Scores of arrests over the weekend by cops reportedly bent on macing, tasering and penning demonstrators rocked the ongoing occupation of Wall Street by a fractured core of anti-corporatocracy activists. They were no closer to getting the government to institute more financial reform, repeal Citizens United, or reinstate the capital gains tax (or eliminate the corporate right to be persons, or forgive student loan debt). But the physicality of the thing did manage to counter-act a heretofore impression of superficiality, hypocrisy, and hippie-dom – and end a media blackout. Suddenly, for a moment, #occupywallstreet felt real.

By Matt Sezer

The occupation, which was initially spurred by a loose alliance between Adbusters and the decentralized hacktivist collective Anonymous, has entered its second week, and the recent flare ups mark a dramatic shift in what’s been an otherwise placid, sleepy protest. NPR reports nearly 80 arrests on Saturday as demonstrators who’d been staked out near the New York Stock Exchange peaceably marched through lower Manhattan toward Union Square. Occupywallst.org, home to a “leaderless resistance movement” that’s compiling real-time reports, images and videos from the ground, claims the National Lawyer’s Guild “puts the number around 100.”

If you happened to be crossing Union Square on Saturday afternoon with a camera, you would have likely been a protester or a journalist or a policeman, and you would have had little idea of where this was going. The NYPD’s cameramen – the plain-clothes Technical Assistance Research Unit – shot protesters while uniforms hustled like anxious referees along the sidelines of a deciding match. As they sized up their task, and tried to set their orange fabric fencing, the protesters drifted down University Place.

Then, at 12th street, the NYPD put its swift and powerful crowd control maneuvers into force, blocking off one corner, and then another, until everyone is standing behind the fences and some people are arrested. Amidst the restraint holds and neck grabs and faces-in-concrete near the Vietnamese sandwich shop and the art house theater, there were some glimmers of the anger and tears and violence that coursed through the streets seven years ago, during the clashes at the Republican National Convention. Two days later, the YouTube videos have been seen over a million times.

As the New York Police Department told NPR, arrests were mainly for blocking traffic. But charges included “disorderly conduct and resisting arrest” with one protester being charged with assaulting a police officer.

Prior to the clashes, dwindling demonstrator numbers, morale and hope of crafting cohesive demands seemed to coincide with frivolous arrests for pitching tents, scrawling sidewalk-chalk messages, attempting to enter a Bank of America building, hopping police barricades and wearing masks, which violates some obscure 1845 Anti-Rent era statute meant to foil the efforts of renters who rallied incognito to stop the “distress sales” of their properties by their landlords – way back when that privileged few brandished feudal-like leases to keep tenants on tight leashes.

via R. Flynn

By Alex Salamunovich.

But on Saturday “the lie revealed itself,” occupywallst.org says. “We live in a world where only 1 percent of us are protected and served.” The site is calling for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s resignation in light of what 23-year-old protest spokesman Patrick Bruner deems the “exceedingly violent” police response to peace-minded demonstrations. The site claims officers had protestors outnumbered two-to-one, and that people were arrested for simply talking to cops – or getting facefuls of pepper spray after they’d already been corralled in mesh crowd-control pens.

Not surprisingly, a deluge of images and video – some of it damn near brutal – of the weekend’s melee has since hit the internet. Whatever the protests have managed to achieve, the fracas lifted what some said was a media blackout on the Wall Street sit-in, which counted satellite demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Madrid, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Tokyo, Milan, Algiers, and Tel-Aviv-Yafo, among others.

As the handcuffs were being snapped on near Union Square, after the most serious tension, one photographer-activist looked dismayed. “It’s still not trending on Twitter,” she said, of the #occupywallst tag. #americandad and #ThingsPeopleDoThatGetMeMad were. A couple of the protest’s “facilitators” were making their pitch to a curious middle-aged woman with a notebook. She was a producer from CNN, it turned out: could she get the story on air finally? She reassured them that, whatever the story, “TV likes pictures.”

In many of the weekend’s more merciless acts of police aggression, now committed to digital eternity, it is the cops in white shirts, the mark of high rank, who appear brazenly thuggish next to their blue-collared subordinates.

Paul J. Browne, chief spokesman for the NYPD, tells the New York Times that cops used mace “appropriately.” They sprayed only once, he continues, “after individuals confronted officers and tried to prevent them from deploying a mesh barrier – something that was edited out or otherwise not captured in the video.” Bruner, who’s quoted later in the same piece, says, “it’s very fair to call it police brutality.”

Meanwhile, nearby, dozens of kids probably just a bit younger were occupying Washington Square Park, to do their Jedi-Sith light-saber battling.

via ennuipoet

And by Sunday, decreed a day of rest by facilitators, those arrested the evening before slowly staggered back into Liberty Plaza, where people wrote songs and roughhoused and checked Twitter for updates, and probably kept eating all that donated pizza.

With reporting by Alex Pasternack. Reach Brian and Alex at brian@motherboard.tv and alexp@motherboard.tv.

Stay tuned for Motherboard’s video coverage of the ongoing Wall Street occupation.