become the Praetorian Guard of the elite of the 
City. And now  corruption is no longer a problem. Who are they kidding?” 
Just this year, the Department of Justice revealed serious problems with 
the  Paid Detail unit of the New Orleans Police Department. Now corruption 
probes are  snowballing at NOPD, revealing cash payments to police in the Paid 
Detail and  members of the department setting up limited liability 
corporations to run  upwards of $250,000 in Paid Detail work billed to the city. 
When the infamously mismanaged Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers, collapsed 
 on September 15, 2008, its bankruptcy filings in 2009 showed it owed money 
to 21  members of the NYPD’s Paid Detail Unit. (A phone call and email 
request to the  NYPD for information on which Wall Street firms participate in 
the program were  not responded to. The police unions appear to have only 
scant information about  the program.) 
Other Wall Street firms that are known to have used the Paid Detail include 
 Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center complex which houses financial 
firms,  and the New York Stock Exchange. 
The New York Stock Exchange is the building in front of which the Occupy 
Wall  Street protesters have unsuccessfully tried to protest, being herded 
behind  metal barricades, clubbed with night sticks, kicked in the face and 
carted off  to jail rather than permit the last plantation in America to be 
defiled with  citizen chants and posters. (A sample of those politically 
inconvenient posters  and chants: “The corrupt are afraid of us; the honest 
support us; the heroic  join us”; “Tell me what democracy looks like, this is 
what democracy looks  like”; “I’ll believe a corporation is a person when 
Texas executes one.” The  last sign refers to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court 
decision, Citizens United v.  Federal Election Commission, giving corporations 
First Amendment personhood,  which allows them to spend unlimited amounts of 
money in elections.) 
On September 8, 2004, Robert Britz, then President and Co-Chief Operating  
Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, testified as follows to the U.S. 
House  Committee on Financial Services: 
“…we have implemented new hiring standards requiring former law 
enforcement  or military backgrounds for the security staff…We have established a 
24-hour  NYPD Paid Detail monitoring the perimeter of the data centers…We have  
implemented traffic control and vehicle screening at the checkpoints. We 
have  installed fixed protective planters and movable vehicle  barriers.”
Military backgrounds; paid NYPD 24-7; checkpoints; vehicle barriers? It 
might  be insightful to recall that the New York Stock Exchange originally 
traded  stocks with a handshake under a Buttonwood tree in the open air on Wall  
Street. 
In his testimony, the NYSE executive Britz states that “we” did this or 
that  while describing functions that clearly belong to the City of New York. 
The New  York Stock Exchange at that time had not yet gone public and was 
owned by those  who had purchased seats on the exchange – primarily, the 
largest firms on Wall  Street. Did the NYSE simply give itself police powers to 
barricade streets and  set up checkpoints with rented cops? How about 
clubbing protesters on the  sidewalk? 
Just six months before NYSE executive Britz’ testimony to a congressional  
committee, his organization was being sued in the Supreme Court of New York  
County for illegally taking over public streets with no authority to do so. 
This  action had crippled the business of a parking garage, Wall Street 
Garage Parking  Corp., the plaintiff in the case. Judge Walter Tolub said in 
his opinion  that 
“…a private entity, the New York Stock Exchange, has assumed 
responsibility  for the patrol and maintenance of truck blockades located at seven  
intersections surrounding the NYSE…no formal authority appears to have been  
given to the NYSE to maintain these blockades and/or conduct security searches  
at these checkpoints…the closure of these intersections by the NYSE is  
tantamount to a public nuisance…The NYSE has yet to provide this court with  any 
evidence of an agreement giving them the authority to maintain the  
security perimeter and/or conduct the searches that their private security  force 
conducts daily. As such, the NYSE’s actions are unlawful and may be  enjoined 
as they violate plaintiff’s civil rights as a private  citizen.”
The case was appealed, the ruling overturned, and sent back to the same 
Judge  who had no choice but to dismiss the case on the appellate ruling that 
the  plaintiff had suffered no greater harm than the community at large. Does 
 everyone in lower Manhattan own a parking garage that is losing its 
customer  base because the roads are blocked to the garage? 
Some believe that Wall Street is given special privileges and protection  
because New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg owes his $18.1 billion in 
wealth  (yes, he’s that 1 percent the 99 percent are protesting) to Wall 
Street. The  Mayor was previously a trader for Salomon Brothers, the investment 
bank made  famous for attempting to rig the U.S. Treasury market in two-year 
notes. 
The Mayor’s business empire which bears his name, includes the awesome  
Bloomberg terminal, a computer that houses enormous pricing data for stocks and 
 bonds, research, news, charting functions and much more. There are 
currently an  estimated 290,000 of these terminals on Wall Street trading floors 
around the  globe, generating approximately $1500 in rental fees per terminal 
per month.  That’s a cool $435 million a month or $5.2 billion a year, the 
cash cow of the  Bloomberg businesses. 
The Bloomberg businesses are run independently from the Mayor but he  
certainly knows that his terminal is a core component of his wealth.  
Nonetheless, the Mayor is not Wall Street’s patsy. Bloomberg Publishing is  frequently 
in the forefront of exposing fraud on Wall Street such as the 2001  tome “
The Pied Pipers of Wall Street” by Benjamin Mark Cole, which exposed the  
practice of releasing fraudulent stock research to the public. Bloomberg News  
was responsible for court action that forced the Federal Reserve to release 
the  details of what it did with trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to 
Wall  Street firms, hedge funds and foreign banks. 
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may also have a soft spot for Wall Street. He 
 was formerly Senior Managing Director of Global Corporate Security at 
Bear,  Stearns & Co. Inc., the Wall Street firm that collapsed into the arms of  
JPMorgan in March of 2008. 
There has also been a bizarre revolving door between the Wall Street  
millionaires and the NYPD at times. One of the most puzzling career moves was  
made by Stephen L. Hammerman. He left a hefty compensation package as Vice  
Chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co. in 2002 to work as Deputy Commissioner of  
Legal Matters for the NYPD from 2002 to 2004. That move had everyone on Wall  
Street scratching their head at the time. Merrill collapsed into the arms of  
Bank of America on September 15, 2008, the same date that Lehman went 
under. 
Wall Street is not the only sector renting cops in Manhattan. Department  
stores, parks, commercial banks and landmarks like Rockefeller Center, Jacob  
Javits Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral have also participated in the 
Paid  Detail Unit, according to insiders. But Wall Street is the only sector 
that runs  a private justice system where its crimes are herded off to secret 
arbitration  tribunals, has sucked on the public teat to the tune of 
trillions of dollars,  escaped prosecution for the financial collapse, and can put 
an armed municipal  force on the sidewalk to intimidate public protestors 
seeking a realignment of  their democracy. 
We may be learning a lot more in the future about the tactics Wall Street 
and  the NYPD have deployed against the Occupy Wall Street protestors. The 
highly  regarded Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has filed a class action 
lawsuit  over the approximately 700 arrests made on the Brooklyn Bridge on 
October 1. The  formal complaint and related information is available at the 
organization’s web  site, _www.JusticeOnLine.org_ 
(http://www.justiceonline.org/) . 
The organization was founded by Carl Messineo and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard.  
The Washington Post has called them “the constitutional sheriffs for a new  
protest generation.” 
The suit names Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Kelly, the City of New  
York, 30 unnamed members of the NYPD, and, provocatively, 10 unnamed law  
enforcement officers not employed by the NYPD. 
The lawsuit lays out dwhat has been curtailing the constitutional rights of 
 protestors for a very long time in New York City. 
“As seen in the movements for social change in the Middle East and Europe,  
all movements for social justice, jobs, and democracy need room to breathe 
and  grow and it is imperative that there be a halt to law enforcement 
actions used  to shut down mass assembly and free expression of the people 
seeking to  redress grievances… 
“After escorting and leading a group of demonstrators and others well out  
onto the Brooklyn Bridge roadway, the NYPD suddenly and without warning  
curtailed further forward movement, blocked the ability of persons to leave  
the Bridge from the rear, and arrested hundreds of protestors in the absence  
of probable cause. This was a form of entrapment, both illegal and  
physical. 
“That the trap and detain mass arrest was a command-level-driven  
intentional and calculated police operation is evidenced by the fact that the  law 
enforcement officials who led the demonstration across the bridge were  
command officials, known as ‘white shirts.’ ”
In April 2001, I was arrested and incarcerated by the NYPD while peacefully 
 handing out flyers on a public sidewalk outside of the Citigroup 
shareholders  meeting – flyers that warned of growing corruption inside the company. 
(The  unlawful merger of Travelers Group and Citibank created Citigroup and 
resulted  in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era 
investor protection  legislation that barred depositor banks from merging with 
high-risk Wall Street  firms. Many of us from social justice groups in New York 
City had protested  against the repeal but were out maneuvered by Wall 
Street’s political pawns in  Washington.) 
Out of a group of about two dozen protestors from the National Organization 
 for Women in New York City, Rain Forest Action Network, and Inner City 
Press, I  was the only person arrested. There was no civil disobedience 
occurring. Rain  Forest Action Network was handing out fortune cookies with 
prescient warnings  about Citigroup and urging pedestrians to cut up their Citibank 
credit cards.  The rest of us were peacefully handing out flyers. 
Chained to a metal bar inside the police precinct, I was grilled on any  
crimes I might know about. I responded that the only crimes I knew about were  
listed on the flyer and apparently, in New York City, one gets arrested for 
 disclosing crimes by Wall Street firms. 
A mysterious, mature, white shirted inspector who ordered my arrest on the  
sidewalk, and refused to give his first name, disappeared from the police 
report  when it was filed, blaming the arrest instead on a young police 
officer.  Citigroup is only alive today because the Federal government inserted a 
feeding  tube into Citigroup and infused over $2 trillion in loans, direct 
investment and  guarantees as the company veered toward collapse. 
The NYPD at the time of my arrest was run by Bernard Kerik – the man  
President George W. Bush later sent to Iraq to be the interim Interior Minister  
and train Iraqi police. The President subsequently nominated Kerik to head 
the  Department of Homeland Security for the entire nation. The nation was 
spared of  that eventuality only because of an illegal nanny popping up. 
Today, Kerik is  serving a four year sentence in Federal prison for a variety of 
criminal  acts. 
The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a Federal lawsuit on my behalf  
(Martens v. Giuliani) and we learned that the NYPD had arbitrarily established 
a  policy to arrest and hold for 72 hours any person protesting in a group 
of 20 or  more. The case was settled for a modest monetary award and the 
repeal by the  NYPD of this unconstitutional and despicable  practice.

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