Written by the UC Davis Dateline Staff
Top UC officials at a UC Davis town hall last Friday on systemwide police practices heard suggestions to disarm campus police units or even disband them altogether. But some who attended the forum raised a question about protester practices: Have they gone too far?
“I’m paying for an education, and they’re coming in and disrupting it,” Le said.
Charles Robinson, UC vice president and general counsel, and Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the UC Berkeley law school, made clear they were looking to strike the appropriate balance.
“How should the administration or police respond, or potentially not respond, to particular incidents of civil disobedience?” Robinson asked at the beginning of the Feb. 10 town hall in the UC Davis Conference Center Ballroom.
And, Robinson continued, recognizing the rich tradition of civil disobedience on UC campuses, what’s an appropriate response?
Robinson and Edley spent much of the afternoon listening as many in the audience of about 60 offered their answers.
UC President Mark G. Yudof appointed Robinson and Edley to review police policies and procedures around the UC system, in the wake of the police response to protests on the Berkeley and Davis campuses last November.
A Yudof-appointed task force led by Cruz Reynoso, UC Davis professor emeritus of law and a former associate justice of the state Supreme Court, is reviewing the campus incidents, while Robinson and Edley are looking forward – to avoid seeing a repeat.
Robinson and Edley conducted a town hall on the Berkeley campus on Jan. 31 and have one more to go, Feb. 28 on the Irvine campus. They also are reviewing best practices from around the country, and hope to present a report and recommendations to Yudof in March.
Possible recommendations
During the course of the two-hour town hall Feb. 10 at UC Davis, Edley and Robinson discussed some of the recommendations that are under consideration:
- Training for administrators in the workings of the incident command structure, to explain the consequences of the various directions that the administrators may give to the police.
- More training for police officers, on working in a university community and interacting with students.
- Having skilled mediators available.
- Establishing civilian police review boards around the system. Only one such board is in place now, at Berkeley. Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi is considering how to establish one on the Davis campus.
- Standardizing police protocols throughout the system.
Another possible recommendation: Requiring administrators to be on the scene of every protest where police are called in. Indeed, UC Davis has already implemented a new policy of assigning a “designated senior official” to major demonstrations. “This would help to ensure any decision to use force is consistent with academic values and campus culture,” Katehi wrote in a Jan. 24 letter to Yudof.
Disarm the police?
Associate Professor Krishnan P. Nambiar, of the Department of Chemistry suggested having a civilian security force instead of armed police. “A public university is not a combat zone,” he said.
In extreme cases, he said, the university could call in police from the city of Davis.
Edley cited the vast size of UC Davis, bigger than what the city of Davis is prepared for, and the value of the campus’s having its own Police Department comprising officers who reflect the values and concerns of the campus community, and who think of themselves as part of that community.
Campus police officers know how to deal, say, with a homeless person in the library, and they are happy to help, Edley said. “We want them to be different” than the city police officers, he added.
He acknowledged, however, the need for university police to get to know the students better.
Robinson said the police must create opportunities for more interaction. That is just what UC Davis is hoping for with the recent certification of seven more officers for bike patrol – an assignment that puts them wheel to wheel with a good majority of the student body.
Security and tolerance
ASUCD Sen. Erica Padgett, a third-year economics major, opposed the disbanding of the campus Police Department. As a student, she said, “I would not feel safe on campus if we did not have someone to protect the student body.”
Padgett said she welcomed classroom debate, say, on both sides of the abortion issue, but not if one side tried to shut down the other: “I would want to have my voice heard, and I would want the police there.”
Le, the biochemistry major, said he suspected many of the participants in Occupy UC Davis during the fall quarter came from off campus. “I feel that should be a security concern” – a reason why disbanding the campus Police Department would be a very bad idea, he said.
Bart Wise, assistant professor in residence in the School of Medicine, said the university should try to be very tolerant.
Robinson wondered how the university could translate “tolerance” into a policy.
The university’s official academic activities are not sacrosanct, Wise countered. “I think these protests are real learning experiences,” he said. “We have to recognize that this is a place where we are all trying to grow as human beings.
“Tolerance to these so-called disruptions is critical to our community.”
But, Edley asked, what if on the day of a disruption students and faculty have different learning experiences in mind? “Because not everything is under the control of the students or the faculty in that particular space at that particular time.”
Wise responded: “That is the moment when learning can occur.”
Edley said he still did not understand why one person’s privilege was better than another’s.
Wise gave in a bit, saying the privilege of protesters should not always trump. “But sometimes it should, and we are nowhere near the limits.”
Proper time and place?
Another speaker cited difficulty in getting her financial aid during December’s occupation of Dutton Hall. “There definitely needs to be a proper-time-and-place law,” she said.
Some people voiced concern about such restrictions, but Robinson pointed out the need to protect the university’s academic mission. He offered this scenario: Protesters stop a lecture by going to the front of a classroom and linking arms.
“There comes a point, what are you going to do?” he asked.
Beth Levy, associate professor of music, said she was “a little frightened” about police having a role in such a protest.
“It’s one thing if there’s a real question of safety or security,” she said in a follow-up e-mail to Dateline UC Davis. “But the idea that police would be called to engage with student protesters in a classroom setting raises a red flag. It’s faculty and staff, not police, who are responsible for the university’s academic mission.”
Robinson said the practice of linking arms is another point of contention: Some UC police departments say it is passive resistance, some say it is active resistance and thereby justifies a different level of force.
Another factor: Are the protesters seated or standing, or are they standing and moving forward?
[quote]Edley said he still did not understand why one person’s privilege was better than another’s.
Wise gave in a bit, saying the privilege of protesters should not always trump. “But sometimes it should, and we are nowhere near the limits.”[/quote]
And this is the real crux of the issue… when civil disobedience tramples on the rights of others to get an education. I went through this myself when I was on the Univ of MD campus during the Viet Nam War riots. I was angry at protestors for shutting down the campus for several days, depriving me of my ability to get an education, and education my parents had paid for. It is one thing to protest peacefully – it is another to do it in such a way as to deprive others of their rights to safety, obtain an education, to do their business on campus.
Not only do their need to be protocols for police/the administration; there also needs to be appropriate protocols for peaceful protest on the part of students. It is a two way street. I have no sympathy for protestors who disrupt classes, shut down buildings, or try and go out on I-80 to disrupt traffic…
[quote]”Training for administrators in the workings of the incident command structure, to explain the consequences of the various directions that the administrators may give to the police.”[/quote]The Incident Command System has been in operation for a long time for emergency situations. One of the major benefits is that “administrators” don’t go wandering around giving “various directions.”
While the incident commander is selected by the boss, the boss doesn’t come into the emergency and start issuing orders. The chain of command is very clear, regardless of how many levels and agencies are cooperating. Second-guessing gets done [s]after[/s] the emergency is over, not during.
If the UCD demonstrations were handled under the Incident Command System, and the Chancellor got involved instructing the police or anyone else not to do this or to do that while the demonstrators were confronting police, she does need training.
Then, there’s Mr. Le who lost 5 or 10 minutes on his midterm? Please!
[quote]Then, there’s Mr. Le who lost 5 or 10 minutes on his midterm? Please![/quote]
If that 5 or 10 minutes lost causes his grade to go down, bc he was distracted, it could be a very big deal…
I agree with ERM. Freedom of speech does not mean the right to disrupt and infringe upon the rights of others. At the point where protestors are being disruptive, I think that the administration and the police have the right to use force to cause them to cease their disruptive actions. Otherwise, the protestors will have absolutely no bounds. Many protestors seek the confrontation for various reasons, including the press or publicity that such a confrontation will bring to either them or their issue. However, they must also accept the consequences of such actions. The police have a right to utilize a method that they believe will minimize injuries to themselves, other innocent bystanders, and the protestors, as well. These protestors were warned multiple times that they would be pepper sprayed if they did not move, and they still did not move out of the way to allow the police to take the previously arrested protestors to the awaiting police vehicles. The protestors were intentially blocking the police from safely removing the arrested protestors from the area. I believe that the police had a right to move the obstructing protestors and I don’t know that physically moving them would have been less risky. It seems to me to be a judgment call that others who are actually trained in dealing with protestors and who were at the scene are in a better position to make than most of us. In hindsight, given what occured, everyone seems to be condemning the use of pepper spray. I’ll be quite interested to see what the Reynoso report says. Other than the bad press and political consequences, the pepper spray was successful in causing the human protestor baricade to be broken, and without any permanent injury to anyone involved.