Occupy Santa Cruz Occupies San Lorenzo Park Overnight

Several police officers who paid a visit Thursday afternoon to the Occupy Santa Cruz gathering in San Lorenzo Park said that they would not make any arrests or hand out tickets unless laws were broken.

However, the Occupy Santa Cruz General Assembly was still debating what laws the group was willing to break to show solidarity with New York's Occupy Wall Street live-in as the sun went down Thursday night.

This violated the closing time in the park which is one of the heaviest policed areas in the city, but none came to disperse the crowd. An unmarked police car pulled up to the edge of the park and shined a light on the gathering, but made no attempt to approach the group of nearly 100 people.

Protesters plan to march Friday to Mission Plaza. The route will bring them to Chase Bank, Well's Fargo and Bank of America, where they plan to peacefully block the entrances for a few minutes at a time before moving on.

Whether the group will use the tactics of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X is still up in the air. Chad Harris who is coordinating methods to feed protesters who decide to make a long term stay at the new headquarters at Mission Plaza, said he is against outright violence but is not conflicted over how they should respond to aggression from the police when they begin their unlicensed actions they hope to be ongoing.

“If someone uses pepper spray on me I'm gonna grab the can and throw it back at them,” said Harris.

There were, however, many more voices in favor of remaining completely nonviolent even if the marches themselves are illegal and lead to arrests.

Substitute teacher Ellen Kane drew some of the night's biggest applause to an emotional cry for unity.

“There are many forms of violence, not only physical, but also verbal and psychological,” Kane said. What these banks are doing is inflicting pain, and we need to strive to lift this to a new paradigm.”

The group decide to move to Mission Plaza because it is much more visible than . The protesters say this will attract more attention  and make people more aware of the protest, and protect people who stay over night from isolation if the police do decide to break up the group for violating the city's public sleeping ban.

Many protesters said even though no large banks are headquartered in Santa Cruz that the same system of money in politics is here in the form of property owners, especially hotels, merchants, landlords and contractors.

Many of the protesters have different ideas for solutions to the wealth consolidation, but say they do not want to limit their demands. They said they see such problems as unemployment  and dwindling school budgets so intertwined that they refuse to be pigeon-holed into being a single-issue protest. James Dillon, a local computer engineer said that the city running fiber optic cord for wireless from Santa Clara County is a single move that could help the economy in many ways.

“It would be under $10 or $20 million to put it in,” he said. “Once you do that, the economy would take care of the rest...start-ups would come here, because they aren't paying $100 a month for Comcast, the only game in town.”

For all the talk of police breaking up the encampment, no uniformed officers had even cruised by the protests as of 9 p.m., two hours after sunset.