Court orders NYPD to pay $360,000 for raid that destroyed Occupy Wall Street library

By Michael Kelley, Business Insider

A New York City court has ruled that the city shall pay $366,700 for a destructive raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment.

Around 1 a.m. on Nov. 15, 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloombergordered the NYPD to evict protestors — some of whom had camped there for almost two months — from Zuccotti Park in New York City's Financial District.

The police threw away 5,554 books from the Occupy library and destroyed media equipment in addition to removing tents, tarps, and belongings.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York decided that the NYPD's actions violated the protestors' rights under the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

The city will pay:

• $47,000 in damages and $186,350 in legal fees for The People's Library.
• $75,000 and $49,850 in legal fees to Global Revolutions TV for damaging their "computers, wifi hotspots and similarly related live-streaming equipment."
• $8,500 for trashing the bicycle-powered generators that protestors built to light up the park after police held their other generators.

Occupy Wall Street is a movement, beginning on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square, that protests the role of Wall Street in the 2007 financial crisis and aims to resist the influence of major banks and multinational corporations.

Here's footage of the raid courtesy of Casey Neistat:

Here's the full ruling:

Occupy Wall St. v. City of New York Settlement

[Occupy Wall Street Library (Flickr user Atomische • Tom Giebel)]