Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman on the UC Davis disgrace

Hi,

Why are the cops and civil authorities always on the wrong side of every social justice movement?

We need to be very careful about who we give the right to monopoly on the use of force and violence. When we give exclusive power to use force and violence to thugs, we should expect thuggery will be committed on us.

The question, of course, assumes we still have the power to make that choice. I suppose we also need to admit as well that we don’t have that choice anymore.

Have a nice day,
Antti

So if she doesn’t resign, then what?

The odd phenomena encircling the world, of leaderless protests lined up against institutions with known and named heads represents this one challenge: there is no one to provide the mass movements leadership.

In this case leadership might involve one on one meetings with institutional power, the brokering of specific terms for on-going actions of dissent, the building of a new theoretical horizon which would represent the common future towards which both parties might jointly head.

MKG and MLK would ask today, what is the dream?

Violence is an ineffective response to nonviolent protest, a fan to the flames of community unrest.

Sometimes it is.

After Seattle, and before Occupy Wall St., violence worked just fine for the police. It made John Timoney’s career at the Republican National Convention in 2000 and the Miami FTAA protests in 2003. (If he did not create the Miami model of false stories about protesters’ plans for violence, preemptive arrests, and finally massive police violence toward protesters, then certainly he popularized it. It became conventional police wisdom. The AP article about UC Davis quotes “Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines” as saying “What I’m looking at is fairly standard police procedure”. I believe him.

Before OWS, I’d been in demonstrations where I narrowly escaped injury, and where some of my friends hadn’t. I’d seen the news stories — about violent protesters and restrained police response. I wasn’t expecting anything like the media response to OWS. The mood of the country has changed.

(Though I’ll note that the police lie that UC Davis cops were surrounded by protesters before they pepper-sprayed anyone was very prominent in the early news stories, and is still there in most of them, hanging like a swollen tick from the facts that anyone can see on Youtube.)

Another UCD prof comments: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ostertag/uc-davis-protest_b_1103039.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Worth investigating, but the author of the article fails to distinguish between nonviolent resistance and passive resistance, and it’s a pretty important distinction for a case like this. At a minimum I hope that it’s stressed to any volunteers for the protests.

Passive resistance would involve simply “going limp,” not helping an officer render an arrest, but not using strength and movement to resist the arrest.

“Nonviolent resistance” isn’t the same as passive resistance, though as a category it includes passive resistance. Nonviolent resistance can also involve tightly linking arms and refusing to be moved, using one’s strength to prevent an officer from effecting an arrest, and so forth, i.e. actively resisting arrest.

Generally, use of force guidelines would likely prohibit an officer from using pepper spray against an individual exhibiting merely passive resistance.

But actively resisting an arrest, even in nonviolent ways, requires the officer to use more force to effect an arrest. This can include hands-on pain compliance, which would involve the application of physical force and temporary pain to induce compliance; this can also include the use of pepper spray (which, though very unpleasant, fades quickly).

In a truly peaceful protest, one uses passive resistance when an officer makes an arrest. Being arrested, submitting peacefully to authorities, is a part of nonviolent civil disobedience. One breaks the law, and accepts, peacefully, the consequences.

Without seeing more of what happened before the use of pepper spray, it’s difficult to make any judgments. If the group had actively resisted arrest, and continued to do so, then the only question for the officers there would be how to effect the arrest within the use of force guidelines and as safely as possible for themselves and the protesters. The alternative to pepper spray for the officers there may have been to use other forms of force to induce compliance, none of which would have been pleasant for the protesters and which – depending on how many officers were actually on the scene – could have been more dangerous for the protesters. These are issues which cannot be resolved by a viewing of that video, and these are issues which must be resolved before one can justifiably condemn the officers portrayed.

Now, there’s also certainly a decision-point before the police arrive on the scene, and it’s worth asking whether alternative avenues were explored. But that decision-point obviously isn’t the focus of the video or of the article.

Protest was staged in support of the OWS movement. OWS clearly is framed in terms of a class war – 99% vs 1% of the richest. But the class war is a war; what’s the point of complaining about a little pepper spray? The top 1% controls $19 trillion of wealth, and they are not about to start hugging, sharing, and singing kumbaya with you. You want to take them on, you should count pepper spray without machine gun fire a good day.

This [g]enerally, use of force guidelines would likely prohibit an officer from using pepper spray against an individual exhibiting merely passive resistance is a perfect example of how difficult it is to defend the indefensible.

If the group had actively resisted arrest, and continued to do so, then the only question for the officers there would be how to effect the arrest within the use of force guidelines and as safely as possible for themselves and the protesters.

Actually, there is a different possible question: why are these people being arrested at all? What crime have they committed?

Worth investigating, but

Oh, for the love of God.

Please don’t feed the Andrew.

From Gandhi’s “laugh out loud” principles of resistance, that seem to rely on the distinction between passive and non-passive forms of civil disobedience:
“When any person in authority seeks to arrest a civil resister, he will voluntarily submit to the arrest, and he will not resist the attachment or removal of his own property, if any, when it is sought to be confiscated by authorities.”

Of course, this is all beside the point, since it’s absolutely unacceptable to use violence against non-violent protestors, passive or otherwise.

If anything, the distinction seems important strategically and symbolically. There may be situations where the symbolism of not assisting or resisting, of “suffering anger” as Gandhi puts it, is more effective. That’s probably not the case here, since OWS has been successful precisely by asserting the people’s right to anger, and by intentionally choosing a symbolism (occupation) that asserts that right to non-passivity.

Hi Henry, I think “litotes” is the figure of name of the figure of speech for deliberate understatement. But I read the “even” in Katehi’s sentence as a psychological slip rather than a rhetorical ploy, indicating Katehi’s view of dissent as grudging admission of something she would rather not have on campus, rather than something to be encouraged.

Platonist: But also, “If a civil resister has any property in his possession as a trustee, he will refuse to surrender it, even though in defending it he might lose his life.” Is your arm, linked to mine, something in my possession as a trustee? If so, Gandhi tells me not to surrender it. And didn’t satyagrahis link arms to defend people boiling salt during the salt march?

I do not pretend to know the full legal implications of the federal jury’s 2009 verdict, which held the County of Humboldt and the City of Eureka liable for excessive force, in violation of the 4th amendment, when police applied pepper spray directly on the faces of environmental protesters at an old forest in Humbolt County in 1997. digby has a post, “Yes of course pepper stray is a torture device,” on 11/19 and links to this:

http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2451&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

At the very least, the UCPD, other law enforcement groups at Davis involved in this “action,” and the university itself, face years of civil litigation.

This is mostly about intimidation. The increasing reliance of “authorities” on intimidation to discourage people’s exercise of their first amendment rights of free speech and peaceable assembly is particularly heinous when it’s college/university administrators enlisting instruments of intimidation to be used on their own students and faculty.
A small state college near me, in a virtually no-crime area with the local police station two minutes from campus and a state police barracks ten minutes away, is preparing to arm the campus security guards with guns. The administration claims that students and faculty will feel and be safer. (Yeah, right. Nearly all the students and faculty oppose the move.) I guess we’re all learning what it’s like to live in a police state, one that defends vast income disparities and various forms of privilege. Banana republic, here we come.

And the “libertarians” are going into full eliminationist mode, all about lice and TB and ringworm and isn’t it great how the police are wiping that health hazard out.

Really?

http://reason.com/blog#article_153682

Which is consistent with extensive Reason’s coverage of non-OWS-related police brutality, which has certainly not ended with Radley Balko moving from Reason to Huffington Post, for example:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/07/29/homeless-man-dies-after-being

And don’t forget, the police who are carrying out the beatings are public-sector union members and part of the Democratic coalition, and the officials giving the orders are putatively ‘progressive’ leaders (big city mayors and university administrators). There are no libertarians involved.

“Not sure why, but nobody spews inhuman, bureaucratic tripe as relentlessly & blindly as college administrators

Also true at the level of HS and middle school administration.

Have you ever read the comments on Reason’s blog posts, mw? Sure, they kept Radley Balko around for a while as the token civil liberties guy. And the posters themselves generally try to appear less propagandistic than Fox — though I note that the current post up about OWS is titled “OWS Los Angeles Clashes with LAPD; Promises to ‘F**K Grey Aliens,’ Illuminati, Satan”, so I think that I just gave them too much credit. But the comment sections, the people they’re playing to, are absolutely filled with people cheering the cops on to beat up the hippies, with all of the standard tropes about how they’re vermin who need to be wiped out. The only difference is that this time they need to be wiped out to defend private property.

I can understand a poorly-disciplined sociopathic cop engaging in brutality against a group he/she despises. It literally happens every day somewhere. What I can’t understand is how it ever got to the point where officer Pike got that opportunity at UC-Davis. How could administrators have possibly reached the decision to send it large numbers of heavily armed cops in riot gear to forcibly end a small, non-disruptive student protest? couldn’t anyone involved see the downside, the chance of a catastrophic outcome, for protestors or police, or as will probably be the case, for their own careers? Couldn’t anyone think of of a better response? One can only speculate what was going through the chancellor’s mind, or whether she now appreciates how badly she handled matters. I hope she will soon.

In this case leadership might involve one on one meetings with institutional power, the brokering of specific terms for on-going actions of dissent, the building of a new theoretical horizon which would represent the common future towards which both parties might jointly head.

Screw that. This is like the left version of the administrative mumbo-jumbo Katehi put out. Flood the campus with protestors until Spicuzzi, Katehi, and Pike are all gone. Of course they’ll likely get six figure pensions but you can’t have everything.

@ PDG # 38. Yep, fire the lot of them. And let the administrators sit on the bench next to the Penn State administrators who’ve been sacked.

Campus cops = mall cops with more toys at their disposal.

And if this weren’t upsetting enough, this little piece in the CHE, showing that Pike makes about twice what an assistant professor makes (and actually, twice what this UC alumna associate professor makes at a SLAC), really puts the icing on the cake.

Seconding Meredith: thanks for that link, Bill.

Woops, Already said that here. Wrong thread.

Forgive me, I read your response to Rich, not your response to Yarrow. I see that you are making the same distinction, but unlike Andrew you aren’t using it to take the side of the police.

My point was that the distinction between passive and non-passive resistance is a meaningful one

Could this get any more ludicrous? What about the distinction of performing a pas de trois, as you’re being hit in the face?

All just a big misunderstanding. Pike thought it was a can of bear spray and the people, Golden Bears from big rival UC-Berkeley. Go Aggies!

I dunno, breaking it down to elementary moves, as if it’s some elaborate game or performance or something. I feel even the distinction between ‘violent’ and ‘non-violent’ is rather meaningless: after all, everybody is entitled to self defense. Let lawyers argue fine points, after the fact.

Downpuppy, yes. I especially worry about armed campus police (guns, pepper spray, tasers) because I doubt most of them get the training regular municipal or state police officers get (inadequate as even that may often be). For instance, if the campus police at the state college near me become armed with guns, they’ll be required to get “training” over a “couple of weeks” (some weekend and night classes?). Not exactly a full course at the state’s Police Academy. Nor will they be working day-in and day-out in an environment where, through apprenticeship, they might learn proper use of these weapons. Most of all (and this is the problem with all this militarization of police), they will risk never developing or failing to maintain the ability to handle difficult situations without resort to force but rather through talking (or, when necessary, mild forms of intimidation — like, just wearing a uniform and having all that walkie-talkie kind of gear can be pretty intimidating). Campus police probably spend 90% of any difficult policing they do either dealing with drunk students (sometimes even some fist fights and vandalism) or following up on the wafting scent of cannabis. (For more serious problems, they call in the local police anyway — or are supposed to.)
I think it was on BoingBoing that I read an interview with one of the pepper-sprayed students, who said that, a few days before, he had been chatting in a friendly way with the very police officer who ended up pepper-spraying him. That earlier, friendly exchange could have provided the basis for further conversation (with an opener like, “Please open a path so we can leave without having to step over you,”) if the pepper-spray and billy clubs and tear-gas-projectors-that-look-like-rifles hadn’t been options.
As for class resentments and such: could get interesting. Another Damned Medievalist (alas, would that the world were awash in Medievalists) @44 links to a Chronicle bit. Apparently Pepper Spray Man receives an annual salary of $110,000.

“I don’t understand the history of how campus security became fully armed police.”
Yeah. Is this kind of thing common in the United States? In Canada campus secruity services are more like security guards. They don’t normally carry firearms.

JQ, I apologize for feeding the troll. I’d appreciate it if you and the other CT folks just broomed him out.

I posed this question at Americablog: what are the sources for the police procedures and tactics in crowd response? The cops don’t seem to be acting like their out of control. Nor does it appear that these actions are the result of overreacting lone wolf thugs in uniform. These are calm and disciplined responses by the cops. And the heavy-handed actions by the cops seem consistent with their training.
Forty years ago people excused police brutality in crowd situations as a lack of professional training. Nowadays they got the training and they can be heavy-handed and brutal in a more professional and disciplined way. Lieutenant Pike was trained to spray and walk that way.

Now there’s more than a little naiveté in my question since it’s clear that cops, mayors, and college administrators are coughing up bogus reasons for their aggressive crackdowns. Even taken at face value, the reasons put forward seem to involve relatively minor infractions that hardly justify SWAT teams, tazers, pepper spray, or rubber bullets. If Bloomberg was seriously concerned for poor sanitation he could have simply called in sanitation workers armed with brooms and mops to clean around the protesters if there was serious concern for littering. UC Davis could have handed out recycle bins and pointed instructions about cleaning up after oneself. The many OWS encampments have hardly done anything justifying the use of any force but the use of force on a college campus once again removes the veil and shows us the modern university as a rubber-room factory farm for the next generation of knowledge workers. But that’s another story.

The trumped up rationales are obviously aimed to distract from the real purpose to intimidate protesters and to inflict pain and suffering to underscore the simple point that cops can and will hurt you. It’s a display of power for the sake of power. Intimidation and coercion are awfully unprincipled ways to get compliance, however common or routine they’ve been.

But what are the sources for these police procedures? I’m not familiar enough with the kind of criminology that could scrutinize the source of these kinds of social control procedures. But I got a feeling that there’s a parallel universe in criminal justice that has built an impressive library of applied psychology and sociology that either informs enforcement tactics and actions. There’s theory behind their practice. These people have been trained to view any situation and any resistance as tantamount to an armed attack, justifying pain. That’s scarier than viewing the cops as bullies or thugs. They’re sanctioned and trained bullies but don’t require malicious motives to energize their actions.

I asked and I’ve received:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/bob-ostertag/uc-davis-protest_b_1103039.html

Oh my, here’s a real wtf moment:

“…regulations prohibit the use of pepper spray on inmates in all circumstances other than the immediate threat of violence. If a prisoner is seated, by definition the use of pepper spray is prohibited. ”

and here’s the answer I feared:

“former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper published an essay arguing that the current epidemic of police brutality is a reflection of the militarization (his word, not mine) of our urban police forces, the result of years of the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror. Stamper was chief of police during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, and is not a voice that can be easily dismissed.”

Just to note that the forms of non-violent protest / confrontation which have become part of the political culture of India, a place born in such protest, can feel very threatening, something like mob rule, but without actual physical attack. It can feel as if the concentrated psychic rays of rejection and dislike are focused on their object. You can see some of this when the students at Davis, so very intelligently and effectively, began chanting ‘shame on you’ as the police backed uncertainly and fearfully away. In this respect the question of relative legality, of different forms of non-violence, passive or active, gives way before moral force, both of whose terms, ‘moral’ and ‘force’, are present. One element in that moral force is something relatively new, namely that the ‘moral’ part of it is acted out by occupiers through their creation of a more or less working community on the spot, based on first principles, sometimes including first principles of how we treat the planet. In the medium term the stultified and sclerotic erections of power will have to give way to some degree, perhaps to a significant degree, in the face of that moral imagination.

Acutely painful chemical sprays would seem to be cruel and unusual, by definition.

Under what nefarious circumstances – on a college campus but perhaps anywhere – would you find people locking their arms together such that twisting them would be necessary and appropriate?

Old-style thugs like Bull Conner used fire hoses on people. The new, more professional police would use fire hoses on people and explain that it was necessary for sanitation.

Actually they’d do it in the way to inflict maximum pain; possibly using techniques researched at our fine universities.

The way this is done was brutal, but I’m guessing most people here realise far worse than this happens all the time to black teenagers in the hood. Which doesn’t justify it (despite the misname “adult”‘s apparent claims otherwise), but this was always inevitable. I’m actually surprised we’ve not seen worse – I guess all those cameras have some affect.

The most interesting thing here is how the students responded afterwards. The “shame on you” stuff, followed by the silent vigil outside the VC’s office. That’s impressive stuff. I honestly never thought the university protests would amount to much. Its nice to be proven wrong.

The pepper spraying brought an image to mind of the Chinese and Japanese executions in the WW2 era. The kids are producing theater so make it good theater. In the newsreels of the Chinese I think the victim is kneeling with hands tied behind with some sign board tied on a board attached. An officer walks up and shoots them in the back of the head. The kids should copy that. In the Japanese case the victim is kneeling with neck exposed as the soldier whacks the head off. Not sure that would make good theater.
The other image that came to mind was of German newsreel footage of people, Jews and other undesirables, being shot, some naked and some clothed who fall into a pit. The uniforms of the German and American officers, soldiers, are surprisingly similar.

I notice that Linda Katehi graduated from the National Technical University of Athens in 77 which means she was a student there in 73 (it takes at least 5 years to get a degree there). This is the year when the students barricaded themselves in the NTUA to protest and start a popular uprising against the military junta. The military invaded the university with tanks and killed 28 students.

I wonder how someone who was part of that generation could later be authorising police action against the students of her university. Unless of course she had been a junta supporter in her youth, which wouldn’t be surprising.

“It is important to present accurate information and encourage educated debates about history

golly. Stanford U neo=con squeaks on History, and the proper way to study it.

Re campus police rather than security: I am pretty sure that the UC police when I was an undergrad were actual police (they definitely are now). Given that the university population was about 2/3 the size of the closest town, and that was unincorporated county, so there were only sheriffs to patrol, I think it made sense for the university to foot the bill for a real police presence (violent crimes against women were not all that uncommon, especially when tens of thousands of outsiders came to town for big events).

Grad U also had a professional police force, and several of the members also served as instructors for the local Metropolis’ police academy. Knowing that there were actual cops on campus made me feel safer. I waited tables locally (even then, full fellowships were not enough to live on), and got to know some of them. Unlike what we have seen at Penn State some 20 years later, the Grad U police didn’t consider themselves an arm of the institution; instead, they actively encouraged the people they got to know, especially grad students and faculty, to convince the campus community to come to them first — especially in cases of sexual assault — rather than going to Res Life or any administrative office, because they wanted crimes treated as crimes.

I’m now at a SLAC with security. They do not make me feel safe. They are badly paid and answer to administrators who are often more worried about the school’s reputation. I’m honestly not sure it’s the problem of “police force” vs. “security guards” per se. I think it’s much more to do with the changing nature of policing in general.

Gatherdust, I don’t really know much about this, but I remember that a good number of abuses at Abu Ghraib were convincingly linked to soldiers who’d learned them as civilian police and prison guards. And, of course, the torture techniques they learned in the Army are going to come back home with them from Iraq. All of the euphemisms about “pain compliance” really are about the same kind of thing as when people said the infliction of pain wasn’t torture unless there was organ failure.

So concerns about the training of the military as torturers go back a step to the militarization of police for the drug war. But the drug war itself could not exist unless it had started out as a means of implicit racial control after the Civil Rights movement made more explicit means untenable. And, of course, before then, police force was openly used to keep poor people and black people in line.

So I really don’t think that there has been any basic change. The justifications have changed, and, in part, the technology, but American policing hasn’t changed its basic form.

So concerns about the training of the military as torturers go back a step to the militarization of police for the drug war. But the drug war itself could not exist unless it had started out as a means of implicit racial control after the Civil Rights movement made more explicit means untenable. And, of course, before then, police force was openly used to keep poor people and black people in line.

I think this is exactly right.

Meredith @85:

I don’t know—it’s certainly good that the Post is reporting on this (if only in the Style section), but that article seems remarkably restrained and also naive in some ways. Just for instance, this thread rightly puts the lie to this sort of nonsense:

University police generally operate under a more benignly paternalistic understanding of the law than other police. They are there to ensure the safety of the students, to help with the messier details of the in loco parentis function of the university.

Nevertheless, it is true that it’s holding out for the right thing. And the author does seem genuinely shocked.

http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/

Got a laugh out of that.

@Elias, @93: wonderful link.

Having been everywhere, in another sense these people belong nowhere. They have been hired for certain things at which they excel: fundraising, cultivating outside constituencies, dreaming up new names for declining fortunes (this Partnership or that Compact), and remaking the “brands” of their campuses.

They have been hired to schmooze with people with enough money to be worth schmoozing with, and tend to take in many many times their own salary in courted donations.

wouldn’t a normal person with normal empathy and sound judgment simply say: “Both my husband and I have family and friends in Greece”?

Nah, not necessarily, especially when discussing ‘economic events’ as the value of property might vary more drastically with economic policy change than the value of a friendship. (It really isn’t a show of empathy to mention concern for one’s own friends and family; empathy’s caring about suffering persons as suffering persons, regardless of their relationship to you.) Her statement seems reasonable enough to me anyway; expressing concern for everybody probably would’ve come across as high-handed speechifying.

What’s much more important is that (1) she has acknowledged the context in which the students were pepper sprayed was nonviolent and that neither officers nor civilians of any kind were in danger of harm from the protestors; (2) she has accepted full responsibility for the incident; (3) she has firmly asserted her decision to not resign.

May this statement of hers, please, be prominently featured in any summary or roundup of the administration reaction?

This video is horrible. It really shows a face for the university that we don’t have.

Indeed, those horrible documenteers, showing a face for UC-Davis that doesn’t exist. I realize that’s a bit of a misreading, but c’mon, in the very sentence in which she’s trying to express sympathy for the victims she makes a PR spin move.

Bill Benzon @ 97
Indeed, you might say it’s almost as if it was believed you had to take special university courses in management in order to be a good manager. Or, you might say it’s almost as if it was believed that only membership in a group of people who think like finance guys fitted one for leadership–past experience to the contrary.

Coming on the heels of Brad DeLong’s and Paul Krugman’s defense of technocrats today, Roland Greene’s The Silence of the Presidents gives me chills. (Thanks for the link, BB.) No doubt indulging in such seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions here could be considered off-topic, irrelevant, etc., but I think they’re essential.

To Krugman and DeLong, decent souls that they are, Jean-Claude Trichet may be an ideologue or a romantic, but I think of him — and of Chancellor Katehi — as symptoms of what may very well be a terminal disease. With all due respect to the defenders of technocratic honor, technocracy is as good a name for this disease as any. No doubt some technocrats serve gods other than Mars or Mammon, and still manage to survive and be heard, but the majority attach themselves to the largest shark, and celebrate that attachment as precisely the distinction which gives them the right to dispose of us as their bosses see fit.

Defending that cozy corner in the universe is not the same thing as defending a rational approach to the problems which confront us. Not by a long shot.

one of the fears I’ve longed had about the fiasco of Iraq was that it would routinize the kind of courtesies displayed by the U.S. military and which were visited upon the Iraqis.

I think it’s fairly obvious that for the next couple of decades, at very least, you’re going to see lots of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan end up in police and security jobs — not least because they receive preferential treatment on applications. But it’s worth remembering that the worst (convicted) offender at Abu Ghraib was a reservist who’d spent most of the previous decade as a prison officer, so it’s not a one-way street.

The other point: there is a large, vocal section of the American public that actively supports the use of state violence against those protesting left-wing causes. It was there during the Civil Rights protests, it stood up for the Kent State shooters, and it’s here today.

NYTimes reports that UCDavice police chief, Annette Spicuzza, has been placed on leave. UC president Yudof calls for meeting where

10 chancellors to discuss “how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to nonviolent protest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/us/police-officers-involved-in-pepper-spraying-placed-on-leave.html?hp

nick@106: the reservists at Abu Ghraib implemented interrogation practices commonly used by intelligence agents. In other words, it was SOP.

The incorporation of military style get and fetch stuff where soldiers knock down doors and round up households, all the while scaring the shit out everyone, I suspect will come about not because of vets on the force but that these practices get imported into SOP by security professionals. Professionalism doesn’t require or permit public oversight. That’s why they’re professionals.

True, Gatherdust, but don’t discount the other side of the cycle: the impact of having those SOPs implemented by people who normally carry out their duties behind locked doors in the prison system.

Helpful start on questions raised in several threads here. (I can’t help but note that the tear gas used in Cairo appears to have been made in Pennsylvania.)

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/from-cairo-to-california-controlling-crowds-with-chemicals/

I have to agree with dilbert dogbert@ 11.21.11 at 1:21 am.
The image of good Lt. Pike that I could not get out of my head was not of him trotting along a row of aphid infested bushes spraying them with insecticide. Rather, it was of him walking along behind the kneeling protesters, just as casually busting a cap from his 9mm Mauser into the back of each of their skulls. Very NKVD, but not necessarily alien to our elites.
As for Pike’s authorization to use force, Abu Ghraib was, of course, the result of the excesses of a few out of control operatives.

Malaclypse, here is the stated justification for the arrests:
“On Thursday, the group stayed overnight despite repeated reminders by university staff that their encampment violated university policies and they were requested to disperse. On Friday morning, the protestors were provided with a letter explaining university policies and reminding them of the opportunities the university provides for expression. Driven by our concern for the safety and health of the students involved in the protest, as well as other students on our campus, I made the decision not to allow encampments on the Quad during the weekend, when the general campus facilities are locked and the university staff is not widely available to provide support.”

I see, “University Policy!” What LAW did they break?

But Capt. Brandon del Pozo of the NYPD would no doubt remind us that police have the opportunity to enforce important norms of social behavior, and not just laws

https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/23/police-discretion-a-different-perspective/#comment-283176

an adult wrote:

” But Reagan’s legacy includes the first militarization of police work with SWAT. Ironic how he and the hippies conspired together to give his yuppie neoliberalism.”

SWAT teams began in the 70’s. There was even a TV show about them, and a popular theme song. I don’t know what you are talking about conspiring with hippies.

Rich wrote:

“But the drug war itself could not exist unless it had started out as a means of implicit racial control after the Civil Rights movement made more explicit means untenable.”

Reagan made his first target the hippies growing pot in Humboldt. That is where the militarization took off. A few years later, the crack epidemic, aided by CIA clients like the Contras, took off, and, at that point, the primary target became minorities. It was much harder for liberals to object to the heavy-handedness, however, because few of them objected when the target was in Humboldt and now the precedents were set.

But Capt. Brandon del Pozo of the NYPD would no doubt remind us that police have the opportunity to enforce important norms of social behavior, and not just laws

Not exactly a fair characterization. If all that officer Pike had done was say, “the whole lot of you are being obstinate jerks about refusing to cooperate with a reasonable request” — or for that matter, if that other officer had pepper sprayed Gates — we’d be in a categorically different situation, at least from my POV. I suppose we shouldn’t re-litigate that whole mess, but Brandon did spend a lot of time afterward clarifying the limitations on what he meant (and in particular that it didn’t apply to the arrest in question, only to the legitimacy of telling someone you think they’re acting like a jerk).

I don’t know enough, without much more context and information, about the perceptions of a reasonable person in those officers’ shoes, to say whether it was a use of excessive force.

The banality of evil.

We’ve had a lot of comments already about the uselessness of responding to Andrew. Clearly what we need is one of those up-or-down rating systems for comments, except that in addition to giving a comment +1 or -1, you can add yourself as one of the people silently watching the commenter walk by on a Walk of Shame. Perhaps with a little GIF of Katehi.

Or just kill files.

Clearly what we need is one of those up-or-down rating systems for comments

Pepper spray can pointed up or pepper spray can pointed down.

What LAW did they break?
Trespassing? The Quad belongs to the university, doesn’t it, giving them the right to make the policy determining who can or can’t be there under what conditions, no? And people remaining in violation of those policies would in fact be trespassing, right?

Not that the pepper spray was justified, of course, but the arrest itself seems fairly clear.

Dragon-King, I guess I’m less interested in deciding whether to label the individual Pike a “monster” than in understanding what might make someone like him tick — and I’m assuming that there are a lot of people like him, at least most of whom are not monsters, many of whom are actually pretty decent people on the whole. What institutional and social conditions create situations where a basically decent person would behave monstrously in the way Pike did? (Let’s assume he could behave monstrously without being “a monster,” just for the sake of argument at least.)

Meredith, fair enough.

There is a whole host of issues at play. As has been recently pointed out, there has been a very disturbing militarization trend re:local policing due to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. This is on top of what was already underway as part of the War on Drugs. We need to keep that in mind when we’re thinking about police forces and the culture and individuals therein.

Even before that, policing was a very tribal profession. The combination of Warrior-Caste guardian role and needing to rely on your partner in life and death situations breeds an elitist self-serving mentality. The Blue Wall of Silence is probably the most blatant manifestation of this.

The guardian role especially excaerbates since, as upholders of the law, it is much easier to portray oneself as “right” and “just” and all others as criminals. So not only is there a very easy Us vs. Them pattern for police to fall into, it’s reinforced by the literal defining of “Us” as “The Law.”

Society’s position about police officers, at least historically, was that the profession demands respect (and not due to fear). There is some utility to that, having co-operation from the public is very useful in maintaining peace and order. Unfortunately this is open to abuse. And abuse it gets quite regularly. Worse still, since society still views policing as an honourable profession, there is almost never any accountability for abuses.

IOW, there are systemic reasons in the design of our adversarial and confrontational model of policing and maintaining peace which lead to abuse – but all abuses are somehow always “a few bad apples” who usually have perfectly acceptable excuses for their bad behaviour. Maybe warranting the docking of ten days of vacation, but hardly ever anything worse. It’s always, most police officers are decent folks who wouldn’t casually point-blank pepper spray seated passive students. It’s never, despite recognizing that casually point-blank pepper spraying seated passive students is wrong – cops never whistleblow or even testify against another Brother-in-Arms.

So yes – there are plenty of reasons why a police officer might start to develop the “monstrous” mentality that other people are not worth giving basic human dignity. Where they might see students as animals. And this does not preclude them also being heroes as well – risking their lives to stop a threat to society. It’s the same übermenschen mentality motivating it.

So the question then becomes – is a person who is motivated by a worldview wherein they represent some sort of superior form of human capable of being a basically decent person, or is their uh, “basic decentness” (I guess) merely coincedental?

The adult here must be the only one reading the news. Honestly.

Officer Pike was simply trying to feed those kids some vegetables with that nutritious spray. It’s similar to a situation in which you throw a ravenous dog a steak in order to distract him from chasing you.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/fox-news-on-uc-davis-pepper-spraying-its-a-food-product-essentially.php

Sounds a lot like communicating the recision and requesting them to leave to me.

Does it?

you consider it a disgrace that -it isn’t legal for random strangers to set up camp in your backyard- it is a criminal offence to wander onto the ‘wrong’ part of our planet’s surface? fixed.

This view is both alien and horrific to me.

Yeah I’m thinking of making a film about such a legal system, a sci-fi spine-chiller. ‘Kin Americans.

I believe (from the followup) that I was correct in reading Tim’s dismay as covering all forms of exclusionary land property ownership.

(Also, parsing the sentence correctly makes it clear that it was Tim’s backyard being referenced.)

(Finally, are you really taking the position that university’s public quads should be so public that they don’t have any authority to exclude anyone from them? Even cult recruiters, expelled students, food trucks, neo-nazi ralliers, or military recruiters?)

(Occupy Jeff R.’s Parentheticals!)

On Pike’s apparently nonchalant demeanor… one additional thought:

He was a Marine for ~4 years, and as part of his training he would have been exposed to a fairly potent form of tear gas (CS) in a closed room and possibly elsewhere. The point of the training is to build confidence in and competence with one’s CW equipment, but it could also have the effect, especially as dialogue within a platoon reshapes the experience retrospectively, of minimizing the effects of the CS. As a police officer, he very likely would have been exposed to pepper spray as part of his training – he would himself have been sprayed with it, and possibly more than once. And this experience too would be subject to the shape retrospective reshaping via dialogue with other members of his unit who went through the same training.

And so while much of the public is shocked by the sight of a line of seated students being sprayed with a yellow cloud of chemicals, Pike and the law enforcement community may see the use of an unpleasant but harmless measure that they may have been taught is preferable to using other forms of physical force.

The law in California with respect to excessive force asks whether a reasonable person, in the same situation and place as the officer in question, would have thought the force used was reasonable. It’s frequently not as easy a question to answer as one might think, and it’s not really possible to answer without additional context. Part of the “wall of silence,” or even support, from the law enforcement community may be indicative not of militarization (a thesis which I dispute, incidentally), but of an awareness of the difficulty of evaluating this type of question on the basis of a video alone.

Thanks for the political philosophy tutorial and the interesting if rather impressionistic info about city ordinances(?) regarding tents and fires in Central Park.

But this strand of the discussion is about whether the cops had any legal basis for their behaviour, which one might think pretty closely related to excessiveness of the response which is what you with supercilious exasperation @150 told all the naughty children was the real question.

Also: There is no question as to whether the students “broke the rulees” is not the most adult analysis ever is it. What rules? What kind of rules?

And, re: liberals who become anarcchists I suppose fwiw could be called a philosophical anarchist inasmuch as I don’t recognise a sui generis binding moral duty to obey the law or any person. But so far as I can make out you seem to be suggesting that people are ‘anarchists’ because (so you seem to think) they are coming up with self-serving misinterpretations of the law. I don’t know what that’s all about.

I don’t think anyone is ‘missing the point’ – they may though not be dealing with exactly the points you want them to in exactly the way you’d like them to – if that is the problem I suggest you do it yourself.

According to this interview with one of the sprayed students, the chancellor had actually given permission to camp the previous night, but withdrawn it the afternoon of the spraying. Unless the UC Davis rules prohibit setting up tents per se, rather than sleeping in them at night, the students were evidently not yet in violation of the camping rule. They got a letter from the Chancellor requesting that they leave for health and safety reasons. They politely said no. They then got a warning that their tents would be removed. This one was unsigned and not on letterhead, so its official status, and, at the time, perhaps, even authenticity, was questionable. So I don’t think it’s clear that they were even in violation of the rules. I suppose it would depend on the exact wording of the first letter – whether it was, as the student represents it, a request, or more imperative.

Andrew,

To clarify, your point was:
“Police may have a different view than the general population of the potential for harm of pepper spray. That may be why they seem so indifferent about it’s use.”

Let me note that, in this case, their view is wrong. Factually incorrect. The actual outcome demonstrates that. The warnings from the pepper spray manufacturer demonstrates that. That even if we were to consider your point as having any merit whatsoever, what it demonstrates is that the police are poor judges of what a reasonable person would consider excessive force.

But it doesn’t matter since you’re wrong. If we accept your view, now that we know the police were wrong about the “harmlessness” of pepper spray in this case, where is the admission of error? Instead we get this ridiculous story of them feeling threatened and surrounded. The official response from the now on-leave police chief is that Pike behaved properly and did nothing wrong. In other words, the hospitalization of students, the medical treatment required, the pain and suffering inflicted, these were intended. These were features, not bugs. That stuff that happened was supposed to happen.

And finally, this is all besides the point. This is a clear and blatant example of excessive use of force. You keep claiming that we shouldn’t be so hasty to judge based on the video evidence. Why not? There is not one single remotely plausible justification you can give for Pike’s actions. Even the ridiculous claim that there were other violent protestors raging just off-camera doesn’t justify it. Did they suddenly disappear once the students gained the upper hand and shamed the cops into leaving? Regardless, it wasn’t those hypothetical protestors that got sprayed.

What we know from the video is that a police officer administered pepper spray to a group of seated, passive, unresisting students. That’s what the video shows. Your position is that there might be some sort of extenuating circumstance, not apparent in the video, which explains why it wasn’t excessive force. Well go ahead then, describe a situation where further incapacitating passive students is justified.

Dragon-King, my point w/r/t Pike’s previous experiences with pepper spray and similar weapons has zero to do with whether excessive force was used. It is entirely concerned with explaining, in part, Pike’s demeanor, nothing more. There could be other factors; it could be that Pike really doesn’t care; but his prior experiences are a relevant fact, and certainly lend an additional, possible, explanation to his demeanor (nothing more).

As to the actual excessive force question… let’s say that we’re at the point where the officers decided to effect an arrest. We know that ultimately they used pepper spray. Among the facts we’d also want to know would be:

(1) Were alternative, less forceful means attempted? If not, was there a good reason why they were not attempted? We can’t tell from the video.

(2) We’d want to know how many police were available; what the crowd looked like from their position; what happened when they made arrests earlier; how well trained the police at the scene were; what the possible risks were in using direct physical contact without pepper spray; and what the possible risks were in using pepper spray.

After we learn all that, we could well decide that this was an instance of excessive force. The video doesn’t provide us with answers to those questions.

an adult at 158 raises a 9th Circuit decision on a qualified immunity question in a case where police applied pepper spray to several protesters who refused to leave the interior of an office building. The protesters there had used enclosed steel cylinders with grips and rings inside, enabling two persons to place arms inside each end and lock themselves in; previously the police had defeated these devices with an electric grinder, without injury to the protesters.

In deciding whether an official is entitled to qualified immunity, a court would consider the question in the context of the facts as interpreted in the light most favorable to the party opposing qualified immunity – and so the court in that case considered the question of qualified immunity assuming that alternative, much less harmful means were easily available (the police could have easily used an electric grinder to remove the cylinders), and that the protesters were completely controlled and could easily be removed. But none of that, among other things, is clear – yet – in the UC Davis incident.

Dragon-King, my point w/r/t Pike’s previous experiences with pepper spray and similar weapons has zero to do with whether excessive force was used.

That’s true. Your point was that it’s entirely possible that Pike has become so desensitized to violence and suffering that pepper spraying people is something he can do casually and without remorse. In other words, a monster. Sure, I agree.

In regards to excessive force, you are still the fruitiest loop in the box. Here’s your 1 and 2 addressed:

Previous attempts at removal? There are no indications that any were tried. No one, including the police, has claimed such. From the video, it’s clear that the students were just sitting there quite calmly. If you watched the video at Meredith’s Shooting an Elephant link, you’ll see that hey were joking prior to the incident. Certainly not behaving as if they had recently had to repulse a concerted effort to break their line. Regardless – how does this even remotely justify pepper spray? Unless you’re claiming that in the fictional previous attempt to move the seated students, several police officers were injured – and then everybody calmed down again. Seriously, this is yet another Chewbacca Defense argument on your part. They could have made a million prior attempts – it still does not justify what we see in the video.

How many cops? From the video we see that Pike wasn’t alone. There are at least a dozen of them visible in the video in riot gear and weilding either tear-gas firing guns or batons. Other reports put the number of cops at 35. In other words, Lt. Pike was not, by any stretch of the imagination, alone. And again, what difference does it make? How does that possibly justify hosing down seated and passive protestors with chemical weapons?

Nothing you have suggested justifies what we see in the video. Nothing. Nevermind the fact that there is no evidence for what you’re suggesting (unless Occupy UC Davis has developed invisible steel cylinders) – what you’ve suggested is not relevant.

You are witholding judgement in this case until something becomes clear – what that something is, I don’t know. And it’s becoming very clear that you don’t know either. Seriously, the guy sprayed pepper spray point blank into the faces of seated and unresisting protestors. Repeatedly. Do uou think what you’ve suggested thus far is even remotely a reasonable justification?

You just don’t want the cop to be wrong and will distort reality and grasp at the flimsiest of straws to make it so. That’s why people think of you as a jackboot-licking authoritarian.

you’re still demanding to know how anyone could assume she has the right to give or deny “permission” for anything

You can’t just call the cops and have people on your premises be arrested. You can notify the cops that an individual is trespassing (which is not what happened here) and because trespassing is against the law, the police have the authority to come arrest the trespassers–but not before confirming that due notification to the trespasser has been given and providing the person(s) enough time to safely willfully exit.

Police have no authority whatsoever to enforce corporate policy or university policy as if those policies were laws. None. If no violation of law is occurring, no such violation has occurred, and no such violation is imminently likely to occur, the police–even the university police–have no legitimate authority to intervene.

(You can remove the word ‘legitimate’ in that sentence if you want, without changing what I mean by it.)

Steve, one of the key questions in an excessive force inquiry is whether the force used was necessary to effect the arrest. An intertwined question is whether the force used was reasonable, in context, to effect the arrest. So whether there were alternative, less forceful means available is quite relevant. I agree with you that a negative answer to the latter question is not sufficient to render the force used justified. But the question is very relevant, particularly when we’re talking about degrees of less than lethal force.

As to the other questions, and I’ll try to respond to Dragon-King’s points in this paragraph too, they all bear on the reasonableness of the use of pepper spray. The number of police officers at the scene and their degree of training would bear both upon whether pepper spray was needed to effect the arrest, and how secure they should have judged their position. What transpired previously to the video footage would bear upon the reasonableness of any judgments the police may have made regarding their need to exit expeditiously, maintain a certain protective posture with respect to the crowd, and, yes, use pepper spray. Obviously the risk of harm posed by available alternative means to effect the arrests, relative to the risk posed by the use of pepper spray, is important to the question of the reasonableness of the force used – perhaps centrally important, in fact. Finally, the risk posed by pepper spray is (we all agree) important, and NOT something that can be answered by a viewing of the video.

Look, any abuse of power by a law enforcement officer is an act several orders of magnitude more concerning and dangerous than any similar act committed by a private individual. I have zero problem with harsh penalties being brought, if the facts ultimately show that the officers involved did abuse their power. What I’m suggesting in listing some of the additional information needed before a good judgment can be made is that we don’t know enough – I’m not mounting a defense for the officers involved.

We don’t know enough. That’s your pathetic excuse of a response. What more needs to be known? None of the things you have mentioned would change the assessment. We also don’t know if Pike was wearing boxers or briefs. All of this is irrelevant in the face of his actions. He administered a chemical weapon directly on passive targets in a callous and unsafe manner. It’s not like the students were brandishing weapons – in fact, the students weren’t brandishing anything since their arms were locked.

No Andrew. We do not have complete and total knowledge of the events – but in this case we don’t need it.

You keep going back to this idea that something might have happened prior to the start of the video – something that justifies what we see. But there is no such thing. You are asking people to withhold judgement of Pike’s actions because there is some possibility that there are mitigating circumstances not covered in the video. But you can’t even describe what any of these circumstances might be. You can’t invent a scenario where Pike’s actions are not excessive.

Yes, the circumstances are important – the context in which things happened are important – and through it all a presumption of innoncence has to be maintained. But only up to the point where it’s plainly bloody obvious that the dude is totally in the wrong. Such as when he opened up with pepper spray on passive seated people. Or maybe when he did it again. Or – since you seem to want to give the police the benefit of the doubt – the third time ought to have been the charm. And there are NO circumstances or contexts in which Pike’s actions are justified. At the very least, none that I can think of and none that you have mentioned.

I’ll grant that if this were a court of law, a more strict and formal approach has to be taken. But it’s not.

No Andrew. You can’t say “maybe he’s not guilty of excessive force because of something that is beyond our ability to imagine at this time.” That is patently absurd. And until you can imagine up a mitigating circumstance – some additional piece of information – anything at all that is relevant and important enough to justify Pike’s actions, then your pleas to wait for all the evidence are meaningless.

Wait – not quite meaningless. They speak volumes about you and your view of the world. And those volumes are not pleasant reading.

And yes, there’s some … exaggeration’s not quite the right word… there’s maybe some potentially excessive emphasis in that last comment, for which I might as well apologize upfront. Adjectives used too frequently or too insistently, and such. Sorry.

Pike may have enjoyed the act of spraying those students because he felt nothing but contempt for them. As best I could, I avoided words (like sociopath) that felt like they might inappropriately imply he enjoys hurting people in general, which is far too broad a claim to be supported by what’s in evidence; in fact I happen to think the ‘pepper spray to the face as expression of contempt’ interpretation is the most accurate.

Salient, we’ll just have to agree to disagree about our state of knowledge of Pike’s thoughts and emotions. And I’d never insult someone for having a different perspective – those with different perspectives can be the best sources for widening one’s own. Finally, while (I think we agree) Pike’s personal motivations may be interesting to discuss, they’re irrelevant to the excessive force question.

an adult, I read the case you cited earlier, and responded to it briefly upthread. It does not lend much strength to a plaintiff’s case here.

You scream in false horror

I’m glad to have conclusive verification that I shouldn’t bother to pay any attention to anything you say from now on. Otherwise I’d have to sort out “it will find answers to your assumptions,” which is a helluva confusing statement.

Salient, we’ll just have to agree to disagree about our state of knowledge of Pike’s thoughts and emotions.

Right, agreed.

Pike’s personal motivations [are] irrelevant to the excessive force question.

No, they’re really not. Maybe it’s better to say there is no excessive force question. When someone engages in physical abuse for pleasure, I don’t care at all about whether they were somehow technically authorized to do so by some higher power or by circumstances or by whatever. In fact we especially don’t want them in a position where they have any legitimate discretion over whether to use force because we cannot trust them to exercise restraint and not indulge.

If they’re a monster, then they need to be shamed out of their position of authority. If they’re a reasonable compassionate person and they exercised discretion horribly poorly, they need to be removed from their position of authority because they have compromised our ability to trust in their judgment. If they’re a reasonable compassionate person and their job duty forced their hand in this, then the people responsible for the job description or duty need to be ceremoniously fired (e.g. the Chancellor) and the description or duty needs to be promptly changed.

The act we witnessed is unacceptable, no matter what. That’s what you’re missing. No matter what context you can suggest, the act we witnessed is unacceptable. I challenge you, Andrew, to describe a plausible hypothetical context scenario in which you feel the act we witnessed would be acceptable (and I invite you to use your own definition of plausible, so long as you don’t say something like “suppose these kids had just been on a murdering spree and Pike had witnessed them kill forty people” or whatever — I trust you to be reasonable).

I propose that you will be unable to do this, because no such context exists, even in your own mind. No matter what the law says. No matter what Pike’s job description says. No matter if he had just spent an hour consulting with the students and legal representatives speaking on their behalf, informing them of escalation procedures to expect and offering alternatives. You say context matters, as if there is any conceivable circumstance or context in which this act could have been acceptable. There is not. No such circumstance or context exists. If what we witnessed was not an excessive use of force, then the definition of ‘excessive use of force’ needs to be changed so that we witnessed was an excessive use of force.