(CBS/AP) BOSTON - Police evicted Wall Street protesters from Boston's Dewey Square early Saturday.
Police communications director Elaine Driscoll says officers moved in about 5 a.m.
She says police began "the process to ensure compliance with the trespassing law."
Protesters transmitted live video from the scene showing officers taking down tents. Footage showed numerous police in yellow and black jackets moving across the square that had been occupied by protesters just minutes earlier.
The Boston Globe says "a large force of officers swooped down" on the encampment, and forty arrests were made "in the lightning-swift operation." It quotes police as saying all were on trespassing charges.
The city had set a deadline for midnight Thursday for the protesters to abandon the site but police took no action until early Saturday.
Protesters first erected the encampment on Sept. 30. Then ten week stay was the longest continual one of its type in the nation, the newspaper says.
According to the Globe, "Demonstrators ran for the camp, yelling, 'Wake up! Wake up!'
'If you don't leave the park, you will be subject to arrest. You are trespassing on Greenway property,' a police officer said through a megaphone.
'Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like,' demonstrators chanted back. About two dozen linked arms and sat down in nonviolent protest, preparing to be arrested."
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