UC Davis Students Sue University Over Pepper Spray Incident

February 22, 2012 in Administration, Campus Protests, Civil Liberties, Governance, Litigation, Occupy Wall Street, Organizing, Police, Speech, Student Power | by | 2 comments

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.

New Map of 2011-12 Campus Occupations

February 21, 2012 in Campus Protests, Civil Liberties, Media, Occupy Wall Street, Organizing, Police, Student Power | by | 5 comments

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.

Quick Vent

February 20, 2012 in Media, Race | by | 2 comments

In the universe’s latest variation on the “they call themselves that, so why can’t I?” idiocy, Reuters journalist Matthew Keys offers this take on the Jeremy Lin ESPN scandal:

“So we’re all just going to ignore the fact that Jeremy Lin used the word “Chink” in his Xanga username in 2004, right?

Just wanted to be clear, since, you know, we’re firing ESPN headline writers for being insensitive and criticizing ESPN anchors for using the word during play-by-play.

At what point do we draw the line between “acceptable use” and “unacceptable use?” Do we further divide people by saying it’s okay for some people to use the word, while barring others?

Or can we all agree that nobody should use these sorts of words, in any context?”

Here’s the thing that burns me up most about this tired, absurd claim: nobody would ever make it in any other situation. The reclamation of slurs is the only circumstance in which this argument is ever raised.

I’ve been known to refer to myself as an idiot on occasion. Does that make it okay for journalists to refer to me as “Angus Johnston, historian, blogger, and idiot?” No.

If an Olympic soccer player used the email address sexxxykutie3914@hotmail.com in junior high, would that make it legitimate for ESPN to mention her sexiness every time she scored a goal? Of course not.

The New York Times doesn’t call Senator Rand Paul “Aqua Buddha.” It doesn’t casually refer to Beck as a loser, Thom Yorke as a creep, or Prince as a sexy motherfucker (though it totally should).

Why? Because the “if you ever use a word to describe yourself, it gives everyone else on the planet the right to use that word to describe you in every situation ever for the rest of your life and you don’t ever get to complain” rule is a rule that doesn’t exist.

It’s not a rule. It’s not a rule. It’s not a rule. It’s not a thing. Everybody knows that. Nobody thinks otherwise. Nobody even pretends otherwise unless they’re trying to come up with a reason why it’s okay for them to call someone a chink or a faggot or a bitch.

Twenty-Three Things You May Not Have Known About the Japanese-American Internment

February 19, 2012 in Civil Liberties, History, Immigration, Race | by | 3 comments

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

NYPD Spied On Muslim Student Groups Outside of New York

February 18, 2012 in Students | by | Leave a comment

In September of last year the Associated Press revealed that the New York Police Department had, in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency, spied on more than half a dozen of the city’s campus Muslim student groups. Today it reported that the NYPD’s surveillance went much further.

In a story published this afternoon, the AP described how the NYPD:

  • Set up a “safe house” in New Brunswick, New Jersey, tasked with monitoring Muslim students at Rutgers.
  • Sent an undercover officer along on a 2009 whitewater rafting trip attended by 18 Muslim students from City College.
  • Used a student informant to keep tabs on Muslims at Syracuse University.
  • Plotted surveillance of “Somali Professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo” in coordination with police in that city.
  • Conducted daily reviews of “websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations” at sixteen campuses in four states.

According to the AP, Muslim student groups monitored by the NYPD included those at “Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; New York University; Clarkson University; the Newark and New Brunswick campuses of Rutgers; and the State University of New York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.”

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.