New York City officials estimate that it will take weeks to clean up the mess and damage left by the Occupy City Hall protesters after police in riot gear forced the remaining people inside to leave the facility.
The cleanup includes removing large amounts of debris, human waste, and graffiti inside city hall and all around the lower Manhattan neighborhood.
“A Manhattan Transport Authority boss revealed to the New York Post that the protesters had turned the subway gates, which they had camped around, into a toilet,” the Daily Mail reported.
“All the people who were here were going to the bathroom in the vents,” the MTA official said. “They were shitting and pissing in the vents. They were using this as a facility, as a bathroom. It’s unbelievable what’s in there.”
The Daily Mail also reported on Mayor Bill deBlasio’s decision to take back the city’s property:
During his daily briefing, the mayor said NYPD officers were sent in because the protest movement which began a month ago had been growing smaller. He also said he was not influenced by President Donald Trump’s threats to send in federal agents but was a health and safety issue they had been looking at for days.
‘What we saw change over the last few weeks was the gathering there got smaller and smaller, was less and less about protests and more and more became an area where homeless folks were gathering,” deBlasio said. “I said repeatedly we do always respect the right to protest, but we have to think about health and safety first and the health and safety issues were growing. So it was time to take action.”
The officers moved in at 3:40 a.m. yesterday, pushing around 70 remaining occupants north on Centre Street to Foley Square, where the crowd began to disperse. Police said they gave the occupants a 10 minute warning before the Defund the Police activists “left voluntarily.”
“The graffiti is just another manifestation of the city in decline,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Wednesday, according to the Daily Mail.
“The goal of the Occupy City Hall demonstration – similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 – had been to secure at least a $1 billion cut from the NYPD budget,” the Daily Mail reported. “After the reform was approved by City Hall earlier this month, and signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio last week, organizers of the protests and many of its members left. Only a few stayed, with the majority of the crowd made up by homeless people.”
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