NYPD: 16 Occupy protesters arrested

More Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested outside Goldman Sachs headquarters in lower Manhattan Thursday during a small but noisy lunch hour demonstration.

About 200 protesters walked -- to the sound of drums -- the several blocks from Zuccotti Park to hand-deliver what some demonstrators called an "indictment" of the giant global financial firm for corporate greed.

More than a dozen demonstrators then sat down in the driveway leading up to the building at West Street and had to be removed by police. A NYPD spokesman said 16 people were arrested. Fifteen of the demonstrators were charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and one was charged with disorderly conduct, a police spokesman said.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs wasn't available for comment.

The latest arrests came on a day when more than 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters, who had been arrested in September at a Union Square demonstration, refused an offer by prosecutors to dismiss disorderly conduct charges if they stayed out of trouble for six months. Prosecutors had said the demonstrators blocked traffic and impeded pedestrians. But protesters said they stayed on the sidewalk, taking care to leave a path for others to get through.

Fewer than 10 of those arrested in September accepted the prosecution's offer of an "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," a fairly common resolution for minor offenses. The court set a new court date of Jan. 9 for all of the September cases.

Meanwhile, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday there had been uncorroborated reports that protesters in the park were dispensing their own form of social justice for criminal acts.

"Instead of calling the police, they form a circle around the perpetrator, chastise him or her and chase him or her out into the rest of the city to do who knows what," Bloomberg told reporters.

Beth Bogart, a media official for the Zuccotti Park demonstrators, said that there wasn't any "vigilante" justice.

"My understanding is that the police aren't in the park but that when there is a situation -- a disruptive person -- I have seen that happen, that people call in cops," Bogart said. "I must say the police handle it very nicely."

Bogart said some people in the park do a good job of using nonviolent methods to de-escalate potentially disruptive situations when cops aren't around.

With AP