Say what you will about the Occupy movement, it has fast become one of the most significant protest movements in recent memory. Since the first marches into Wall Street on Sept. 17, tens of thousands of individuals have taken up the banner of Occupy in cities on every continent on Earth. While movements like this have had greater participation in the past, few, if any, have been embraced so quickly and so thoroughly by so many different people around of the word.

Although there were reports of initial conflict between protestors and police from the very start, for a while, it seemed like the movement was carrying on without meeting much resistance from police forces. Within weeks, however, video footage emerged of NYPD deputy inspector Anthony Bologna pepper spraying two protestors at Occupy Wall Street. Following that, drastic breakdowns in the relationships between protestors and police forces started to be emerge in media coverage of the events, as attempts were made to shut down camps at various cities around the world. However reluctant we should be to do so, putting aside the gross abuse of power in firing on unarmed, nonaggressive citizens– even with non-lethal weapons– police attempts to bring the protests to an end through such tactics likely only serves to strengthen civilian support towards the protestors.

On Oct. 26, images of marine and Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen emerged showing the blood-soaked man being carried by fellow protesters. Olsen was hit in the head with a projectile, which fractured his skull and knocked him unconscious. Eyewitness reports differ in what struck Olsen, with reports of both non-lethal weapon rounds from police and bottles and rocks being thrown by protestors. However, what most of the photos capture– which throws support in Olsen’s favour regardless of what injured him– are the acts of aggression by police on the protestors who were trying to remove him from the scene to safety. They were again assaulted with non-lethal weapons.

Days later, on Nov. 3, again in Oakland, Scott Campbell was shot by police with similar non-lethal weaponry. The event was documented by Campbell himself, who was filming the officers who fired upon him. His video account of the attack shows that it was unprovoked.

On Nov. 16, the Associated Press released a photo of Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old who stopped on her way home at a march in Seattle to voice her support of New York protests, which had recently been shut down. During a stand-off with the police, Rainey was pepper sprayed. Most accounts of the situation refer to it as having been a peaceful protest, and there have been none which have indicated any acts of aggression– by Rainey or otherwise– towards Seattle police.

These instances are but of a few of the many reports of assault and injury on protestors by police, most of which report the aggression beginning with the police. Although it’s important to also consider the many allegations which do not involve the police– reports of assault between protestors are also numerous– these incidents are the ones which demand the most attention and people like Olsen, Campbell and Rainey become martyrs, and having faces to put to any cause does nothing to quell emotion among people who are involved. If anything, having such ubiquitous images of such galling circumstances of police aggression towards the protestors deepens the us-and-them divide between civilians and police forces, which won’t cause any of these camps to go away any sooner. Disproportionate violence is more likely to cause people, even those who may not even have had any prior investment in the movement, to be sympathetic towards the protestors.

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