As I've blogged here previously, there's much interest over the possibility that mayors and police departments around the country are coordinating crackdowns on "Occupy" encampments in some kind of shared, organized, collusive manner.
At Mother Jones, Andy Kroll has an excellent piece up today that digs into what we know, and what we don't know.
The tl;dr: yes, mayors from a number of US cities chatted together with police department reps from around the country, to share information about OWS. Beyond that, the details of what was discussed and whether that amounted to a "coordinated crackdown" are not yet clear. The Council of Mayors denies it.
"Even if mayors didn't coordinate their crackdowns, they likely drew support from peers who'd clamped down on the Occupy protests before them," Kroll writes. Read the whole report here.
The two biggest follow-up questions I have: What's next for OWS? And was there federal involvement*?
*Yes, yes, I've read the anonymously-sourced "Examiner" piece, and no, the Examiner isn't a newspaper, and no, that's not enough to go on in my book.
(Image: NYPD watches over empty Zuccotti Park, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from zokuga's photostream)
