On Monday, students, faculty and supporters at the University of California, Davis, attempted a mass general strike to protest tuition hikes and to demand the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after police pepper-sprayed eleven protesters who blocked a public access way at an #OccupyUCDavis event on November 18th. Students maintain it was Chancellor Katehi who requested the police remove the Occupy encampment and clear access to the facility. The incident sparked a firestorm of media all across the world and has become a viral phenomenon, and now even an Internet meme.
We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation. But not for the reasons they might think.
The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents. In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority. Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it. Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.
Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven “peaceful prtesters,” as onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay. The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.
But just as Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Perhaps in this case, it’s not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.
We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point. What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path. Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be “subject to the use of force” if they did not voluntarily move. The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.
The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way. In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.
She describes that the students were there to stand in solidarity with UC Berkeley students and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and to “protest tuition hikes that are happening at public universities all across the nation.” Pearson goes on to explain: [my emphasis]
“We linked arms and we sat down peacefully to protest their [riot police] presence on our campus, and then at one point we had encircled them [police] and they were trying to leave and trying to clear a path, and so we sat down and linked arms, and said that if they were trying to clear a path they would have to go through us.”
When asked if the student protesters were given any sort of warning by police, Pearson responds:
“I believe they told maybe one student or maybe had some dialogue, but certainly not everyone could hear, it wasn’t like an announcement that was made.”
So, they intentionally encircled the police and blocked them in. In doing so, the Davis 11 created a serious public safety hazard. But you’d never see that from the same twenty seconds of video splashed across every media outlet. Not until other bloggers began to delve into the story did the more complete versions of the incident begin to crop up on video.
But by then, the damage was done.
Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and two officers, including Lt. John Pike, have already been placed on administrative leave, and petitions calling for their resignation have been collected. Videos and internet memes of the “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” have gone viral. The hacktivist collective Anonymous posted Pike’s information online and encouraged people to call and harass the officer.
Other law enforcement personnel have explained that pepper spray is often used as a compliance tool when necessary. “People don’t consider what it takes to break up an unlawful assembly if the protestors refuse to disperse. It always takes some kind of force,” said one law enforcement officer we spoke with. Police needed to remove the protesters, who’d linked arms to form a blockade. Reaching in to manually break them apart would have required the use of physical force, while leaving the officers’ weapons vulnerable to seizure. In that case, most procedures indicate that pepper-spray is justified and the most humane of all options. While it creates temporary discomfort for the protestors, it enables the officers to safely contain, and in this case, arrest the protesters in order to remove them from blocking the public’s access. Protesters have since admitted, they intentionally surrounded the police and blocked them in. While the video footage shown on mainstream media may not appear this way, the complete footage that has since surfaced clearly backs up the officers’ claims.
Police officers are public servants, they are people too. Where are they supposed to turn when a situation has become so politicized that they aren’t supported by their own chain of command? At Monday’s general strike at UC Davis sister campus UC Berkeley, a statement from the university’s police officers’ union reflected this sentiment and admonished regents and UC administrators:
“[do not] ask us to enforce your policies, then refuse to stand by us when we do…It was not our decision to engage campus protesters. We are now faced with ‘managing’ the results of years of poor budget planning.”
Speaking of the chain of command, where is the same support for police from our own leaders, Vice President Biden and President Obama, as they supported police in 2010 and last month when Biden opined that rape would rise without the jobs bill?
In March, some of the very same protesters encountered similar events during the March 4th Day of Action to Defend Public Education (video & photos), when protesters blocked a major California highway in a standoff with police that required the use of pepper-spray pellets to contain the crowd. Protesters later went on to “Occupy” buildings and classrooms at UC Davis. One of those participants listed at the March protest was Kase Wheatley, one of the Davis 11 featured in the November 18th video. Clearly, Kase is no stranger to such conflict, and judging by the high-end raincoat he’s seen wearing in the video, he apparently came prepared.
Kase and other students have actually been protesting for some time, supporting labor causes like unionized teaching assistants at UC Davis and protesting union busting on behalf of AFSCME.
“The UC system has actually hired one of the premiere union busting firms in the country to basically break up the unions on campus,” Wheatley said. “They’re all connected, it’s happening all over the world. It’s happening with riots and protests in Tunisia and Egypt, and all the way to the United States.”
With all the comparisons to Tunisia and Egypt, it’s not surprising then that media outlets like MSNBC have exalted Kase to martyr status, where he was most recently heralded by Michael Moore, who calls the UC Davis pepper spray incident an iconic moment in the Occupy movement akin to “Tiananmen Square.”
But the ramifications of the pepper spray incident reach further than the topic of the use of force. Too many fail to realize that 200 protesters in a school of over 30,000 tuition paying students is a tiny minority, less than 1 percent. What about the 99 percent in this case? The 99 percent who want to go about their daily routines, be safe on their college campus, not be afraid to voice their own opinions, and want to attend the classes for which they’re paying?
There is no better example of this majority than a young woman and a young man who spoke up at a Town Hall meeting that was held with Chancellor Katehi and other administrators from UC Davis. As the woman so eloquently stated, while it’s great that the school supports the rights of the Occupy protesters, it’s come at the expense of the other students.
“My concern is what the events of the last week have been doing to the quality of our education. I know that myself personally I’ve already had two days worth of classes canceled by the professors, I expect to have more classes canceled on Monday with the general strike and I don’t think I’m alone in this. As was just stated, we have midterms coming up, we have finals coming up, and it’s both ironic and sad that one of the initial starting points of this movement was to defend the right to education by not making it a classist place, and I do feel as though within the last week we have had some of those rights taken away from us. Not only are we not able to attend class because of noise, but classes are actually being canceled, we don’t have the option to go.”
This sentiment appears to be echoed by the failure of students to turn out for Monday’s general strike, as many of those interviewed emphasized that it is mid-terms week at the university and thus, they prioritized their coursework above the strike.
UC Davis maintains published policies in its Standards of Ethical Conduct by which every student and faculty member must abide. Individuals are required to sign agreements to such policies. The Davis 11 were expected to follow these policies, and to comply with applicable laws and regulations. They did not. And their actions risked infringing upon the rights of others.
Let’s put this into perspective: Whether you agree or disagree with cities’ decisions to evict Occupy encampments, the fundamental 1st Amendment rights of the protesters are not being violated. Protesters are still permitted to assemble, they are still permitted to speak, they simply must do so within the limits of the law – free speech is subject to time, place, and manner regulations. Such guidelines exist in order to protect the rights of the public as a whole to safely access the same facilities in an unrestricted manner. As was the case in the Zuccotti Park ruling, the Judge ruled that the protesters:
“had not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators and other installations to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely.”
The first amendment does not protect the right to camp out or to prohibit others from gaining access to the same spaces.
Such is the issue at UC Davis and likely soon to be at many other college campuses. Protesters may assemble and have their voices heard – in the time, place, and manner permitted – but not to the detriment of the majority of the public, including the other students trying to attend classes. Police responding to requests to clear encampments and access ways are enforcing existing laws and performing a much needed service to the general public. The outcry that protesters’ rights to free speech are being violated are nothing more than opportunistic propaganda. And the more we see the repetitive accounts exploiting the police, publishing their information as retaliation for “violating the first amendment,” the more dangerous the propaganda becomes. One can certainly argue the merits of the appropriate numbers of police officers, the gear they wear, the procedures they follow – all of these are another conversation.
In fact, not only should Chancellor Katehi resign for her failure to show leadership, but the protesters who violated the Standards of Ethical Conduct should be expelled or punished, not given amnesty. Pepper spray aside, they broke the rules and that has an impact on their fellow community members who chose to be responsible and play by the rules.
As the Occupy movement progresses to the next phase of its lifecycle, we must all be vigilant to keep things in perspective and to look at the entire picture before hastily drawing conclusions. There will be those on all sides who strive to polarize the country, and wish to create and disseminate propaganda that serves a specific purpose. Left unchecked, the propaganda itself can be more dangerous than anything like pepper spray.
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