The incident with a protester being "run over" by a police scooter is a fraud. Here's proof

OWS Goes Pallywood: A Frame by Frame Analysis of an Attempted Media Fraud

John on October 14, 2011 at 4:12 pm

Here’s what happened this morning when police tried to clear the streets on their scooters. A man later identified as an observer for the National Lawyer’s Guild was supposedly run over by a scooter and lies on the ground screaming. Here’s the AP photo and their caption:

Caption: A New York City police officer runs over a National Lawyers Guild observer as Occupy Wall Street demonstrators march through the streets near Wall Street, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, in New York.

It certainly looks bad. And at first blush the video of the incident seems worse since the man in question is screaming, apparently in terrible pain. Here’s the clip:



Now let’s walk through this carefully and see what actually happened. Starting at 6 seconds we see the scooter is stopped and the cop has his feet on the ground and is walking it forward:

At 8 seconds the scooter is off screen but you hear a man begin screaming loudly. The camera moves and at 10 seconds we see the man on the ground. But at 12 seconds we can see that his feet are not under the scooter:

The man continues to scream but the camera jostles behind some other eager photographers. Finally at 17 seconds we get a new view and now the man’s leg is directly in front of the rear wheel of the scooter:

He’s writing and screaming for several more seconds as if in terrible pain. The cop gets off the scooter.

At 22 seconds and you’ll hear someone in the crowd yell “He’s having a seizure! He’s having a seizure!’ Clearly they are trying to explain what they are seeing which doesn’t make any kind of ordinary sense.

At 25 seconds you hear a loud thud which is the scooter being knocked over. As we’ll learn in a moment, it was kicked over by the supposed victim to free his “trapped” leg. At this moment the man stops screaming. We lose the image again until about 33 seconds at which point the man is rolled over on his face and is being arrested by two cops (on the right):

At 35 seconds you can see the scooter is down:

There’s another video from a slightly different angle which shows the same thing. Here’s the moment right after the screaming starts. Note again that his feet are not under any part of the bike:

Now, just to make it clear what is being alleged, the National Lawyers Guild claims his foot was trapped and that’s why he kicked over the scooter:

“He was observing the protest and he was run over by a police motorcycle,” said Zainab Akbar, 31, another legal observer with the lawyers group.

“His leg was stuck under the bike, and he kicked his leg to get the bike off his leg, and then the police attacked him and shoved him into the ground and put a night stick against the back of his neck,” Akbar said.

Well, as you’ve just seen, that’s a flat out lie. He wedged his own foot under the scooter. Fortunately, in addition to the video we have the testimony of an eyewitness on the scene. A NY Daily News photographer explains what he saw:

Daily News photographer Joe Marino, who witnessed the confrontation, said “the bike definitely hit him” but the officer didn’t run him over. “I saw him sticking his legs under the bike to make it appear he was run over,” Marino said of the lawyer.

To its credit the NY Times is publishing doubts about this as well:

[Police spokesman] Mr. Browne said he was also told by The Associated Press that one of its photographers witnessed Mr. Douglas deliberately putting his feet under the scooter.

And in case there’s any doubt what the cops think, they charged him with criminal mischief:

Mr. Douglas was charged with felony criminal mischief, obstructing judicial administration, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, Mr. Browne said.

This is the OWS version of Pallywood. I hope this guy, whose name is Ari Douglas, faces some kind of discipline from the bar for this attempted fraud.