RELATED: It must take a mighty, mighty big man to get all armored up, while surrounded by reinforcements, and spray a U.S. citizen with mace for exercising their inalienable rights. Never mind whether said citizen is female or not. The police state isn’t coming, it’s already here. This is what a police state looks like. MORE
RELATED: This Is Also What A Police State Looks Like
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RELATED: Excellent Pictures Of 11/17 Protests
RELATED: The right-wing Daily Caller website has been anything but kind to Occupy Wall Street, even going so far as to condemn the protest movement as generating riots, murder, and arson. But when a couple of Daily Caller employees were at Occupy Wall Street this morning, it was the very protesters 
they had been demonizing who ended up helping them out. Daily Caller reporter Michelle Fields — who faced off with actor Matt Damon earlier this year over education policy — and videographer Direna Cousins both claim they were attacked by the New York Police Department (NYPD) while covering the raucous protests in the Financial District today. Fields added that Occupy Wall Street protesters immediately came up to her to offer their help: “Direna had a camera in her hand and I had a microphone, and we were being hit,” she said. “When I fell to the ground I said at one point, ‘I’m just covering this! I’m covering this!’ And the officer just said, ‘Come on, get up, get up,’ before pulling me up by my jacket. The protesters came up to me right away and asked if I needed any medical assistance. They were actually very kind and helpful. It was the police officers who were very aggressive.” MORE
OCCUPY TVNY: At Beaver and Broad Street at 10:45 AM on November 17th, an impromptu dance party in the street is attacked by riot police. Unarmed protesters are beaten with batons and arrested. MORE
RELATED: Including today’s 375+ #occupyarrests the global total is now 4542
Q: How did you go about finding someone nearby who would allow you stage this from inside their home?
A: Opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There’s a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons. I walked around, and put up signs in there offering money to rent out an apartment for a few hours. I didn’t say much more. I received surprisingly few calls, and most of them seemed not quite fully there. But then I got one call from a sane person Her name was Denise Vega. She lived on the 16th floor. Single, working mom, mother of three. I spoke with her on the phone, and a few days later went over and met her. I told her what I wanted to do, and she was enthused. The more I described, the more excited she got. Her parting words were, “let’s do this.” She wouldn’t take my money. That was the day of the eviction of Zuccotti, the same day. And she’d been listening to the news all day, she saw everything that had happened. “I can’t charge you money, this is for the people,” she said. She was born in the projects. She opened up her home to us. She was in there tonight with her 3 daughters, 2 sisters. The NYPD started snooping around down on the ground while the projections were up, it was clear where we were projecting from, and inside it was festive. “If they want to come up they’re gonna need a warrant!,” her family was saying. “If they ask us, well, we don’t know what they are talking about!” They were really brave and cool. MORE