On early Tuesday morning, Boston police violently arrested 141 members of Occupy Boston for expanding their peaceable assembly to a new encampment without city authorization. The number of activists participating in the occupation of the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the heart of Boston’s financial district has steadily grown since the beginning of October, leading to the confrontation.
After the arrests and the destruction of the expanded encampment, Mayor Thomas Menino and Police Commissioner Ed Davis have offered conflicting accounts of the reasons for the city’s actions, from protecting grass to preventing outdoor sleeping. Davis called those arrested “anarchists,” and Menino claimed “outsiders” who came “from another country” hijacked the Occupy Boston protest:
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