50 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested

Demonstrators including members of clergy held after trying to scale church car park fence in New York

guardian.co.uk, Reuters, Sunday 18 December 2011

A retired bishop joins Occupy Wall Street protesters in climbing a
fence. Photograph: Andrew Burton/REUTERS

More than 50 anti-Wall Street protesters have been arrested after they tried to climb over a fence around a church car park in a bid to establish a new encampment.

The demonstrators had used a wooden ladder to scale the chain-link fence and enter the car park owned by Trinity Church, an Occupy Wall Street spokesman said.

Police could not immediately say how many people were taken into custody, but Gideon Oliver, president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, put the number at about 55, including between five and 10 members of the clergy.

The remaining demonstrators marched through Manhattan's streets on Saturday towards the house of the Trinity Church rector, but were turned away by police.

Later, as they started to move toward Midtown, some of the demonstrators were hemmed in by lines of police, and police on motorcycles tried to disperse protesters who were in the middle of streets.

"We are unstoppable. Another world is possible," and "Whose street? Our street," were among the chants from the protesters, who blocked some streets as they marched.

The remainder of the group, several dozen protesters, held signs in Times Square into the evening.

The Occupy movement began with protesters taking over a park in New York in September to draw attention to economic inequality and a financial system they say is unfairly skewed toward the wealthy.

In ensuing months the protests and encampments spread to cities throughout the US as well as abroad.

But Occupy camps in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a number of other major cities were shut down in recent weeks in operations that resulted in hundreds of arrests and have raised questions about the movement's future.

Authorities have justified their moves against the camps on a variety of grounds, including that the camps were causing sanitation problems and were dangerous to public safety.

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Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu called the Occupy movement
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