The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

[Terralthra]

Worth noting:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A California university placed two of its police officers on administrative leave Sunday because of their involvement in the pepper spraying of passively sitting protesters, while the school's chancellor accelerated a task force's investigation into the incident amid calls for her resignation.

The president of the 10-campus University of California system also weighed in on the growing fallout from Friday's incident at UC Davis, saying that he is "appalled" at images of students being doused with pepper spray and plans a far-reaching, urgent assessment of law enforcement procedures on all campuses.

"I implore students who wish to demonstrate to do so in a peaceful and lawful fashion. I expect campus authorities to honor that right," UC President Mark G. Yudof said. All 10 chancellors would convene soon for a discussion "about how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to non-violent protest," he said.

Officials at UC Davis refused to identify the two officers who were place on administrative leave but one was a veteran of many years on the force and other "fairly new" to the department, the school's Police Chief Annette Spicuzza told The Associated Press. She would not elaborate further because of the pending probe.

Videos posted online of the incident clearly show one riot-gear clad officer dousing the line of protesters with spray as they sit in a line with their arms intertwined. Spicuzza told the AP that the second officer was identified during an intense review of several videos.

"We really wanted to be diligent in our research, and during our viewing of multiple videos we discovered the second officer," Spicuzza said. "This is the right thing to do."

Both officers were trained in the use of pepper spray as department policy dictates, and both had been sprayed with it themselves during training, the chief noted.

Meanwhile, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said she has been inundated with reaction from alumni, students and faculty.

"I spoke with students this weekend and I feel their outrage," Katehi said in a statement Sunday.
Katehi also set a 30-day deadline for her school's task force investigating the incident to issue its report. The task force, comprised of students, staff and faculty, will be chosen this week. She earlier had set a 90-day timetable.

She also plans to meet with demonstrators Monday at their general assembly, said her spokeswoman, Claudia Morain.

On Saturday, the UC Davis faculty association called for Katehi's resignation, saying in a letter there had been a "gross failure of leadership." Katehi has resisted calls for her to quit.

"I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident," Katehi said Sunday. "However, I pledge to take the actions needed to ensure that this does not happen again. I feel very sorry for the harm our students were subjected to and I vow to work tirelessly to make the campus a more welcoming and safe place."

The incident reverberated well beyond the university, with condemnations and defenses of police from elected officials and from the wider public on Facebook and Twitter.

"On its face, this is an outrageous action for police to methodically pepper spray passive demonstrators who were exercising their right to peacefully protest at UC Davis," Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said in a statement Sunday. "Chancellor Katehi needs to immediately investigate, publically explain how this could happen and ensure that those responsible are held accountable."

The protest Friday was held in support of the overall Occupy Wall Street movement and in solidarity with protesters at the University of California, Berkeley who were jabbed by police with batons on Nov. 9.

Nine students hit by pepper spray were treated at the scene, two were taken to hospitals and later released, university officials said. Ten people were arrested.

Some defended the officers' tactics. Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department's use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a "compliance tool" that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.
Meanwhile Sunday, police in San Francisco, about 80 miles south of Davis, arrested six anti-Wall Street protesters and cleared about 12 tents erected in front of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Across the bay in Oakland, police made no arrests after protesters peacefully left a new encampment set up in defiance of city orders.

Oakland police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said about 20 tents were erected late Saturday after several hundred protesters tore down a chain-link fence surrounding a city-owned vacant lot and set up a new encampment on Telegraph Avenue.

Katehi continues to ignore calls for her resignation by a vast swathe of students and professors. It's entirely likely that like Abu Ghraib, the higher-ups in charge of orchestrating the University response will be able to blame the officers with their fingers on the spray bottle while they, the Chancellor and UCDPD police chief, face few consequences.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The chancellor may 'step down', but she'll get another job as a senior administrator somewhere within the UC system at about the same pay but with less visibility.

[Terralthra]

The chancellor may 'step down', but she'll get another job as a senior administrator somewhere within the UC system at about the same pay but with less visibility.

Benefits of being in the 1%.

[weemadando]

The chancellor may 'step down', but she'll get another job as a senior administrator somewhere within the UC system at about the same pay but with less visibility.

Benefits of being in the 1%.

If you think she's anywhere near the 1% you're insane.

[CaptainChewbacca]

She'd be in the provost/[resident range, whats the average salary of the 1%?

[Duckie]

200k is about 3%- some of those people are highly paid for doing useful work still. Top 1% is about 300,000. The top 0.1% is about 1.5 million, according to the Census, and the 'no job is actually worth that' range according to my rule of thumb*. But '1%' is more catchy and easy to say than 'The top half a percent or so of oligarchs' or whatnot even if technically the top 1% of society includes some professionals like lawyers and specialist doctors who aren't so bad.

(incidentally the average american estimates the top 2% make about 150,000, judging by the fact that 18% of americans think they are the top 2%.)

*There are people that actually do add millions of dollars to a company's value, but they're invariably not the guys paid millions, just the people in the top 5% or so.

[Simon_Jester]

Suffice to say that the people in or around the top five percent enjoy at least the penumbra of the privileges enjoyed by the super-elite of the 1% or 0.5% or whatever.

While OWS may claim to speak for the 99%, I suspect that if you had everyone in America sit down and really think through their economic interests in cold blood, the incomes high enough to align with the "1%" would probably make up more like 2% or 3% of the population. This shouldn't stun anyone- a super-elite of people with seven, eight, or nine figure incomes needs a large staff of high-grade managers, planners, fixers, and so on to keep the machine running on their behalf and manage the large numbers of proles.

The top tier of this manager-class will live in the same atmosphere of privilege as the lower end of the elite itself as a matter of course, because that's where new members of the elite are drawn from in the first place.

[Terralthra]

She actually made $400,000 annually when hired 2 years ago. Above $250,000 annual household income is in the top 1.5% in the US. So, weemadando, I guess I'm not insane at all.

[Duckie]

Well, I guess my estimates were wrong. I was using the 2006 census for median household income. Regardless, she makes a lot of money I think is the thing.

[weemadando]

She actually made $400,000 annually when hired 2 years ago. Above $250,000 annual household income is in the top 1.5% in the US. So, weemadando, I guess I'm not insane at all.

Fair enough. She's going pretty well.

On the topic of her, what was with her crocodile tears over the abuse by the police... That should ordered.

[madd0ct0r]

Suffice to say that the people in or around the top five percent enjoy at least the penumbra of the privileges enjoyed by the super-elite of the 1% or 0.5% or whatever.

While OWS may claim to speak for the 99%, I suspect that if you had everyone in America sit down and really think through their economic interests in cold blood, the incomes high enough to align with the "1%" would probably make up more like 2% or 3% of the population.

The genius of Tony Blair was to realise that while the UK didn't have that many rich people, it had plenty who intended to be rich, and would not want to vote against their perceived future benefits.

Add in the American dream, and it's pretty obvious that the tolerance of the super rich getting perks will be high, because after all, I'm going to be rich too someday.

[Minischoles]

The BBC News Article on the same subject has a video attached.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15809742

Officer simply strolls along emptying an entire canister of spray into their faces.

[Shroom Man 777]

Weren't you also shrieking about cannibals because some shmuck was going Oscar Wilde? Maybe that shmuck, that carnoshmuck, bit some other guys, and spreaded the hunger for human flesh and brains, and like he unhinged his jaws around my head like a snake gulping down an egg and took a huge ass chunk off my skull, and now I don't actually have half a fucking brain and now I'm also slavering for the flesh of the living. Zinegata Romero's Occupation of the Dead (also known as: Occupy Dead Street)!

That wasn't me. However, if your sort of ad-hominem shit is allowed here, then perhaps we should just spam each other to death with insults, because apparently it's now okay to do so.

Okay, it was my mistake man. It was Chocula who shrieked about cannibalism. Whoops.

Why do you think I advocated Gandhi-style non-violence? Which gives the authorities NO excuse for violent behavior?

Really, you cannot pretend to be a happy, hippy, non-violet movement that is trying to change the minds of the common man, when the majority of its supporters here think Gandhi-style non-violence is not gonna work for a variety of reasons, and instead favor methods that are the real-life equivalent of trolling.

"I want to sit down and create a mess so that the police will be brutal on me!" isn't a great narrative for the common man.

Were the things that happened in the 60s and 70s that also helped change America also done with Gandhi-style things? Is Gandhi-style the ONLY style of non-violence applicable?

[Shroom Man 777]

I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.

And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... z1eOSZxx4Z

[Skgoa]

Suffice to say that the people in or around the top five percent enjoy at least the penumbra of the privileges enjoyed by the super-elite of the 1% or 0.5% or whatever.

While OWS may claim to speak for the 99%, I suspect that if you had everyone in America sit down and really think through their economic interests in cold blood, the incomes high enough to align with the "1%" would probably make up more like 2% or 3% of the population.

The genius of Tony Blair was to realise that while the UK didn't have that many rich people, it had plenty who intended to be rich, and would not want to vote against their perceived future benefits.

Add in the American dream, and it's pretty obvious that the tolerance of the super rich getting perks will be high, because after all, I'm going to be rich too someday.

This is something I will never ever understand. It's patently illogical to me to favor policies that hurt me economically/financially right now and for the foreseeable future, just so that at the time when I have overcome these problems I can be a little bit richer.
It's like a mountaineer opting to carry 10 kg of lead up Mt. Everest just so he can feel lighter on the way down. I don't want to have it easier when I already succeeded, I want it easier ON THE WAY UP.

[Kamakazie Sith]

I would like to simplify my question.
1.Was the use of pepper spray on non violent protesters sitting in an arm linked chain a valid escalation of force?

2. Pray justify the reasons for escalation of force in this manner. What was the overriding factors that meant chemical agents had to be utilised as opposed to lower echelon scale of force, from a display of force, negotiation or waiting out the protesters........

Given all the latest information. It doesn't sound like the escalation was valid. However, the discussion isn't about any one specific incident.

And? In terms of the use of force, potential options from tackles to the three man take down is possible even if the protesters had linked arms.

I will once again clarify that my question is what justified the escalation of force in this situation.

Is the immediate execution of the order to disperse protesters from university grounds so important that pepper spray had to be used? The escalation was relatively rapid with no aggravation on the part of the protesters. The Chancellor gave notice, days later after a core of campers refused to budge, the police was sent in, hours after an order to disperse was ignored, the police escalated force by using pepper spray after a show of force in the form of a police line......

Tackles aren't good options because they can result in injury that will be more intrusive then that caused by OC spray. The force used in an arrest is that force which is reasonable to effect an arrest. So, assuming the protesters sucessfuly resisted all lower methods then yes it would be justified.

As to the importance of the order to disperse protesters? I'm not aware of all the details with that incident but it does sound like the escalation was too rapid.

I would like you to explain how and where the police actually used lesser echeolons of force to effect an arrest here. If the police didn't, then please explain why such a force level was appropiate for non violent protesters who were of no immediate danger to themselves or others, nor were able to do imminent damage to property.
The last possible reason to justify the use of such a force level would be the importance of the order. I fail to see what could had been so important, so immediate about evicting student protesters that this force level was appropiate and was the first line adopted after display of force/verbal orders to disperse.

I've answered this question in the most that you replied to.

Oh bollocks. The whole reason why Rules of Engagement and Force Spectrum come about is to guide officers in using the appropiate level of force to actually effect an arrest.

Pepper spray and Tasers have been in the police arsenal for over a decade, what you're suggesting to me now is that the US police force has not evolved any effective guidelines and training to tell officers when its appropiate to use a taser/pepper spray and when its not.

AGAIN. Why was it appropiate to use pepper spray to effect an arrest in this case straight after verbal orders to disperse and then display of force via a police line?

I've answered this question several times in this thread. Perhaps a dozen times.

I'm sorry, are we viewing different videos here? What I saw was the use of verbal orders and display of force, a police line against protesters and then the use of pepper spray on non violent students who simply linked arms.

Any use of physical force is derived purely from the statements of witnesses who stated that police officers tore down the tents, but students refused to be evicted and linked arms and sat down. Nowhere was it stated that police actually laid hands on students to break the chain before the use of pepper spray. Indeed, the statements from police officers and witnesses, along with video testimony was that they were "surrounded" by onlookers, stepped out from the circle and then started using pepper spray on the arm linked protesters.

I apologize. I was citing an example of what I feel was proper use of force by police so yes it is a different video.

Stop twisting the question. The question isn't should the police be using violence. The question is are the police using EXCESSIVE force to effect an arrest.

You know. Let's use the appropiate term.

POLICE BRUTALITY

Is some cases they have been. However, I wasn't discussing that. I was discussing whether or not the use of pepper spray is ever reasonable.

I could very well imagine why the police officers used pepper spray here. Its much easier to break up an arm linked protester mob and poses less potential harm and damage to you. After all, tackling a sitting down protester exposes you to being kicked in the face or crown jewels. This action STINKS of expediency as opposed to being the right force level.

It could very well be.

[Starglider]

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

I have been pleasantly surprised that OWS has stayed mostly on 'financialisation and business-government collusion must be dismantled', and not many have been crowing the old 'nationalise everything, handouts for all' line. Hopefully the traditional union-dominated 'worker solidarity' that went so horribly wrong in the mid-20th-century UK won't reappear, and new cultural context and Internet-enabled social awareness will produce different structures and better outcomes. That said we're still facing multiple very negative trends (energy, environmental, demographics, income disparity, government debt, existental risks) and IMHO there's just no way to avoid large-scale unrest and violence.

[Simon_Jester]

By and large, OWS is not made up of socialists the way that Old Labour in the UK was. OWS contains a huge number of people who don't really contest the verdict of the Cold War and are willing to coexist with any form of capitalism that shows itself to be willing to coexist with them.

The crony corporatism we've had growing over the past 20-30 years isn't willing to coexist with the average citizen; it wants them to live on its (unpleasant and demanding) terms. That's what's sparked these protests, and that's what defines the limits of their demands.

Although if capital proves unwilling to compromise with labor, that may change- one of the best ways to end up with radical opposition on your hands is to refuse to take moderate opposition seriously.

[Terralthra]

More from Davis:
First up, an open letter from the faculty of the Women's and Gender Studies department:

20TH November 2011.
Open Letter to the Chancellor

Dear Chancellor Katehi,

The faculty of the Women and Gender Studies program are writing to express our deep concern regarding the unjustifiable use of gratuitous force against UC Davis students on November 18, 2011. The administration has attempted to defend its actions by characterizing them as measures taken to protect the health and safety of Davis students. We do not see how pepper spraying students demonstrates concern for their well-being.

The campus community has been asked to accept disproportionate police action in the name of safety. To encourage the acceptance of that logic, the administration raises the specter of criminalized outsiders and mentions the risk of university “liability.” We do not accept the logic that outsiders, sitting on the ground, with their arms linked to our students, are more dangerous than the persons pointing weapons at them. In fact, sitting with linked arms has a long tradition in the Black Civil Rights and pacifist movements in this country and is understood as a non-violent means of exercising free speech rights. Furthermore we reject the implicit gendered logic of vulnerability that suggests that in order to protect vulnerable women from outsiders we must stifle protest.

Witnesses present on Friday afternoon report that most if not all of the tents were removed before the police closed in upon the students. Regardless, the issue of the presence of tents is a specious one. Despite the administration’s calls for tolerance and dialogue, it has shown that it will not tolerate peaceful protest. At UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau described arm-linking as "not nonviolent." Such a claim is preposterous and merely represents an attempt to find provocation where none is present. The students who were pepper-sprayed were linking arms and sitting on the ground. As the video of Friday’s events spreads across the Internet, it is clear to all who view it that it was not the students, but rather the police who were violent. We are deeply concerned by the militarized police violence that academic administration used to exercise its control and discipline over Davis students expressing concerns over rising debts and UC tuition, the stress on their families, and the privatization of a public land grant institution. Moreover, the video clearly discredits the police chief’s account of what transpired.

For those of us old enough to remember, Friday’s events brought back images of Kent State. We reject arguments that justify violence in the name of security. We oppose the stifling of free speech done in the name of maintaining community. We reaffirm the right of students to assemble, to link arms, and to fight for public education. The video of an officer, systematically pepper-spraying passive students, has circulated nationally and discredits our university. We can be very proud, however, of the students who bravely and peacefully held their ground. We are writing to show our support of those students. We share their love of this university and their belief that public education and social-economic justice are worth fighting for.

In times of conflict, the administration often invokes the Principles of Community but does not appear to be able to translate these principles into actions that bring a diverse community together. Those Principles were fundamentally violated on Friday. We ask for clear accountability. We want to know how and why the decision was made to call in police from other jurisdictions. We want to know whose decision it was to have the police appear in riot gear. We want to know who sanctioned the use of pepper spray. Finally, we want to know what specific measures will be put into place to ensure that such violence never again occurs on our campus.

We call for an immediate and thorough investigation by an Academic Senate-appointed committee, to be completed by the end of fall quarter, of the events leading to the use of force on Friday and request that those found culpable be disciplined. We call upon the Chancellor to drop any pending charges against the students who were taken into custody, and to take immediate actions to foster a meaningful dialogue regarding next steps. We do not believe that the campus can wait 90 days for a task force report.



Amina Mama, Director and Professor

Maxine Craig

Liz Constable

Wendy Ho

Suad Joseph

Susan Kaiser

Anna K. Kuhn

Luz Mena

Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon

Margaret Swain

And Katehi puts UCDPD Chief on Administrative Leave...

Police chief placed on administrative leave
November 21, 2011
UC Davis announced today that the chief of the campus Police Department had been placed on administrative leave pending a review of officers' use of pepper spray against protesters. UC Davis Lt. Matt Carmichael will serve as interim police chief.

“As I have gathered more information about the events that took place on our Quad on Friday, it has become clear to me that this is a necessary step toward restoring trust on our campus,” said UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi.

“I take full responsibility for the events on Friday and am extremely saddened by what occurred,” Katehi added. “I eagerly await the results of the review, and intend to act quickly to implement reforms that will safeguard the rights of our students, faculty and staff to engage in nonviolent protest.”

On Sunday, Katehi also called on the Yolo County district attorney’s office to investigate the Police Department’s use of force. The district attorney agreed to conduct a review in collaboration with the Yolo County sheriff's office.

In a letter to Police Department staff, Vice Chancellor John Meyer said that the decision to place Chief Annette Spicuzza on administrative leave was necessary to allow "a fact-based review of events, assist in calming the community environment, and allow the department to focus on its current and substantial demands."

Today, Katehi will initiate the creation of a task force to conduct the campus review. The task force will convene immediately and will be asked to issue its recommendations within 30 days.

The chancellor also plans to hold a series of meetings and forums with students, faculty and staff to listen to their concerns and hear their ideas for restoring civil discourse to the campus.

“The events last Friday do not represent the UC Davis community we all aspire to be members of,” Katehi said. “The safety of our students and their ability to express themselves are paramount as we strive to create the best possible learning environment.”

On Sunday, two police officers who were videotaped deploying pepper spray against seated protesters were also placed on administrative leave.

Ten protesters were arrested Friday in connection with an overnight encampment of about 25 tents on the campus Quad. University policy prohibits overnight camping. The protesters were cited and released on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and failure to disperse.

Videotapes showed officers spraying seated protesters with pepper spray following the arrests.

Eleven protesters were treated on site for the effects of the pepper spray, including two who were taken to a nearby hospital, where they were treated and released.

I wonder how many more underlings she'll put on Administrative Leave before resigning?

Occupy Davis has voted to call a general strike at UCD and is hoping to spread that to other UCs. If it goes through, I'm going to try to organize something at SFSU, my grad school campus.

[Terralthra]

Worth noting that Ramon Solis, a student reporter for the UCD Aggie student newspaper, was threatened with retaliatory administrative punishment for reporting on Occupy Davis and especially the riot police's attempt to break up the protest. He has since quit and now reports for KDVS.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Wouldn't a general strike at universities just hurt the students who are going there and paying money? The administration has already been paid, so why do they care if you show up for class?

[Terralthra]

Wouldn't a general strike at universities just hurt the students who are going there and paying money? The administration has already been paid, so why do they care if you show up for class?

At the last general strikes at CSUEB (my alma mater), the faculty and much of the staff participated in the walkout as well. So that's something.

[Terralthra]

Add the faculty of the UCD English Department. Their website is currently down due to slashdotting.

[Broomstick]

Why do you think I advocated Gandhi-style non-violence? Which gives the authorities NO excuse for violent behavior?

Really, you cannot pretend to be a happy, hippy, non-violet movement that is trying to change the minds of the common man, when the majority of its supporters here think Gandhi-style non-violence is not gonna work for a variety of reasons, and instead favor methods that are the real-life equivalent of trolling.

"I want to sit down and create a mess so that the police will be brutal on me!" isn't a great narrative for the common man.

Were the things that happened in the 60s and 70s that also helped change America also done with Gandhi-style things? Is Gandhi-style the ONLY style of non-violence applicable?

Just for the hell of it - I'm going to point out that at times Ghandi (non-violently) openly and flagrantly broke the law as a protest, such as at the end of the Salt March. He didn't just sit around singin "Kum Ba Ya", he refused to obey laws that he felt were unjust/evil/false. He did so despite the consequences.

Non-violent protest is closely related to civil disobedience. Too often people think that civil disobeidence is without consequence, but if it involves breaking the law then the second half of that is to suffer jail time. I refer anyone interested to Henry David Thoreau's essay of 1849, Civil Disobedience, which had significant influence over both Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and their protest campaigns.

While I in no way condone the use of pepper spray on the seated protesters, I will also remind people that back in the 1960's non-violent protesters were not only arrested, at times they were knocked over by fire hoses, beaten bloody (or worse), attacked by dogs, or even actually shot at. I'll put that another way - unarmed, peaceful protesters sometimes died at the hands of the police back in the day. Can pepper spray be bad? Sure - in fact, it scares the hell out of me personally since, having asthma, I'm at risk of actually being killed by it more than the average person - but even so, in many ways it's preferable to actually being shot by bullets. And, I'm sorry, if you aren't willing to risk some police brutality or legal consequences your protest isn't that impressive. All the men we're holding up as examples of non-violent protest served time in jail for breaking the law and for their non-violent protesting. All of them suffered physical harm. Ghandi and MLK, Jr. both died from a bullet.

Yes, police brutality and violence against the non-violent is wrong, but you're naive if you think that's not a real risk to any sort of protest.

[CaptainChewbacca]

This UCD thing is getting crazy. I'm an alumni, and my facebook and email have been blowing up with people contacting me for various causes, protests, and counter-protests. I think the chancellor is gone.