Are the NY police relying on criminals and lowlifes to break down the protest in Zuccotti Park?

Excellent reporting by Harry Siegel at the NY Daily News:

Most of the working groups have been clustered at the east end of the park....

Most of the non-participants in turn pitched camp west of there, as far as possible from the workers. That dynamic reinforced itself, as occupiers nervous about their possessions and safety slept by their equipment and each other to the east, while the carnival crowd kept to the other side of Zuccotti....

The police, whom many occupiers see as the enemy and who work under a mayor who’s made no secret of his distaste for the occupiers, have little reason to help them maintain order, and rarely seem to have entered the park over the last week for anything short of an assault....

But while officers may be in a no-win situation, at the mercy of orders carried on shifting political winds and locked into conflict with a so-far almost entirely non-violent protest movement eager to frame the force as a symbol of the oppressive system they’re fighting, the NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals....

“The police are saying ‘it’s a free for all at Zuccotti so you can go there,’” said Daniel Zetah, a member of several working groups including community affairs. “Which makes our job harder and harder because the ratio is worse and worse.”

Read the whole thing. It's fascinating sociology: the little society that has grown up within Zuccotti Park. It reminds me a bit of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Joan Didion's account of of Haight-Ashbury, which describes the decline of what was supposed to be a Utopia.

And what of the police strategy Siegel seems to uncover? I can't say what is really going on, but suppose the police (and the Mayor) decide that it's too difficult — too much effort and too much bad press or too legally confusing — to oust the protesters from Zuccotti Park, and instead they encourage criminals and lowlifes to move in and prey upon the idealists and naifs.