By Hannah Roberts
9th October 2011
These are the shocking scenes that have led some people to accuse the Occupy Wall Street protesters living rough in New York's financial district of creating unsanitary and filthy conditions.
Exclusive pictures obtained by Mail Online show one demonstrator relieving himself on a police car.
Elsewhere we found piles of stinking refuse clogging Zuccotti Park, despite the best efforts of many of the protesters to keep the area clean.
The shocking images demonstrate the extent to which conditions have deteriorated as demonstrations in downtown Manhattan enter their fourth week. Further pictures seen by Mail Online have been censored, as we deemed them too graphic to show.
According to eye witnesses, when people ran to tell nearby police about the man defecating on the squad car they were ignored.
Standing downwind of the piles of rubbish, bankers walking past the man did a double take before hurrying away.
Brookfield Office Properties, which owns Zuccotti Park, the site of the New York demonstration, have already railed against protesters, who they claim are creating sanitation problems.
'Sanitation is a growing concern,' Brookfield said in a statement.
INSIDE MAN: IS PRESIDENT OBAMA SUPPORTING THE PROTESTERS?
Despite claiming to represent 'the 99 per cent', not all Americans are behind the Wall Street protests.
But according to the Financial Times, the President himself is unofficially backing their cause.
The paper wrote: 'While not endorsing the protests, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have expressed understanding of the movement that has spread rapidly across the country.
'Mr Obama said people were angry because Wall Street had not been 'following the rules'.
'His vice-president even compared the movement on Thursday to the Tea Party, the conservative movement which has upended national politics in the past two years.'
'Normally the park is cleaned and inspected every week night. . . because the protesters refuse to cooperate. . .the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels,' CBS News reported.
Although many of the protesters are understood to be making strenuous efforts to clean up after themselves, after three weeks of occupation, the strain of hundreds of people living on the street has begun to take its toll.
The authorities today warned of a dramatic crackdown on Wall Street demonstrators, as the protests spread across America.
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has promised that if protesters targeted the police, authorities will respond with 'force.'
Kelly blamed activists for starting the skirmishes with police that led to 28 arrests yesterday.
Most were arrested for disorderly behaviour, CBS News reported.
'They’re going to be met with force when they do that — this is just common sense,' Kelly said.
'These people wanted to have confrontation with the police for whatever reason. Somehow, I guess it works to their purposes.'
Mayor Bloomberg added his voice to the furor, accusing the Wall Street demonstrators of putting the city's economy at risk, the New York Post reported.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg attacked protesters today, saying the demonstrations were harming the city.
He said: 'What they're trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city.
'They're trying to take away the tax base we have because none of this is good for tourism.'
'If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city -- the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy-- we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean the blocks or anything else.'
Protests against corporate greed and economic inequality spread across America on Thursday.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, that began in New York last month with a few people, has now swelled to protests in more than a dozen cities.
They included Tampa, Florida; Trenton and Jersey City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, Virginia in the East; to Chicago and St. Louis in the Midwest; Houston, San Antonio and Austin in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Los Angeles in the West.
Protesters have raged against corporate greed and influence over American life, the gap between rich and poor, and hapless, corrupt politicians.
'I'm fed up with the government, I'm fed up with the bailouts. If I fail at my job, I don't get a bonus -- I get fired,' said Tim Lucas, 49, vice president of a software company, who was protesting in Austin.
Hundreds of people have been arrested in New York since the protests began last month. On Wednesday, the biggest crowd so far of about 5,000 people marched on New York's financial district, and police used pepper spray on some protesters. But protests for the most part have been non-violent.
Organisers predict momentum will continue to build, as labour movements join the growing numbers.
'This is the beginning,' said John Preston in Philadelphia, business manager for Teamsters Local 929. 'Teamsters will support the movement city to city.'
In Philadelphia, up to 1,000 protesters chanted and waved placards reading: 'I did not think 'By the People, For the People' meant 1 percent,' a reference to their argument the country's top few have too much wealth and political power.
In Los Angeles, more than 100 protesters crowded outside a Bank of America branch downtown, while a smaller group dressed in business attire slipped inside and pitched a tent. Eleven were arrested when they refused to remove the tent.
In Washington, protesters carried signs that read: 'Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed' and 'Stop the War on Workers.'
