Thirteen days after the first arrests in the Occupy Tampa movement, Tampa police officials and members of the activist movement both came before the City Council Thursday morning to give an assessment of where things stand, a month into the protests.
But if you were watching the proceedings via the Tampa government channel, you wouldn't even need to put the sound on to see that the two sides aren't really on the same page.
As Assistant Police Captain John Bennett was telling council members that, all in all, relations between the police and the activists is now relatively positive, members of Occupy Tampa sitting in the rows behind him dropped their hands and wiggled their fingers, their nonverbal sign of disagreement.
But if that was too subtle for the casual viewer to discern, one Occupy Tampa member made it simpler to understand, holding up a single white piece of paper with the word "liar" written on it.
City Council member Mary Mulhern, who so far has been the only elected official to meet the protesters in Curtis Hixon Park, the epicenter of Occupy Tampa's occupation, asked Bennett if the city would be able to accommodate the activists most pressing request: that a common space be made available for them to occupy without harassment.
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2011.