Occupy Davis - Update

18 November 2011

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

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Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association.

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You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

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  Full letter from Nathan Brown demanding the chancellor’s resignation

The letter also indicates that police forced open the mouths of some of the students and sprayed pepper spray down their throats. I’m thinking the chancellor may be toast, and should be.

The U.C. Davis chancellor has announced that a investigative task force will be formed in the wake of a disturbing pepper-spray incident at Occupy Davis, a protest on the university campus. In a video, police are seen pepper-spraying students even after they had been subdued.

  TPM

Thank you, Chancellor. Let’s see, number one: who ordered the police invasion?

Beyond the light it is shedding on how power is really exercised in the U.S., [the] UC-Davis episode underscores why I continue to view the Occupy movement as one of the most exciting, inspiring and important political developments in many years. What’s most striking about that UC-Davis video isn’t the depraved casualness of the officer’s dousing the protesters’ faces with a chemical agent; it’s how most of the protesters resolutely sat in place and refused to move even when that happened, while the crowd chanted support. We’ve repeatedly seen acts of similar courage spawned by the Occupy movement.

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The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more.

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Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time.

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist.

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Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights.

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That’s [...] exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

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The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been “persuaded” — through fear and intimidation — to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

  Glenn Greenwald

Here’s a video of the incident showing Lt. Pig, I mean Pike, making a great gesturing show of the fact that he is about to pepper spray a bunch of kids sitting on a sidewalk. And calling in another cop to join him.