I learned long ago as a reporter a couple of things that have influenced my thought process for most of my life. First, when people are involved there are always multiple and often differing versions of a story. Second, what you see in pictures or on video provides only a limited glimpse of the scene in total. In other words, you only see what is going on in front of the camera ... not to its side, not to its back.That being said, I am still having great difficulties accepting what I saw happen, and later hear what happened, at UC Davis on Friday. The cell phone video, which has now gone viral and has been shown on virtually all major and minor news outlets around the world, shows a group of protesters, sitting down, arms linked, non-violent, blocking a walkway, being nonchalantly pepper-sprayed at near point-blank range by a UC Davis police officer. The incident incited angry response first from those nearby who witnessed what was happening. The more the bystanders yelled, the more the police officer pelted the protesters with a powerful blast of pepper-spray. Click HERE to see the YouTube video.
Since then, some law enforcement has praised the UCD police action ("What I'm looking at is fairly standard police procedure," according to a Baltimore Police Lt who wrote rules regulating the use of force against protesters). It has also drawn the ire of those in academia ("We are outraged that the administrations of UC campuses are using police brutality to suppress dissent, free speech and peaceful assembly," says the Council of UC Faculty Associations). There is a call for UCD Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign. Referring to the video "chilling," she has requested an investigation.
Watching the video took me back nearly 40 years, to when I was a student at UC Santa Barbara. There were similar stand-offs back then, mostly over the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and perceived injustice by the Nixon administration. While there were some violent clashes with police back then, several things were different. First of all, police were not as eager to engage a group of students who were peacefully protesting. Perhaps it was because they had their hands full with more violent demonstrations, but rarely did we see non-confrontational students at UCSB become the target of resistance from police. Second, there was little documentation of what actually transpired. Few carried still cameras, and video cameras had not yet been marketed (let alone cell phones, many of which now have video cameras built in). Atrocities of police and protesters were merely heresy. Not anymore. History is recorded and almost instantaneously distributed for all to see.
While the "Occupy" movement which the UCD protesters were supporting seems to have sputtered recently, largely because the original premise has been diluted by unsavory elements, the UCD incident could provide the impetus to change that. Whether the police were right or wrong (from what I have seen, they were wrong ... very wrong), the image of an officer repeatedly attacking peaceful protesters does not set well with Americans. When we see similar images from third world countries overseas, we cringe, and say thank God we don't live in a place like that. When it happens in the US, all to often, people say "Well, they must have had it coming." But if you read the comments on Facebook, if you read the letters to the editors, if you read the responses to stories on TV websites, overwhelmingly people are angry. And increasingly, they deserve to be angry and ought to be angry.
One UC Davis police officer may have thought that he was single-handedly suppressing a movement. In reality, he may have been spraying new life into an already edgy America that, like those of us in the 70s, is increasingly upset with the direction of the country ... including the erosion of basic rights granted in the Constitution for freedom of speech and peaceful dissent.
