NYPD "Snatch and Grab" Tactics Illustrated (and, Why the Pics are So Scarce)

In a May Day piece on police tactics, In These Times details the NYPD’s new “snatch and grab” tactic for countering the Occupy movement and other large protests. In a nutshell, the strategy involves the lightening-fast intimidation and scooping up of protesters in ones and twos as much as possible away from the glare of media scrutiny.

If  going “low key” will make intimidation harder to see, the way newswire photos are utilized these days will make it doubly difficult. That’s because most news coverage is pretty general, representing a “snatch and grab” in its own right: only the most dramatic shots (or series of dissimilar shots) will be published to illustrate one overarching story (i.e. May Day Demonstrations: Occupy vs. NYPD).

That’s why news consumers were most likely to have seen only one of the two photos just above (which were published widely), but never would have seen or known that the protester was first cornered between a brick wall and a roll-up door in a driveway away from the demonstration.

Even in those ubiquitous news photo galleries where editors can and will dump 30, 50, even 100 photos, it’s still rare to get much connection or narrative between the photos. If you do, what connects the dots mostly consist of  general themes rather than anything deeper or investigative.

Having the time and the space here, and because our interest is the visual and political narrative, we can focus in on what we’re “not supposed” to see or we’re shown in a moment and ignore. With that focus, we have the opportunity to see the evidence, captured by the combined efforts of Getty photographers Spencer Platt and Emmanuel Dunand, of the NYPD’s use of snatch and grab tactics.

Platt, by the way, has been documenting these lightening strike intimidation and detainment tactics for months.

In November 2011, during the eruption of protests after NYC cleared out Zuccotti Park, he captured this powerful set of images (still accessible on the Getty editorial sales site) of the police roughing up a young woman protester after a confrontation in a building lobby. The blurriness of the photos (and, especially, the expression on the policeman’s face at the end) conveys the instantaneousness, aggression, and furtiveness of this police action.

It is clear to us that the bandwidth for reporting, visual and otherwise, is all too narrow, especially when social justice and free speech are concerned. But there is another point to make: while the marketplace uses only a limited number of visuals to report a story, it doesn’t mean that the photographers, those men and women on the ground collecting imagery and witnessing events, don’t have a lot more truth to show and tell.

(photo 1: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images caption: Occupy Wall Street protestors are arrested by New York City police officers during a demonstration across the street from the New York Stock Exchange on April 13, 2012 in New York City. In preparation for massive May Day demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street protestors continue to hold weekly “Spring Training” demonstrations. photo 2 & 3: Spencer Platt/Getty Images caption: A man is arrested during an Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan on May 1, 2012 in New York City. Hundreds of people ran through the streets of New York pursued by police after a Labor Day march concluded in the early evening. Occupy Wall Street has joined with unions during the May Day protests, a traditional day of global protests in sympathy with unions and leftist politics.photo 4 & 5: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images caption: Policemen arrest Occupy Wall Street participants after they staged a march down Broadway as part of May Day celebrations in New York, May 01, 2012. photos 6 – 9: Spencer Platt/Getty Images caption: A protester affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street Movement is arrested by police in the Financial District on November 17, 2011 in New York City. Protesters attempted to shut down the New York Stock Exchange today, blocking roads and tying up traffic in Lower Manhattan.)