West Side Congressman Jerrold Nadler  today sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder  urging him to launch an investigation into allegations of excessive force used by NYPD officers against Occupy Wall Street protesters and members of the media.

“Over the past several weeks, I have heard a number of credible and troubling allegations of police misconduct around Occupy Wall Street demonstrations nationwide,” said Nadler.  “Our law enforcement officers have a duty to protect our health and safety, but that duty must always be discharged with respect for the fundamental First Amendment rights to free expression and peaceful assembly.  I am urging Attorney General Holder to launch a thorough investigation into law enforcement activities surrounding Occupy Wall Street – and its national offshoots – to determine whether the police have indeed violated the civil liberties of demonstrators or members of the media.” Read More

Greg Sargent of The Washington Post scored an interview with Chuck Schumer today in which the senior senator–and Democratic messaging chief seemed to make common cause with those kids in Zuccotti Park:

“Occupy Wall Street has resonance far beyond the protests,” Mr. Schumer told The Post. “Whether middle class people agree with the protests or not, the vast majority believes that they’re part of the 99 percent and that something should be done to help them.”

Mr. Schumer did not visit the protests, as some of the local elected officials did, and kept a fair distance from them for the first couple of weeks of the protests. But that doesn’t mean that Mr. Schumer thinks that the protests will hurt Democrats as much as Republicans say–because, he told Sargent, Occupy Wall Street has the same message that he has been promoting, that GOP policies help the super-rich at the expense of everyone else: Read More

The New York Press Club announced on their website this afternoon that they were forming “The Coalition for the First Amendment,” along with other local media groups in order to monitor relations between the NYPD and the press.

The announcement comes as the relationship between the police and the fourth estimated have reached a new low, with journalists being kept away from the midnight raid on Zuccotti Park last week, an action that saw the arrest of a nearly two dozen journalists.

“When New York City police evicted “Occupy Wall Street” protesters from Zuccotti Park in the early hours of Tuesday, November 15th, more than 20 journalists were arrested and several were injured,” the coalition said in a statement. “In what appeared to be a planned maneuver, police officers forced reporters and photographers so far away from Zuccotti Park that they could not see what was happening. They roughed up people who were trying to fulfill their duty to report the news. Read More