Occupy Wall Street Protesters Arrested in New York

NEW YORK | Sat Dec 17, 2011 6:49pm EST

(Reuters) - Hundreds of anti-Wall Street protesters took to New York's streets on Saturday in an attempt to establish a new encampment, with scores arrested as they tried to move onto church-owned land.

The protesters had used a wooden ladder to climb over a chain-link fence into the lot owned by Trinity Church, an Occupy Wall Street spokesman said.

Police had no immediate figure on how many protesters were arrested, but Gideon Oliver, president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, put the number at about 55, including between five and 10 members of the clergy.

The demonstrators continued moving around Manhattan's streets into the evening, at one point saying they were headed to the house of the Trinity Church rector.

"We are unstoppable. Another world is possible," and "Whose street? Our street," were among the chants from the protesters, who blocked some streets as they marched.

Later, as they started to move toward Midtown, some of the demonstrators were hemmed in by lines of police, and police on motorcycles tried to disperse protesters who were in the middle of streets.

The Occupy movement began with protesters taking over a park in New York in September to draw attention to economic inequality and a financial system they say is unfairly skewed toward the wealthy.

In ensuing weeks the protests and encampments spread to cities throughout the United States as well as to some in other countries.

But Occupy camps in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a number of other major cities were shut down in recent weeks in operations that resulted in hundreds of arrests and have raised questions about the movement's future.

Authorities have justified their moves against the camps on a variety of grounds, including that the camps were causing sanitation problems and were dangerous to public safety.

(Writing by Jerry Norton; Editing by Dan Whitcomb)