UC Davis: the crowd responds peacefully to police assault

All over the UC system, students and faculty have been organizing over the past few years in opposition to tuition hikes but also to the ways that the administration has been making decisions about its priorities in running this educational institution. So the most recent events on UC campuses, in the context of the Occupy movement, should be understood not as something new but as the next stage in this movement. But the acts of police brutality--a cliche, but there are no other words--against non-violent students and faculty, have resulted in serious injuries and shown clearly that the administration thinks that violence is an appropriate response to a non-violent display of opposition.

As could have been expected, these events have galvanized people--workers, teachers, and students--in the entire UC system. This web site, Reclaim UC, provides a useful round-up of news and responses.

As an alumna of the University of California at Berkeley (BA, MA, and PhD) who attended from 1974-1988, I am entirely unsurprised by this thuggery, as I knew of or witnessed similar incidents around other issues,  but it is important to remember that not everyone has these memories, and it is still essential that indignation and repulsion be expressed at these illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane uses of force to coerce people into shutting up and going away.  University of California campuses are "public" but, as I learned during jury duty on a trespassing case on the UC Berkeley campus, they legally are the "property" of the Regents of the UC system, a legal fiction that is used to justify removal of anyone (including an old man eating his lunch in Evans Hall on a Sunday) that a bored cop wants to push around.

This event, at UC Davis, shows both an act of gratuitous violence on the part of police, and an angry but peaceful and sane response by the crowd, which refuses the provocation and accomplishes their goal of taking back their space.
 Students sitting in the quad at UC Davis are pepper-sprayed like bugs by a cop. Watch all the way to the end to see what the crowd does.

This open letter to UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katebi by an untenured professor Nathan Brown explains what the event was about in the first place--protesting tuition hikes and previous examples of police brutality on UC campuses--and describes in more detail what was done to the students who were assaulted with chemical weapons:

What happened next?
Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

New York City Councilman arrested, beaten, detained without medical care

Ydanis Rodríguez is a New York City Council member who was violently assaulted by police, detained for 17 hours, bleeding from the head, without access to his lawyer. He was one of 200 arrested, along with 9 members of the media.

Dorli Raiiney interviewed about being pepper-sprayed in Seattle

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Keith Olbermann interviews the 84-year old woman who was pepper-sprayed yesterday. Dorli Rainey from Seattle, originally from Austria. She is a long-time activist, who stopped off to see what was happening. Listen to this smart, brave woman, who grew up under the Nazis, talking about her work of consciousness-raising.