Cop novelist (and former cop) Joseph Wambaugh has an op-ed in the LA Times this week mocking the students who were pepper-sprayed at Davis. It’s about as stupid and as boring as you’d expect, but there are a couple of passages that are worth giving a moment’s attention to.

First there’s this:

“An assistant professor of English at UC Davis was quoted in The Times as saying that the pepper-spray incident was simply the latest example of “the systematic use of police brutality by UC chancellors” to suppress protests. Well, when I was an LAPD cop, I majored in English at Cal State L.A., and I can affirm that assistant professors of English claim all sorts of weird things after having been driven loopy by too much Elizabethan poetry. The UC Davis campus cops as serial brutes? I thought they just wrote tickets and attached wheel locks to illegally parked cars.”

Willful ignorance is never pretty, but in this case it’s particularly embarassing. UC police have indeed made a regular habit of using excessive force against peaceful protesters in the last couple of years, and even if Wambaugh somehow missed the incident in which a woman needed reconstructive surgery on her thumb after an encounter with a campus cop’s baton, or the time when a UCPD officer pulled a gun on protesters at a regents meeting, or the various other taserings and pepper-sprayings of the last 26 months, you’d think he’d have noticed the roughing up of a tenured professor and a former US poet laureate (and his elderly wife) at Berkeley just three weeks ago.

But as bad as that is, this is much worse:

“The Times also quoted a 23-year-old student … proclaiming that the action of the campus cops was an example of police brutality that is even more “rampant” against “minority groups and women” in the world outside of UC Davis. I think the kid must be experiencing Revolutionary Overload. Allegations of excessive force against minorities have long been an issue with law enforcement critics, but police brutality against women? When did that start? I know quite a bit about police officers, and I can tell you that most of the male cops I’ve met like women. Really like them. A lot.”

No need to worry about police abusing their authority with women, see? Cops like women.

By “women,” of course, he means “women they want to fuck.” And by “like,” of course, he means “want to fuck.”

And what could possibly be wrong with that?

Today is the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused, sparking a movement that would change America.

But Claudette Colvin is worth remembering too.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.

Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she refused. Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she was arrested.

So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?

Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.

Because where Parks was a respectable married woman with a good job, Colvin was poor … and would shortly become pregnant by an older, married man.

Because where Parks responded to injustice with quiet dignity, Colvin responded with noisy anger.

(When the bus driver told Rosa Parks that he would have to call the police if she didn’t get up, Parks replied, with extraordinary self-possession, “You may do that.” When the police arrived, she went without resistance. When the cops came for Claudette Colvin, she yelled at them that they were violating her rights, and refused to move. They dragged her from the bus. When they kicked her, she kicked them back.)

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Claudette Colvin is another.

And there’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. I first discovered it in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.

In November 1952, a black Montgomery high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested and charged with the rape of a married white teenager four months earlier.

It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair. Reeves himself said that she had gone to the authorities only because she feared she was pregnant with his baby. But the police were able to extract a confession from him by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even forced him to sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

After the confession Reeves was quickly charged with raping or attempting to rape six white women, and brought to trial just weeks later. He was convicted by an all-white jury that included one of the police officers who had participated in the investigation. The jury deliberated for just 38 minutes, and — despite the police’s promises — sentenced him to death.

Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin’s at Booker T. Washington High School, and a neighbor. He was a senior, she was a first-year. He was handsome, popular, a talented drummer, a friend. Colvin rallied in his support, raised money for his defense, wrote him letters in jail. His arrest was, she later said, “the turning point in my life,” the moment when she really began to think critically about racism and injustice.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that Reeves be given a new trial on the grounds that his confession should not have been admitted into evidence. (He was retried, with the confession excluded, but the result was the same — and the jury’s verdict came even quicker.) In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin sat down on a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat.

In 1958 Jeremiah Reeves was executed in the same electric chair in which he had been threatened with death six years earlier.

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.