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Yesterday the Occupy Wall Street movement passed a milestone — five thousand arrests since the Zuccotti Park encampment was established on September 17. As a result of multiple crackdowns overnight, the tally now stands at 5,163 arrests in 75 days, an average of almost 69 a day.
Let’s put those numbers in perspective.
There were 13,120,947 arrests in the United States last year. (That’s one for every 24 people in the country, including babies.) Almost 36,000 arrests each and every day.
Assuming those numbers are about right for the last few months, that means that one out of every five hundred people arrested in the US since mid-September was arrested in connection with OWS.
The OWS arrests since September 17 amount to less than ten percent of the number of vandalism arrests in the same period. A little over a third of prostitution arrests. One and a half percent of drug arrests.
More people were arrested for vagrancy in the last seventy-five days than were arrested in connection with OWS, and almost four times as many were arrested for loitering or curfew violations.
In the last seventy-five days, three children twelve and under were arrested for every OWS-related arrest. So far this year, there have been fewer OWS arrests than arrests of children under ten. Since mid-September the number of juveniles referred to adult courts for prosecution is double the number of total OWS arrests.
This country arrests a hell of a lot of people. This country arrests a hell of a lot of kids.
“Those of you that are going to be twenty-one by November the 12th, I ask for your support and your vote. Those of you that won’t be, just work hard.”
That’s Rick Perry, forgetting that the voting age has been 18 for since the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment forty years ago.
Even worse? He was speaking to a college audience.
Information is sparse so far this morning, but students occupied buildings on two University of California campuses yesterday, and it appears that one or both occupations are continuing at this hour.
At UC Davis, site of the infamous pepper-spray incident eleven days ago, students occupied Dutton Hall, which houses various financial offices on campus. Meanwhile, at UC Santa Cruz, students occupied the Hahn Student Services building. As of eleven o’clock last night they were still there, and administrators sent out word yesterday evening that the occupation would result in the relocation of offices housed in that building today.
Occupiers at Davis are calling for the resignation of chancellor Linda Katehi, the establishment of the campus as a police-free space, and a tuition freeze.
The two occupations followed protests at all four campuses at which the UC Regents were meeting yesterday by teleconference. That meeting was delayed at three of the four campuses by student demonstrations. No students were arrested or injured at any of the demonstrations.
There have apparently been no moves by administrators to end either occupation, and Davis chancellor Katehi, under fire from critics of the pepper-spray incident, has had no public comment on the Dutton occupation.
More when I get it.
Last week a massive General Assembly on the UC Davis campus called a student strike for today, November 28, on campuses across California. The strike was intended to call attention to police violence in UC, and to highlight student demonstrations against today’s meeting of the University of California Board of Regents.
The UC Regents were supposed to meet earlier this month at the system’s out-of-the-way Mission Bay campus, but that meeting was cancelled in the face of planned student demonstrations. Today’s rescheduled meeting will take place by teleconference, with regents scattered across the state. UC Davis is one of the meeting’s four physical locations, but as of the weekend only the board’s two student members (one of them non-voting) planned to be present at what has become the new center of resistance to the university’s capricious regulations and reprehensible institutional violence.
In explaining why more regents did not plan to be present at Davis today, university spokesman Pete King said that the regents did not want to “jeopardize” the Davis chancellor’s “pledge to students to keep police presence on campus minimal until the campus … begins to heal.”
This is what UC has come to. The university’s regents feel that a small police presence isn’t enough of a barrier to allow them to sit down in the presence of the system’s students. They have, they say, “no expectation of student violence.” The students of Davis have proven their commitment to nonviolence over and over in recent days, even in the face of egregious violence directed against them. But just a few cops aren’t enough cops to allow the regents to come to their campus and hear their voices without fear.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York are shutting down an entire campus building — a huge building — so that they can meet inside. Classes are being cancelled, staff are being placed on leave, a street is being prepared for barricading, all so the CUNY trustees can hold a regularly scheduled meeting.
When the governing bodies of two of the country’s greatest institutions of higher education are literally, physically walling themselves off from the students of those universities, something has gone deeply deeply wrong.
Yesterday Catherine Cole, a Berkeley professor, published an essay on the current “cycle of violence” at UC Berkeley that I consider an important and valuable contribution to current discussion.
In it, Cole properly declares that the perpetrators (and she uses that word) of the first acts of violence in connection with the current wave of student activism at Berkeley were not students, but police — “heavily armed police who assaulted unarmed bystanders located in a zone of free speech.” That violence, she notes, was the direct result of the Berkeley administration’s dereliction in “fulfilling its foundational duty of ensuring a safe campus,” a dereliction of duty whose consequences the administration “must accept full responsibility for.”
Instead of doing so, Cole writes, the administration has continued to resort to violence on campus, most recently eighteen days ago when “the Berkeley Administration” — not the UCPD, the administration, who directed the police’s actions — “lit in to unarmed student protestors … whacking them full force with truncheons, cracking ribs, bruising bones, and throwing unarmed students, faculty, poet laureates and their loved ones to the ground.”
“The Administration sets the tone for the campus,” Cole says, and “the tone that has been set since November 20, 2009 has been a trigger-happy resort to riot police and an utter failure to engage in any kind of meaningful dialogue.” In the face of a vibrant, committed, and exuberant student movement in defense of public higher education, the administration of Berkeley and the entire UC system has adopted a posture of “defeatist resignation.” They have declared the students of the university “unworthy interlocutors,” failing to even attempt “to mobilize and harness the power, the populist strength, the sheer numbers of students, staff and faculty who are currently located within public higher education in California and who are prepared to take action to preserve their fine institutions.”
All of this is, to my mind, absolutely correct as both description and analysis. But there are several ways in which Cole’s argument could be strengthened further.
First, there is the matter of the “retributive violence” of December 6, 2009, in which a small group vandalized the Berkeley chancellor’s residence with him and his wife inside. Cole implies that this act was a response to the police violence of November 20, and that violence surely contributed to activists’ anger, but the incident was a far more direct reaction to the arrest of sixty-six peacefully, non-disruptively demonstrating students in Wheeler Hall earlier that day. Police violence is not merely a matter of batons and tasers and pepper spray — it also takes the form of illegitimate and unreasonable arrest.
Second, Cole declares that with the attack on the chancellor’s residence the Berkeley student movement “forfeited the one source of power it had: the moral high ground” and “lost the sympathy, respect and participation of many faculty.” As a description of the consequences of the incident on the Berkeley campus, this may well be accurate. But as a moral judgement of the movement itself, it misses the mark. The vandalism of the chancellor’s residence was an act committed by a small group of people — who may or may not have been students — over the course of a few minutes. It involved no physical violence against any person. It was conducted without the authority or the imprimatur of any organization. That act cannot alter the moral position of anyone who did not participate in it, and if it caused faculty to dismiss an entire movement, that is a failing of the faculty, not the students.
Finally, there is Cole’s apparent conflation of the illegal and the violent. Destruction of property may perhaps be described as violent, even if it is not violence of the same kind or seriousness as brutalization of people. But a peaceful demonstration, even when it takes the form of an illegal occupation of a campus building, cannot be described as “violent” in any meaningful way. To the extent that such actions contribute to a cycle of violence that cycle might more accurately be described as a spiral — the spiral into greater and more egregious violence of an institution frustrated by student noncompliance with its regulations.
Update | In this post I’ve emphasized my areas of agreement with Cole’s piece, rather than underscoring the places where our analysis differs. But this critical response to Cole is well worth reading, though its reading of Cole is less charitable than mine. This passage in particular makes a crucial point:
Let us be clear: the purpose of the student movement is not to negotiate the privatization of the university with administrators. Students have tried again and again to reach out to the administration, but to no avail. The problem is not that administrators like Yudof and Birgeneau are hard of hearing; they have heard our message and they are ignoring it. The days are long gone when university administrators thought it their job to protect and safeguard affordable higher education; they’re paid to manage the university system like the multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprise that it is, which is exactly what they’re trying to do, students and faculty be damned.
studentactivism.net 
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