11.18.11 - 11:23 am | Shawn Gaynor

As cities across America evict encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement, similarities of timing, talking points and tactics among major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs have led critics to wonder: Is some sort of national coordination going on?

The White House says there’s no federal oversight. Speaking November 15 aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said “The president’s position is that obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues.”

But a little-known but influential private membership based organization has placed itself at the center of advising and coordinating the crackdown on the encampments. The Police Executive Research Forum, an international non-governmental organization with ties to law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been coordinating conference calls with major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs to advise them on policing matters and discuss response to the Occupy movement. The group has distributed a recently published guide on policing political events.

Links:

About Perf: http://www.policeforum.org/about-us/

The article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/11/18/cop-group-coordinating-occu...

Note:

So what is meant by that there was no federal oversight? More to the point, so as not to get into an endless discussion about meaning of words, what happened to "protection of local accountability"?