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I wrote yesterday about the lawsuit filed by 19 UC Davis students and recent graduates who were subject to pepper spraying, other police violence, and false arrest last November 18. The students are suing fifty-six university employees for violating their constitutional and statutory rights, but the list of defendants only has six names on it.
Why? Because only one of the dozens of police officers who participated in the attack on the protesters has been identified by the university.
It’s more than three months after the incident. Video of the day’s events has been shown over and over again throughout the planet. But UC Davis still won’t tell its students which of its campus police officers brutalized them.
In addition to the pepper-spraying, which was conducted by two officers, the lawsuit alleges that one student was thrown to the ground where his head struck a lawn sprinkler fixture. Another was pinned down after having been pepper sprayed. Another was dragged, handcuffed, to a police car. Another was “slammed to the ground,” kneed, and kneeled on, then denied medical assistance.
None of the officers who engaged in these acts, other than the two who were videotaped pepper-spraying students without cause, have been suspended. As far as is publicly known, all are still at UC Davis, working alongside the sixteen plaintiffs who are still students there.
And yet the faculty of the university, in a 645-343 vote, praised Chancellor Katehi last week as “a Chancellor who engages in a full and open dialogue with students, staff, and faculty,” saying that her resignation “would have devastating effects on the moral and academic standing of the campus.”
“It is time,” say the UC Davis faculty, “to promote a constructive healing process.” When will these professors call for transparency and accountability for the campus police?
Nineteen students and former students at UC Davis have filed a federal lawsuit charging the university’s chancellor, chief of police, and other officials of violating their civil rights in the November 18 pepper spray incident that made headlines around the world.
The lawsuit argues that “campus policies and practices” that led to the incident “offend both the state and federal constitutional guarantees of the rights to free speech and assembly.”
Five of those named in the suit are Davis administrators, including Chancellor Linda Katehi and Chief of Police Annette Spicuzza. The suit alleges that the five promulgated an unlawful dispersal order and failed in their duty to properly train the campus police in handling peaceful protests. It further alleges that the five were negligent in hiring and retaining campus police officer John Pike, who was “unqualified” for his job.
The nineteen plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and an injunction barring similar responses to student protest in the future.
Thirteen of the plaintiffs say they were pepper sprayed on November 18 “without legal cause or justification.” Four say they were physically mistreated in other ways. Eight say they were wrongfully arrested, and one says he was denied medical assistance while in custody.
Some highlights of today’s court filing:
- Seventeen of the nineteen plaintiffs in the case were UC Davis students last November. The other two were recent graduates, one of whom was teaching classes at Davis at the time. (The other was visiting the campus.)
- Eight of the ten protesters arrested at Davis on November 18 are parties to the lawsuit.
- The plaintiffs claim that the pepper spray used on the students carries a manufacturer’s recommendation that it be used from a distance of at least six feet. The lawsuit estimates that the students were sprayed from a distance of 1-2 feet.
- The suit alleges that “neither the University nor the police provided adequate medical attention on the scene to any of the students who had been sprayed.” It further claims that one defendant was taken to a hospital in an ambulance for treatment of the effects of the spray.
- Fifty-one campus police officers are cited in the suit, of whom all but John Pike are unnamed.
- The lawsuit alleges violations of the plaintiffs’ First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well as their rights to free speech and assembly, medical care when in police custody, and freedom from arrest without probable cause, under California law.
Update | Key quote: “In prior years, Defendants … as well as their predecessors in their positions, permitted assemblies, demonstrations and protests on campus which included the erection of structures such as tents and domes, when the message and speakers were less controversial. In contrast, Defendants and each of them took the actions to disperse the lawful assembly on November 18, and to pepper spray and arrest students because of the demonstration’s message and who was delivering it.”
Also: “Certain plaintiffs were targeted by the police for forcible arrests based on their past political activism and associations at the University.”
And this: “The pepper spraying and arrest of peacefully assembled students on their college campus was so clearly in violation of established state and federal law that no inference other than that the Defendants acted maliciously with intent to injure and to deprive plaintiffs of their constitutional rights can be drawn.”
Second Update | The ACLU of Northern California is assisting with the lawsuit. Their press release can be found here.
The faculty of the University of California at Davis has condemned the use of police in response to non-violent student protests, but overwhelmingly rejected a resolution expressing no confidence in the chancellor whose deployment of police in such circumstances led to the use of pepper spray against campus activists last November.
About a thousand of the university’s 2,700 eligible faculty members voted online on three resolutions addressing the question of their confidence in Chancellor Linda Katehi’s leadership. They rejected a no-confidence resolution by a 697-312 margin, while approving two — one more critical than the other — that endorsed her continued leadership of the university.
The resolution which garnered the most votes among the faculty condemned “both the dispatch of police in response to non-violent protests and the use of excessive force that led to the deplorable pepper-spraying” and opposed “all violent police responses to non-violent protests on campus.” The deployment of police against student protesters, it said should only be “considered” after other “efforts to bridge differences” had been “exhausted,” and only in “direct consultation with the leadership of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.”
It went on, however, to say that Katehi’s decision to deploy the police under inappropriate circumstances did not “outweigh” her “impeccable performance of all her other duties.” That resolution was approved 635 to 343.
A second resolution of support for Katehi, less critical than the first, passed by a narrower 586 to 408 margin. That resolution withheld direct criticism of the chancellor’s actions in connection with the pepper spray incident, which it described obliquely as “the horrific events of November 18, 2011.” Sidestepping the widespread criticism of Katehi’s orders to the police and her initial public embrace of their actions, it praised her for moving “expeditiously to to replace the flawed communications in the two days following the events with a campus-wide dialogue.”
The rejected resolution declared that the faculty “lack[ed] confidence” in the chancellor
“In light of the events on the quadrangle of the UC Davis campus on the afternoon of Friday November 18, 2011, in light of Chancellor Linda Katehi’s email to faculty of November 18 in which she admitted that she had ordered the police to take action against the students who were demonstrating on the quadrangle and said that she had had “no option” but to proceed in this way, and in light of the failure of Chancellor Katehi to act effectively to resolve the resulting crisis in the intervening days.”
The main takeaway from these series of votes is, of course, Katehi’s support among the faculty — or at least among the 65% of the 37% of the eligible faculty who voted for the most popular resolution. But it’s also worth noting that the most popular idea among all of those put forward in the three resolutions was the proposition that police force should not be used to break up nonviolent student protests.
Such a policy, if implemented, would represent a dramatic and welcome change from UC practice both before and after the November 18 pepper spray incident, and sustained faculty pressure would go a long way toward making such a policy a reality. Let’s hope that these resolutions represent a first step toward a more engaged faculty commitment to civil liberties on campus, and to the well-being of their students.
No time for a full treatment of this right now, but can I just point out something?
There wasn’t a Superbowl riot at U Mass last night.
The AP story on last night’s events on campus says there were no hospitalizations, and no property damage. A university spokesperson says there were a few fistfights, but all thirteen of the student arrests were for either disorderly conduct or failure to disperse.
Why the “failure to disperse” arrests? Because fifteen minutes after students gathered in a main residential quad on campus, police told them to go home. They used horses, dogs, and smokebombs, cops to clear the area, and busted folks who wouldn’t leave. From everything I’ve seen the big drama all came from the cops.
Which is part of why I was a bit disappointed to see supporters of the Occupy movement snarking the U Mass students. No, their Superbowl party wasn’t a political act, but since when do any of us only like political parties? Occupy is about (among many other things) reclaiming public spaces, opposing police harassment, and creating community. Isn’t a mass campus gathering like the one that took place last night presumptively a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing even if we call it a riot?
A couple of years ago, Malcolm Harris — then a campus radical at UMD-College Park, now a writer and Occupy activist in New York — was present at a similar “riot” after Maryland’s basketball team beat Duke. His take on that night is well worth remembering now:
I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots. I’m supposed to complain that students are willing to take to the streets when the Terrapin mens’ basketball team wins but not when tuition increases or black enrollment drops. Sadly, I can’t play the alienated radical role today because I was there Wednesday night, and I saw more than drunk revelers.
When students took to Route 1 after a hard-fought victory over Duke, it was with joy and celebration. We chanted “Maaarylaaaand,” and we didn’t mean the buildings or the endowment or the logo. We meant one another.
Student activism (as I wrote then) has always straddled the line between politics and play, between organizing for social change and acting up for the hell of it. Either impulse can be creative or destructive, either can be deployed for positive or negative ends, but both impulses are inherent to student identity, and both are worth celebrating.
Go Terps.
Update | Aaron Bady passes along a fascinating piece on the role of Egyptian soccer fans in that country’s popular uprising. Here’s a taste:
I believe we are witnessing a natural development in an inevitable conflict between two parties that have found themselves following two different paradigms of life: the paradigm of the depression, control, and normalization of apathy versus the paradigm of joyful liberation from the shackles of social and institutional norms to create gratifying chaos.
The latter is what I call “the politics of fun”.
And another:
The key to understanding the Ultras phenomenon is to imagine it as a way of life for these youth. For them, becoming a football fan became a symbolic action that was both joyful and a means of self-expression. But the broader social, psychological, and cultural contexts were unable to adapt to the groups’ activities, in part by virtue of their rebellious nature and their defiance of norms.
Last night at Penn State thousands of students took to the streets. They tore down light poles. They vandalized cars. They overturned a news van. They lit a fire. They threw rocks at police and at least one bystander.
Why? Because their football coach, Joe Paterno, was fired.
And why was he fired? Because nine years ago, one of his staff witnessed Jerry Sandusky, one of Paterno’s former top assistants, anally rape a ten-year-old boy in the team’s showers. And because when that staffer reported what he had seen to Joe Paterno, he did nothing. No police were called. No investigation was undertaken. Paterno didn’t even revoke Sandusky’s access to the team’s locker rooms.
Sandusky was indicted on forty counts of sexual abuse last week. Two top administration officials were indicted for covering up his crimes. And yesterday Joe Paterno and the university’s president were fired.
Some Penn State students supported the Paterno firing. Others — many others — attended a vigil last night for Sandusky’s victims.
But thousands took to the streets around the campus chanting “fuck the trustees” and “we want Joe” and breaking things and hurting people.
And I honestly have nothing more to say about that.
studentactivism.net 
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