The UC campus police have gone way too far on several campuses. I don’t know the rules about setting up tents, and I don’t sympathize with protesters who do that when it’s not allowed, but the police need to show more restraint.
The incident at Davis, if the video and pictures are telling the full story, was outrageous. Drag the protesters off if you have to, but they pepper sprayed peaceful protestors like they were spraying raid on insects. Heads will roll over this, as well they should.
From what I understand the protestors had locked arms to block the police from leaving with others they had already arrested. At that point dragging them off would have required wrestling with them, which would seem much more likely to cause injuries to the police and the protestors than pepper spray. Locking arms when one is under arrest may be peaceful but it is not passive. What if the police need to get to another situation, what if someone’s life is at stake? Should the police negotiate withthe protestors, taking the time to ask to be allowed to leave? Should they allow the protestors tactics to work and release their prisoners so they will be allowed to leave?
The best way to handle sit ins / camp ins on property where the people do not have the legal right to remain is to remove them one by one. I’ve seen it done before and when 4+ police officers physically lift you and carry you to a wagon you’re getting moved. If the crowd starts becoming violent or individuals you are trying to move become violent then use the less-lethal control tools if necessary.
I think we’re deep down the rabbit hole with stuff like pepper spray and TASERs. I think there is a big fear of using too much physical force, because of the PR repercussions and the legal liability repercussions. In the 1960s or 1970s, if the police needed to remove people who were trespassing they would basically use their hands and force the matter. They would use batons as “pain compliance” tools and if the people got violent they’d not hesitate to use whatever physical force was necessary.
This results in broken bones, bruises, cracked skulls. Even if done 100% “correctly” those things can happen, and when things turn into a physical scuffle it’s often the case that passion/anger get involved and some officers will of course go beyond what is appropriate and deliver illegal beatings.
So I understand where the fear of going physical has come from, but the alternatives (pepper spray / TASER) which were designed to be less violent (and on the whole probably are) have become too politically sensitive. They now need to be reserved for only extreme cases in which someone is being violent and needs to be stopped but isn’t threatening life or limb of the officer or others (in those cases a gun is justified, obviously.) But instead of those sort of limitations they are now being used as the first line of action, because some police are no longer willing to try and physically move people.
Personally I have no issue with pepper spraying or TASERing the ever living snot out of people that are trespassing, in fact I applaud when it happens. However my advice to LE organizations is to focus more on using multiple officers to physically remove people one by one, because that actually is less dangerous from a PR perspective. Things get murky of course when individuals start physically resisting, because wrestling them with hands can lead to people looking/being “beat up” (even if the officers don’t do anything illegal), which opens its own can of worms.
If you have the manpower you just break the chain one by one. The guy you want to remove you have 3-4 officers on him, and you have 3-4 officers for each of the two people he has locked arms with. The 3-4 officers on his companions focus on physically unlocking their arms (and 3-4 police officers on each guy will definitely be able to do this) and the 3-4 officers removing him basically just carry him off.
I’ve seen some of these sit ins and you have dozens of officers on scene, so this isn’t impossible. If they get violent, use the pepper spray or TASER, but only if they get violent. If they just clench their arms, just use superior strength to force them apart. Unless you have Heracles in the crowd it’s not going to be difficult for multiple police officers to force people’s arms apart.
Further, once you have the first guy split from his two friends, you now have two more guys who at most are linked with one person, because you’ve unlinked them from the center guy. So the 3-4 guys on those two guys just work on separating his other arm and then when the first guy is successfully restrained the officers who handled him go back to the now broken chain and get to the next guy who is only linked on one side now, so it gets easier the more you do it.
Not all the kids had their arms locked together and even those who did were just loosely doing so. Trained cops should be able to break that up easily.
Their arms were locked loosely because no one was trying to break them apart. Don’t you think that they would have tightened their grip once the cops tried to separate them? And let’s say the cops do break the chain and carry someone away, what do they do if every time they carry people away more protestors take their places? Are the police then subject to spending their whole day physically pulling apart protestors. This seems both a bad use of the police and a plan that is likely to result in more actual injuries.
Also, form the video, I’m unclear on who was being blocked from what.
Yes, they need to spend the whole day physically separating them if that’s what it takes.
I wouldn’t even mind if they had to pepper spray them, individually, as they tried to separate them, if they put up too much resistance. But crop dusting isn’t the way to go.
I don’t think that’s a good use of a police force. There’s a whole city that needs there patrolling, as well.
I mostly agree with this. I can see a scenario where crop dusting might be called for, but this wasn’t it.
These are campus police.
If someone was being raped somewhere, I would expect them to not worry so much about breaking up the protest for the time being and to deal with that.
I didn’t know they were all campus cops. Regardless, my point was a larger one. It’s all fine and well to have cops physically overpower a few people, but if it’s a a large number of people, you need other strategies. As I said, it’s not a good use of a limited police force and it increases the likelihood of physical injury to both protestors and cops.
There are different situations. A sit in you would normally disperse by arresting people one by one, and sit ins by their nature usually aren’t going to have some unlimited supply of protesters who will keep replacing the ones you’re arresting.
If it’s a riot in the streets you use riot techniques to control/move the crowd which is a very different situation.
Something that helps is at a sit in some number of people will start leaving when enough people have been arrested. Not everyone wants to go through the hassle of getting processed, some of them might have outstanding warrants or etc and in such a situation if you help the police by leaving they aren’t going to follow you.
Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking. You start working at one end. Or you look for the weak links and break them up. As more people get dragged off, it’s going to send a message to the rest of the group.
But if they are really persistent, then I still say you drag their asses off one at a time for whatever it takes. Pepper spray if they start to get violent, but don’t meet peaceful, passive resistance with tactics that should only be used against violent offenders.
Maybe the message will be sent that the people involved so heavily outnumber the authorities and are willing to be arrested that their cause is just?
It’s pretty abhorrent to condone pepper spraying non violent protestors.
The whole point of civil disobedience is to cause a scene, get arrested, and persuade others that your cause is worth the consequences. Violating a no camping or a trespassing ordinance in a peaceful way should not warrant pepper spray in the throat. Get arrested, pay your $25 misdemeanor fine* and be on your way. If enough people do it it will overwhelm the system and maybe the tactics will be re-evaluated.
*for example (I made that up)
I don’t know that these protests are really all that big. The number of occupiers is relatively small, at several engagements in NYC there were more police present than protesters. (The NYPD itself has like 45,000 members, Occupy New York was only over 1,000 people on days with major activity/demonstrations, it was normally only a few hundred.) When they cleared out the park temporarily to remove the permanent camping equipment there were like 700 police officers and 200 protesters.
There isn’t any convincing evidence that “enough people will overwhelm the system.” The system wasn’t overwhelmed during Civil Rights or the protests against the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights movement was successful because it turned the opinion of the rest of the country to its favor, not because we didn’t have enough police, jail cells, and water cannons to handle the marchers. Much larger protest movements have failed; there were multiple 100,000+ large protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 across several American cities. Any one of which was probably larger than the entire number of people who have participated in Occupy protests combined, and we still invaded on the schedule the President wanted.
I forgot to mention changing public opinion. I agree with you - that’s kind of my point. There’s not that many of them. It would be easy to just cuff and remove them one at a time. If they become aggressive then respond accordingly - pepper spraying sitting non-violent protesters is shitty.
Not protestors per se, but in CA at least, there are enough people in prison that have actually overwhelmed the system. It’s a major point of contention against the stupid drug war.
These people aren’t going to California prisons. Something like this you get processed, given a citation, and released. I think for something like that you could even just opt to pay a fine prior to your court date and you don’t even have to attend the hearing. I mean this is a pretty extreme (meaning minor) misdemeanor offense. Unless something goes on that would escalate it to something higher (assaulting a police officer, for example.)
Something I’m not sure on, at UC Davis were the police sent in to “enforce order” or to remove the protesters? If they were sent in to remove them, then they (one or some of the officers on the scene) made a serious tactical blunder. If they were just sent to “observe and enforce order” someone made a strategic mistake in sending them in. If they were sent in to remove them it should have been simple enough, they methodically arrest the people sitting in one by one and haul them off.
Restoring order is a lot more difficult because the police are essentially required to stand there for their entire shift and deal with yells, jeers, insults, etc and constant taunting. It’s a much more difficult situation.
Something interesting to note is the police officers at UC-Davis are probably a lot more likely to be 99%ers than the college kids they were dealing with, which is ironic.
Why would you say that? Not a lot of really rich families send their kids to UCD.
Certainly all of the cops are 99-percenters, and maybe one or two protesters, but I’d say it was pretty much a wash.
The prison comment wasn’t related to the specifics of these protestors. Just an example that volume can overwhelm something - eventually.
The chancellor has stated that she had a call with the chief of police (UCD Police) and her instructions were to order the protestors to disperse but if they did not comply they were not to use force and back away. Her position is that someone wasn’t following orders and they acted on their own. So she’s ass covering. Of course, her instructions if accurate as portrayed were stupidly asinine.
Wait, you think that all but a couple of protestors are part of the 1%?