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A hundred members of Occupy Boston were arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning after police tried and failed to get them to give up a satellite encampment across the street from their main Dewey Square occupation. Multiple reports from the scene suggest that the cops used excessive force in the course of making the arrests.
Meanwhile New York mayor Mike Bloomberg made his most conciliatory statement to date on Occupy Wall Street yesterday, saying that he would make no move against the demonstrators in Liberty Plaza “as long as they obey the laws.” Bloomberg, who had previously declined to answer questions about whether he would allow the camp to continue indefinitely, said yesterday that “the weather” could well be the determining factor in how long the occupation goes on.
What these two disparate developments — a raid in Boston, an olive branch in NYC — have in common is a recognition that shutting down major OWS protests is not a practical option for local police right now. Whether Bloomberg or Boston mayor Tom Menino would like to end the protests or not, they each recognize that right now any such attempt would prove disastrous. OWS is just too big, and too popular, to shut down completely.
So instead of a full frontal assault, what we’re seeing in both New York and Boston is an attempt at containment. In NYC, that’s taken the form of mass arrests at street demonstrations. In Boston last night it took the form of pushback against expansion.
Expect to see more of this kind of pushback, in these cities and nationally. And expect to see heightened tension around it as the OWS movement grows in numbers and the spaces already occupied become ever more cramped.
Last week six UC Berkeley students went on trial on charges stemming from a March occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Unlike the Irvine 11, their fate was decided by a judge, not a jury. And unlike the Irvine 11, they were found not guilty.
The acquittals of these six students, however, were followed just two days later by the arrests of two more, at the campus’s “Day 1” protests marking the start of the fall semester throughout the UC system.
Police say that protesters on September 22 threw chairs, bottles, and chunks of concrete at cops, and that members of the group used oversized book-cover props as shields and offensive weapons. But one officer’s claim that “we respect people’s right to protest, but we ask that they do it safely and peacefully” rings hollow in light of UC’s recent history with nonviolent protest.
As I noted earlier this week, hundreds of student activists have been arrested on UC campuses in the last two years, many in situations in which no protester violence was even alleged. (In the most egregious case, sixty-six students were woken from their sleep and arrested in the unlocked building they were peacefully and non-disruptively occupying, just hours before that occupation’s scheduled end.) One student journalist was not only put through the wringer of the campus judicial system — in an incident I’ll be writing about tomorrow — but forced to pay court costs when a legal challenge to the university’s procedures failed.
Berkeley, and the UC system generally, have systematically criminalized nonviolent confrontational protest over the course of the last two years. The result has been a wave of questionable arrests and prosecutions, a ratcheting up of student tactics, and a dramatic increase in police violence. With students chaining themselves together on high ledges and police officers pointing guns at angry crowds, the whole situation is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Something’s got to give.
Ten Muslim students from the University of California were found guilty of misdemeanor charges Friday after a 2010 incident in which they disrupted and delayed a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States on the UC Irvine campus. The students, who could have faced jail time, were sentenced to probation and community service.
The university had previously suspended the Irvine Muslim Student Union in connection with the incident, and many observers — including Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Irvine law school — criticized the decision to bring criminal charges.
I agree with those who are dismayed by the verdict. The interruptions of Ambassador Oren were brief and non-violent, the students didn’t resist ejection, and the ambassador was eventually able to give his speech in full. Clearly the students were disruptive, but they did not have the intent nor the effect of preventing Oren from speaking.
As a person who speaks on campuses with some regularity, I’d certainly be appalled if such an incident ever led to criminal charges against someone who was critical of anything I had to say — the idea that the disruption of a campus speaker would leave a student with a criminal record, and relying on the forbearance of a judge to avoid jail time, is astonishing.
But as I told the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the most important thing to underscore here is that this prosecution stands as part of a larger recent pattern of criminalization of non-violent student protest throughout California, and in the UC system in particular.
Again and again over the last few years, university officials in California have directed law enforcement to end protests by arresting students, including in circumstances in which those protests were neither violent nor substantially interfering with the functioning of the university. In many cases those arrests led (as here) to overreaching prosecutions, while in others the arrests themselves had a disruptive effect on legitimate protest.
It’s the university’s prerogative to set limits on student protest (subject to their First Amendment obligations to permit free speech and assembly), but those powers should be used with restraint and discretion. When the university finds itself deploying mass arrests of non-violent student protesters as a matter of course, as the University of California has in the last several years, something is seriously out of whack.
By contributing to the criminalization low-level non-violent protest as they have, UC administrators, police, and prosecutors have cowed some student activists while radicalizing others. They’ve fostered a charged, tense atmosphere in which students have chained themselves together on the high ledge of a Berkeley campus building and in which a UC San Francisco police officer pulled a gun on a group of protesters, all within the last twelve months.
The Irvine 11 were among some 250 California student activists arrested during the course of protests during the 2009-2010 academic year. That’s a mind-boggling number, and evidence that student-administration relations have gone profoundly off the rails.
The faculty council of New York City’s Brooklyn College has unanimously condemned NYPD’s spying on their campus’s Muslim student organization, saying it has a “chilling effect” on academic freedom.
Documents made public earlier this month indicate that the New York Police Department has been monitoring Muslim student groups at seven local colleges — City, Baruch, Queens, Brooklyn, LaGuardia Community College and St. John’s. At Brooklyn and Baruch, the department sent undercover police officers to spy on the groups directly. St. John’s college is private, while the rest of those targeted are part of the City University of New York.
The NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim organizations was undertaken in concert with the CIA, whose inspector general is now investigating whether the Agency’s involvement violated the law.
The Brooklyn College resolution said that the faculty “opposes surveillance activities by the NYPD and affiliated agencies on our campus either directly or through the use of informants for the purposes of collecting information independent of a valid and specific criminal investigation,” and called on the college’s administration to reveal “their knowledge of or involvement in this surveillance and information gathering.”
Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, who took office in 2009, said the NYPD had not informed her administration of its spying.
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is back in court for a second day today, appealing an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face questioning on rape charges. As I noted yesterday, his defense team has shifted tactics in this latest round of argument, and they now claim that the charges against Assange, even if proven, don’t amount to rape. However “disturbing” or “disrespectful” his actions may have been, they say, however much he “push[ed] at the boundaries” of the complainants’ wishes, the two women ultimately consented to the acts in question.
Today Clare Montgomery, a representative of the Swedish prosecutors, is rebutting those arguments, and she’s pushing back hard.
The fact that the two women eventually acquiesced to advances they had originally rejected, Montgomery argues, is evidence not of consent but of coercion. In their statements to police, she says, the complainants describe “circumstances in which … they were coerced by physical force or were trapped.” In two cases — one in which Assange is alleged to have ripped a condom, and another in which he is accused of penetrating a complainant without a condom while she slept — “the complaint is unprotected sexual intercourse where consent had only been given to protected intercourse.” In the latter of these instances, she notes, “nobody suggests she was positively consenting.”
What is at stake here is the fundamental question of what constitutes consent in a sexual encounter. Yesterday Assange’s attorneys suggested that an encounter that begins non-consensually may become consensual if the passive party eventually agrees to the other’s advances, while today Clare Montgomery is arguing that such grudging consent is no consent at all.
The two complainants “let him continue,” she said this morning, but that did not make his actions legal. In fact, that construction is itself evidence of coercion, and thus of rape. “This is non-consensual,” she argued. “It is coerced, and the words used — ‘I let him’ — means non-consent.”
The hearing has just resumed for the afternoon session. More later if events warrant.
Update | More from Clare Montgomery on the incident in which Assange is alleged to have penetrated a complainant while she slept:
“The evidence is absolutely clear that this complainant may be legitimately described as given evidence that she had been penetrated whilst asleep. Furthermore, being penetrated in a way which [it] is absolutely clear … she had not consented to, namely unprotected. It is doubly clear there is no consent. She may later have acquiesced. That didn’t make the initial penetration anything other than an act of rape.”
Montgomery went on to say that the complainant had, by her own account, been “shocked and paralyzed” when she realized what Assange was doing, in part because she had never had unprotected sex before in her life.
Second Update | Montgomery has accused Assange attorney Ben Emmerson of “winding the law of consent back to the 19th century” with yesterday’s arguments.
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