A group called Occupy Colleges, fashioning themselves after Occupy Wall Street, has issued a statement denouncing what they are calling the “police shooting and beating of students at UC Riverside.”In a statement they argue that students were “brutally and unnecessarily injured” at a peaceful demonstration at UC Riverside.
After weeks of quiet, student demonstrations re-emerged in the news. On the local front came the not-unexpected news that the Yolo District Attorney had declined to file charges against the UCD protesters who were pepper sprayed.
For the most part, the district attorney has declined to involve his office in the politics of student protests.
A group of students from UC Riverside attempted to storm the UC Regents meeting on Thursday, and were confronted by riot police. Numerous YouTube videos showed that they were fired upon with paint-filled bullets and other projectiles that injured several at the scene.
According to a news report from the local ABC affiliate, the protests were more peaceful than most, with people peacefully protesting inside. However, things started to go downhill after students refused to stay within the time allotted to speak at public comment to the Board of Regents.
Last week, the Orange County Register ran an article arguing that criticism by students over UC salaries has fueled the student protests that exploded in the late fall of 2011.
As the paper notes, “Over the past few months, the University of California has raised undergraduate tuition by 18 percent, awarded raises of as much as 23 percent to a dozen high-ranking administrators and announced a possible 81 percent tuition increase over the next three years.”
According to a letter from former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, the report from the independent investigation led by former LA Police Chief William Bratton, and his private company Kroll, will be completed in early January, but the task force will withhold the results from the public and only release them after they have completed their review.
In a letter from Justice Reynoso to President Yudoff, outlining a December 13 meeting, the former justice writes, “We established ground rules, procedures, and a schedule that put us on track to release a report by late January or early February.”
A lot of people have questioned the anger of students over fee hikes and their targeting that anger toward the chancellor, the regents and UC President Mark Yudof. After all, it can be argued – as many have – that the real culprit in the fee hikes is not the University of California but rather the state legislature.
I note another Op-Ed, written this time by entomology professors Walter Leal and James Carey. Their central argument that the faculty should speak for themselves and that we ought to “abide by the vote of the majority regardless of the outcome” is fine, though it comes across really as too much inside baseball, embodying some internal battle for the university.
One of the lesser-known features of the Occupy movement is that attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild have embedded themselves with protesters as observers for the next stage of the fight.
It has now been over a month since the initial pepper-spraying incident that caught the attention of the region, the state, the nation and even the world. In the aftermath of that event, the Vanguard joined many others in calling for the chancellor to resign.
The reason we argued that the chancellor should resign is that (A) we believe the police acted wrongly on that day in November in violation of the university’s and UC’s use of force protocol and also, according to case law, we believe they acted in violation of the 4th Amendment, (B) the chancellor was too busy attending to other matters to address a critical precursor to the pepper-spraying event, and (C) in the aftermath of pepper spraying, the chancellor appeared to have first backed police action and then slowly changed her view – eventually both taking responsibility and shirking from it.
A few weeks ago, a version of the pepper spraying was posted on YouTube by “UCDCollegeRepublican” which purports to show a different vantage point of the incident than what was previously aired. I was a bit skeptical about this purportedly new video, because I had watched the full 25 to 30 minute version on AggieTV.
I could not believe when I saw the release from UC Davis: “Occupy’s aftermath: 8,500 for cleanup and repair,” my thought was, really? That is what you are going to complain about?
One of the key moments of the actual hearings on Wednesday came when Assemblymember Marty Block asked perhaps the most critical question of Chancellor Linda Katehi – what would you have done differently that day?
Wednesday featured a joint legislative hearing looking into UC and CSU system-wide policies and procedures regarding non-violent protests and campus police use-of-force rules.
Apparently the Attorney General did not want the political hot potato of the pepper spray investigation, either. In a press release from the office of District Attorney Jeff Reisig, he announced that on December 9, 2011, the California Attorney General’s Office declined a request to investigate the events surrounding police officers’ use of pepper spray against protesters on the campus of the University of California at Davis last month.
On Wednesday, with little fanfare or controversy, Occupy Davis left Central Park, having decided on Monday that there were other ways to more effectively protest.
On Monday, UC President Mark Yudof appointed 12 members of the task force that will be headed up by former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, a professor emeritus at the UC Davis School of Law.
In yesterday’s column “viewpoints,” I wrote something that I think needs clarification in light of the response to a statement: “Call me a cynic, but I don’t see any way at this point that the findings from an investigation will be such that she has to step down.”
This statement was meant to express skepticism and cynicism that the process set forth by UC President Mark Yudof will bear fruit. Some took it to mean that I have made up my mind and no finding would be adequate to change my opinion.
Two pieces on the UC Davis situation warrant some discussion. First, we will look at Daniel Filler’s op-ed that appears in the Davis Enterprise, “Policing’s ‘new normal’ doesn’t work with white folks,” which focuses on an issue that has long troubled me, that police get away with certain tactics on minorities that would outrage the white community if it happened in middle America.
A friend of mine at lunch this week tells me a story that happened in Yolo County recently. A man is being followed by an undercover police officer. How he knows this, I’m not sure. I’m not sure the guy was undercover, he may just have been off-duty. After awhile, the man has enough and starts snapping pictures out of the side of his car, toward his back.
While the Vanguard welcomed the news that Cruz Reynoso, a former California Supreme Court Justice, would head up the UC Davis Task Force that will review the independent investigation led by William Bratton, a retired Police Police Chief with the Los Angeles Police Department, the key to any inquiry will be the ability of that team to have access to crucial information.
