The NY Times Lede Blog shares a YouTube video that provides an alternative view of pepper spraying police at UC Davis. Based on this video, a second policeman participated in the pepper spray melee.
I’ve read dozens of stories about the event, mostly from “real reporters” (aka mainstream media). I have not seen a reference to the Humboldt decision that pepper spraying nonviolent protesters is excessive force. I have not seen any questions about standard police procedure for escalation of force. I have not seen any questions about state or local policy on use of pepper spray. And the only article that talked about an investigation said that there was only one policeman who had used pepper spray.
Are reporters not asking these questions? If not, why not?
According to the Sacramento Bee:
An Occupy Davis encampment has been in place in downtown Davis for more than a month, but students increased their involvement following an afternoon rally Tuesday. A couple of dozen students were allowed to sleep overnight in the university administration building. They were evicted from the building Wednesday afternoon and began camping in the quad Thursday.
The Sacramento Bee questioned the police about the use of pepper spray. Here’s the answer:
Annette Spicuzza, the U.C. Davis police chief, told The Sacramento Bee that the officers used pepper spray on Friday because the police were surrounded by students. “There was no way out of that circle,” she told the newspaper. “They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.”
[…]
She said officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them. They used a sweeping motion on the group, per procedure, to avoid injury, she said.
Her story does not match the videos.
Officers moved without obstruction. The students were sitting down — they had not surrounded the police — and there was plenty of room around the students as the police wielded pepper spray. There was no circle around the cops — not until after the pepper spraying and after the crowd grew. And no where — no where — do you see “volatility” except when officers have double-teamed a prostate student.
I cannot believe that a “sweeping motion” is standard procedure for dispensing pepper spray when Connecticut policy is short 1-second bursts, which is how Seattle police used pepper spray on Tuesday.
Someone is lying and I don’t think it’s the more than 200 videos that have been uploaded to YouTube. The top three videos on YouTube have, combined, more than a million views. (Note, a “view” means someone started watching a clip, not that they watched the entire clip.)
Protests Are Supposed To Make Us Uncomfortable
At The Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta reminds us that “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response.”
But the truth is that American protest movements in real time — and especially in their early days — often appear controversial, politically difficult, out-of-the-mainstream, and dangerous. And they are met with fear.
[…]
This sort of dynamic holds for pretty much any group that aims to upend the existing social order using direct action, because few resort to such tactics if they think they have other, easier ways to petition for redress of grievances or could be heard as loudly through existing channels of expression. The Tea Party movement, for example, has held many protests but with few exceptions has stopped short of civil disobedience, finding early on that its members were by and large not willing to face arrest and that it could gain power relatively quickly through the political system by backing challengers in Republican primaries and allying with experienced party operatives. The Occupy movement is both very new and rather diffuse so far, and appears less interested in gaining power than making power uncomfortable and raising far-reaching questions and public awareness. (emphasis added)
Campus Protests Are Also About Tuition
Mike Konczal argues that OWS protests are returning to college campuses; he cites data from the 2009-2010 academic year to point out that protests on campuses are not new. I agree with him that one of the catalysts for the current protests is a proposed hike in tuition:
The University of California regents are considering raising tuition 81% over the next four years, moving the world class system further away from a right citizens have to develop their talents to a debt-financed commodity they indentured themselves to access as consumers.
Tuition increases — which administrators call inevitable due to economic conditions — also led to protests, tear gas and pepper spray earlier this month at McGill University.
At Berkeley this week, “Kavaoa Fraiola, a 30-year-old Ph.D. candidate in environmental science, waved a placard that read, ‘Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence’.”
The pepper spray story isn’t going away quietly. And neither are the students.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com