Occupy Los Angeles faces Monday eviction deadline

Mayor and police chief say city has accommodated movement but 'after 56 days it's time to leave'

guardian.co.uk, Reuters, Saturday 26 November 2011

The Occupy LA protesters have been told to leave by 12.01am Monday
or they will be evicted. Photograph: Danny Moloshok/Reuters

Hundreds of Occupy protesters will be evicted on Monday from their encampment in front of Los Angeles city hall, city officials have said.

The nearly two-month-old encampment is among the oldest and largest on the US west coast aligned with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations protesting against economic inequality and the excesses of the financial system.

"We're asking the participants in the Occupy LA encampment to pack their belongings and leave in an orderly manner," the Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, said at a news conference with the LA police chief, Charlie Beck.

"It is time to close the park and repair the grounds so that we can restore public access to the park."

Protesters must pack up their tents and dismantle their encampment by 12.01am on 28 November, the mayor said.

The compound, set up on 1 October, surrounds the city hall and has grown to roughly 400 tents and 700 to 800 people, according to estimates by organisers and municipal officials.

Compared with other major cities, Los Angeles has been relatively accommodating. Villaraigosa at one point provided rain ponchos to campers but said on Friday that the eviction deadline was firm.

"It took a couple of hours to put up those tents," he said. "It only takes a couple of hours to take them down."

Villaraigosa said the eviction would be handled differently from the crackdowns seen in cities like Oakland.

The Occupy Oakland encampment was plagued by violence before being shut down by police earlier this month. Oakland's first attempt to evict its encampment sparked confrontations between protesters and police.

Scott Olsen, a former US Marine, was critically injured during those altercations, which transformed an initially New York-based phenomenon into a nationwide movement.

"We've not stared each other down across barricades and barbed wire," Villaraigosa said, referring to the riot police and teargas used in Oakland.

Beck said he wanted to avoid violence and arrests. "This is a national movement that the city of Los Angeles wanted to accommodate as best we could," he said. "We have been reasonable. We have given 56 days."

Jim Lafferty, an attorney advocating for Occupy LA, said the protesters had been offered but rejected space in an old bookstore inside a shopping mall as well as two plots of land.

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Occupy Los Angeles given City Hall Park eviction deadline