Two weeks into the occupation of Zuccotti Park, on October 1, 2011, a march of thousands set out across the Brooklyn Bridge. Police appeared to lead the column onto the vehicle roadway, then stopped it mid-span, unrolled orange netting behind the crowd, and arrested more than 700 people — the largest single mass arrest in the movement's history and among the largest in American protest history, processed for hours in plastic cuffs on a bridge in the rain.
Nearly all charges were dismissed, and the kettle spawned years of federal litigation over whether marchers had been deliberately trapped; the city ultimately paid settlements rather than test the videos before juries. As with Seattle and A16, the arrests functioned regardless of legal outcome — they defined Occupy's relationship to the NYPD, previewed the eviction to come, and added seven hundred names to the decade's ledger of Americans arrested for walking in the wrong lane of a public bridge.