Mayors & police chiefs held secret meetings to coordinate responses to Occupy Wall Street

WASHINGTON -- After denying that they are coordinating responses to Occupy Wall Street, the U.S. Conference of Mayors recently surveyed city administrations across the country about the movement.

In late November, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the District of Columbia mayor's office received a request to update its answers to the survey. The questions to city officials appeared to elicit profiles of Occupy activists and answers that could help show the activists as a drain on resources.

The mayor's conference asked via the emailed survey: What are the estimated Occupy-related costs? What are the major issues relating to Occupy events? Has the Occupy membership changed and if so "describe those involved in the movement how they've changed in terms of who they are and what their intentions for the demonstrations are."

In the survey, the organization also called on city administrations to share tactics. "Please describe any strategies or tactics your city is employing in responding to Occupy-related events, including an assessment of their effectiveness if possible."

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has quietly led efforts to coordinate city responses to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the records show. These documents -- which comprise emails to local D.C. officials -- appear to contradict previous statements in which mayors denied any sort of group strategy sessions.

In a Nov. 10 email, Tom Cochran, CEO and executive director for the conference, hyped a follow-up conference call led by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. Cochran wrote that the call "will enable more mayors and police chiefs from across the country to participate in the discussion, sharing information about the situation in their cities, their concerns, and the strategies that are working."

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, has obtained her own set of conference-call related documents and says the mayors' conference is an active participant in setting the stage for the camp raids. "These are sessions that were intended in assisting cities in creating the public pretext for the eviction of the encampments," Verheyden-Hilliard said. "I think they tried to play a fairly covert role in what was an extremely significant nationally coordinated effort to shut down the occupations."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/occupy-wall-street-us-conference-of-mayors_n_1232080.html

U.S. ranked 47th. in the Press Freedom Index 2011/2012:

“This year’s index sees many changes in the rankings, changes that reflect a year that was incredibly rich in developments, especially in the Arab world,” Reporters Without Borders said today as it released its 10th annual press freedom index. “Many media paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements. Control of news and information continued to tempt governments and to be a question of survival for totalitarian and repressive regimes. The past year also highlighted the leading role played by netizens in producing and disseminating news.

“Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them.

The United States 47th. also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests.http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2011-2012,1043.html