October 14, 2011
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AP Photo/Andrew Burton
In the staring contest between the Occupy Wall Street protesters and New York City, Mayor Bloomberg blinked first, deciding that the occupiers didn’t represent the kind of safety crisis Brookfield Office Properties, the owners of protest epicenter Zucotti Park, described in its letter to the NYC police commissioner. The protesters can now stay, much as Bloomberg first promised days before.
That’s nice. But other protests nationwide end up organizing under the shadow of eviction for the same reasons: public safety, cleanliness, and so forth. In Raleigh, for example, a protest organized for October 15 is allowed on the State Capitol grounds for only four hours because the state, after laying off half its capitol police force, says it cannot guarantee protestors’ safety.
The problem with that claim is it doesn’t hold up under simple analysis. It’s a question, after all, of infrastructure.
A protest group is like a city, and it has basic needs. Some of are already provided by the nature of the city itself; some of them emerge. A protest encampment requires no paving, for example, and no other transportation needs. And communications? The protesters
Photo from Cryptome
bring that in their pockets. Food and water are as close as the nearest store. Stormwater takes care of itself through the city’s curb-and-gutter system, and power comes in batteries. As for things with rechargeable batteries, keeping them running is easy. In Tahrir Square, protesters jacked into a streetlamp to recharge cellphones, andOccupy Wall Street is doing it with generators. Plus, doing without easy power — like sleeping on the ground — is something protesters can be expected to be willing to endure.
The only legitimate concerns a city ought to have regarding long-term protests, then, are sanitation, trash collection, and public safety. None of those represents an issue that can’t be solved in a ten-minute standup meeting.
Start with public safety. According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 2.5 full-time officers per thousand people will get the job done. Call the New York protest about 5,000 people, since estimates, though all over the map, exceed that only on weekends and during special actions.
Trash pickup? Brookfield complained about the trash barrels on Zucotti park needing extra attention, which is true — but an average weekly trash-truck route in my town can cover 850 houses in five hours. Since each household is about 2.26 people and each person generates about 4.6 pounds per day, that means those protesters generate 23,000 pounds of waste per day. That the weekly trash pickup hauls away 61,856 pounds of trash from those 850 houses, which means it ought to take a single trash truck crew just under two hours to take care of that problem.
From mesawasteservices.com, a portable restroom calculator
The only other significant problem the protesters present is sanitary needs — Brookfield mentioned it, and certainly local restaurants are complaining. But an entire portapotty industry exists to solve problems like this. If, as the Associated Press estimated, only a couple hundred people are sleeping in the park, you can treat the crowd as a daily crowd and estimate the number of potties needed on any number of portapotty websites, like this interactive calculator and this grid estimator. Turns out you can solve that problem cleanly — no kidding — with 50 portapotties or so. Throw in a couple of hand-sanitizer stations because that’s just polite.
So, then, let’s see — for the 5,000 people we estimate to be hanging around in Zucotti Park on an average day, the problems they pose, at least physically, can be solved by an extra two-hour run of a single garbage truck; 13 cops; and 50 portable toilets. For the thousand folks or so the city of Raleigh expects October 15? Say three extra police officers, ten toilets, and a half-hour of trash pickup.
That all sounds like the kind of problem the average city ought to be able to solve in its sleep. You can file that under “City life — you never know what to expect,” not under, “Sanitation crisis! Release the hounds!” Plus, you’d need to clean up after those hounds anyway.
And if you’re concerned that protester and other law-breaking types are likely to ignore decency and convention regarding cleanliness, remember — the OWS protesters are cleaning up as they can and have even started a greywater system for the water they use to wash dishes.
So. Hard to find a good reason to kick anybody out of anywhere in all that. There may be good reasons to chase protesters away from the site of a long-term occupation. But the reasons don’t lie in sanitation, cleanliness, or infrastructure.
About the Author: A writer who commonly explores science, culture, and the relationship between the two. Follow on Twitter @huler.
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Um. That was clearly written by someone who has never been a high level public administrator who deals with large groups of people. You can’t just “get” portapotties. Or police. I am sympathetic, but having actually managed events with thousands of people:
First, you have to contract with an approved vendor for those potties, and have someone agree to have them put near of their place of business. Not easy.
Then you have to arrange for regular poo pickups–which in a big crowd of people, or visible near a place of business–not easy.
If you want extra police, that means overtime pay, which is not free. Also, the union has to agree to the extra overtime.
Extra trash pickups could be arranged, since there is presumably already a city contract, but that isn’t free either.
To throw out these suggestion and not include how to PAY for it–when states and cities are more financially strapped than they ever have been before–is just naive.
I could keep going, but basically public entities just are not set up to do ANYTHING quickly or efficiently. I am sure someone has already done the math, and realized it just wasn’t feasible. Everyday I find things that I can’t do because of my budget. Having something like this land in my lap would be a nightmare, no matter how much I wish the protesters well.
Link to thisMan, I know I’m gonna get burned for this, but what the hell. The logical response would be “a good city would plan for an emergency and keep some funds in reserve.”
Yes–except that we had a hurricane and several other major disasters that have sucked up a lot of those funds already. There are still 8 months in the fiscal year left, most of which have potential for severe weather yet to come.
Speaking as a public administrator (yeah, I work for the Man), I don’t think this problem is at all as simple as you have made it here. (and remember I was laid off earlier this year, and now evilly administrate in a new state)
Link to thisbug_girl’s right. This is a poorly thought-ought piece.
Link to thisI wonder what Scientific American’s attitude was concerning the Tea Party. Apparently, the Flea Party is A-OK. I’m sure Sciam has all kinds of material on the gun-happy, xenophobic Tea Party, loaded with reasons why it poses a threat to our way of life.
Link to thisGovernments tend to hate protestors. They’re hard to plan for. They cost money. They take police away from other duties.
But the heavy-handed tactics that get applied invariably lead to more protests. Just budget for them and plan for them.
And yes, Bug_Girl – as a public administrator this is just one of many problems that you get to deal with. It sorta goes with free speech.
Link to thisI appreciate bug_girl’s thoughts, though obviously I disagree. Like Postulator, I feel that when you’re talking about the people’s right peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances, having to respond quickly with a couple portapotties and police overtime is, as Postulator says, just one of the many problems that administrators get to deal with. Nobody doubts that they’ll have to work extra to solve these emergent problems; in the piece I just noted that the problems the protesters cause are themselves easily solvable. And yes, it costs money, which raises the kind of taxation issue the OWS protesters are talking about.
Thanks for your thoughts, bug_girl. I don’t think the protesters ought to be evicted, but that’s personal. My point here is only that you can solve those problems with cops and portapotties. You’ve agreed — you said that what the piece says is “[t]he logical response” — but note that administration is hard and costs money. My point is not that the people’s right to assemble outweighs those difficulties and costs (though I think it does) but that the problems aren’t large enough to justify eviction, and that places seeking justification need to look elsewhere for it. So far the city of New York seems to have agreed, as have most municipalities where Occupy protests are occurring.
Link to this