Cop novelist (and former cop) Joseph Wambaugh has an op-ed in the LA Times this week mocking the students who were pepper-sprayed at Davis. It’s about as stupid and as boring as you’d expect, but there are a couple of passages that are worth giving a moment’s attention to.
First there’s this:
“An assistant professor of English at UC Davis was quoted in The Times as saying that the pepper-spray incident was simply the latest example of “the systematic use of police brutality by UC chancellors” to suppress protests. Well, when I was an LAPD cop, I majored in English at Cal State L.A., and I can affirm that assistant professors of English claim all sorts of weird things after having been driven loopy by too much Elizabethan poetry. The UC Davis campus cops as serial brutes? I thought they just wrote tickets and attached wheel locks to illegally parked cars.”
Willful ignorance is never pretty, but in this case it’s particularly embarassing. UC police have indeed made a regular habit of using excessive force against peaceful protesters in the last couple of years, and even if Wambaugh somehow missed the incident in which a woman needed reconstructive surgery on her thumb after an encounter with a campus cop’s baton, or the time when a UCPD officer pulled a gun on protesters at a regents meeting, or the various other taserings and pepper-sprayings of the last 26 months, you’d think he’d have noticed the roughing up of a tenured professor and a former US poet laureate (and his elderly wife) at Berkeley just three weeks ago.
But as bad as that is, this is much worse:
“The Times also quoted a 23-year-old student … proclaiming that the action of the campus cops was an example of police brutality that is even more “rampant” against “minority groups and women” in the world outside of UC Davis. I think the kid must be experiencing Revolutionary Overload. Allegations of excessive force against minorities have long been an issue with law enforcement critics, but police brutality against women? When did that start? I know quite a bit about police officers, and I can tell you that most of the male cops I’ve met like women. Really like them. A lot.”
No need to worry about police abusing their authority with women, see? Cops like women.
By “women,” of course, he means “women they want to fuck.” And by “like,” of course, he means “want to fuck.”
studentactivism.net 
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December 2, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Milan Moravec
UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police report to the chancellor and the campus police take direction from the chancellor. University of California (UC) campus chancellors vet their campus police protocols. Birgeneau allowed pepper spray and use of batons to be included in his campus police protocols.
Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police use brutal baton jabs on students protesting increases in tuition. UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau and UC Davis Chancellor Katehi are in dereliction of their duties.
Birgeneau and UC Davis Chancellor need to quit or be fired for permitting the brutal outrages on students protesting tuition increases.
Opinions? Email the UC Board of Regents marsha.kelman@ucop.edu