You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Civil Liberties’ category.
As the map below shows, students have staged more than three dozen campus occupations across the United States and Canada during the 2011-12 academic year. Starting with the University of New Orleans at the end of August, more than two weeks before Occupy Wall Street kicked off, the movement has grown to encompass at least thirteen states and one Canadian province.
Campuses hosting occupations have been public and private, urban and rural. They have included university centers and no fewer than four community colleges. Students have occupied indoors and outdoors. They have been rousted by police. They have been beaten. They have been arrested. They have been pepper-sprayed. And in many cases they have come back from such treatment to re-establish occupations larger and more lasting than those that were cut short.
Some occupations have won concrete victories, others have refused to articulate demands. Some have been mounted by students alone, others have been supported by faculty, staff, and community members. Together, these actions represent a new phase in American student organizing.
And it’s only February.
This map presently includes detailed information about all 37 campus occupations of which I’m aware. It will be updated on an ongoing basis for the rest of the academic year — please disseminate it widely and forward any additional data you may have.
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.
What you see below is the first step toward a comprehensive interactive map of all American campus occupations during the 2011-12 academic year. It’s not close to done — I’ve got a lot more data to add, for starters — but it’s a beginning.
Fall 2011 occupations are marked in yellow. Spring 2012 (most of which aren’t on the map yet) are in blue. Occupations that saw arrests or other police violence are in red.
Each marker contains at least one link to the occupiers’ blog/Twitter/Facebook info and/or to media coverage of the action. Click here for the full map with a complete explanation and chronological list of occupations.
If you have info about occupations not listed here, or more data about occupations that ARE listed, please share. Include links if you can.
Today is the 70th anniversary of #EO9066, the FDR executive order that authorized Japanese deportation from the West Coast during WWII.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 19, 2012
I just posted a string of tweets, including the one above, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. EO 9066, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized the exclusion of Japanese Americans from large portions of the United States solely on the basis of their ethnicity. It led almost immediately to seizure of property, ethnic curfews, and — on May 3, 1942 — the authorization of the establishment of internment camps to house those who would be relocated from exclusion zones.
- 70 years ago today FDR #EO9066 created the Japanese-American internment policy. 120,000 people, 2/3 of them citizens, were imprisoned.
- The number of Japanese Americans interned without cause by FDR was greater than the population of Wichita, KS. #EO9066
- 62% of Japanese Americans interned by FDR were US citizens. (The rest were immigrants barred from naturalization due to their race.) #EO9066
- Americans with as little as 1/8 Japanese ancestry were interned, including orphan infants. #EO9066
- Internment order included Americans of Taiwanese and Korean descent, since Japan occupied those countries. #EO9066
- “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.” —LA Times editorial endorsing Japanese-American internment #EO9066
- Surviving #EO9066 internees received $20,000 compensation each in 1988. Families of internees who had died got nothing.
- I said a few minutes ago that Americans with as little as 1/8 Japanese ancestry were interned. I was wrong. The cutoff was 1/16th. #EO9066
- The 1944 Korematsu decision declared the Japanese-American internment constitutional. It has never been overturned. #EO9066
- “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism.” —Justice Frank Murphy dissenting in Korematsu. #EO9066
- Justice Murphy’s Korematsu dissent was the first Supreme Court opinion ever to use the word “racism.” #EO9066
- “military urgency…demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast.” —Korematsu, majority opinion. #EO9066
- “Korematsu…has been convicted…merely of being present in the state…where all his life he has lived.” –Korematsu dissent. #EO9066
- Fred Korematsu was born in Oakland, CA in 1919. He was arrested in San Leandro in 1942 for being Japanese-American. #EO9066
- In 1946 Fred Korematsu married Kathryn Pearson in Michigan. (Interracial marriage was illegal in California at the time.) #EO9066
- Fred and Kathryn Korematsu moved back to California in 1949, the year after interracial marriage was legalized in the state. #EO9066
- Fred Korematsu’s conviction was set aside in 1983. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. He died in 2005. #EO9066
- Two years before his death Korematsu filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing for legal rights for Guantanamo detainees. #EO9066
- Survivors of the Japanese-American internment camps include George Takei, Norman Mineta, Isamu Noguchi, and Pat Morita. #EO9066
- Los Angeles internees were housed in stables at the Santa Anita racetrack while awaiting relocation. #EO9066
- George Takei’s first schooling was under the grandstands at Santa Anita while his family was interned in a stable. #EO9066
- “We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless.” –Harold Ickes. #EO9066
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments