POLICE IN BOSTON arrested over 50 protesters at the Occupy Boston movement for allegedly trespassing when moving to a second site overnight from their original encampment on the city’s Dewey Square.

Hundreds of students took to the streets yesterday in support of the movement, calling on the government to “Fund education, not corporations”.

The Boston Phoenix reports that a group of US war veterans who had joined the movement complained of police brutality when being moved from the demonstrations later yesterday. The Phoenix posted this video of the unrest last night:

The leaderless movement inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings and calling for “democracy not corporatocracy” has been spreading from its New York base near Wall Street to other US cities, with similar demonstrations taking place in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Honolulu and Washington DC.

An Irish demonstration mirroring the US movement has entered its fourth consecutive day today and is based outside the Central Bank on Dublin’s Dame Street.

Four weeks into the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and the costs of policing the demonstrations are adding up for the NYPD.

The police force has already spent $1.9 million, much of which went on overtime pay, in patrolling the area around Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where hundreds of people have based their protest camp.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last week called on city agencies to cut their budgets, said yesterday that “the bottom line is that people want to express themselves, and as long as they obey the laws, we allow them to”.

The NYPD has also been accused of police brutality in coping with the demonstrations, and recently launched an internal investigation into into an incident in which an officer pepper-sprayed female protesters apparently without provocation.

The movement has so far generated the support of filmmaker Michael Moore, philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Zizek, Kanye West, Russell Simmons and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators say they are not planning to pack up any time soon and are in for the long haul.