Maybe It’s Time to Occupy the Police State
When the first major evacuation of Occupy Oakland was ordered, and police responded in full riot gear, I wrote at the time:
A little friendly advice for the police: if you want a protest or a rally to dissipate, ignore it. Until it turns into a violent riot, ignore it. Even if it goes on for weeks and months, eventually people go home.
If you want to make the protests more poignant, more profound, if you want to swell the ranks of the protesters and give them even more legitimacy, attack them with tear gas and flashbombs. Arrest them en masse.
Even better, pepper-spray unarmed, nonviolent protesters while they sit in a line. According to James Fallows, police are claiming that the officer who pepper-sprayed a number of Occupy protesters at UC Davis Friday responded in self-defense during a tense moment. Here’s the picture he uses to illustrate the absurdity of this claim:
It’s almost as if the police here don’t want the protests to end. Instead of waiting for boredom or cold weather to
At UC Davis, Students Silently Confront Chancellor Katehi
This is via Xeni Jardin at boing boing who writes:
I thought I wouldn’t see a more dramatic video than the ones yesterday of the pepper-spraying of students by police at UC Davis. I was wrong.
In the video above, UC Davis students, silent, with linked arms, confront Chancellor Katehi one day after the incident. It’s hard to tell exactly how many of them are present, but there they are, a huge crowd. They’re seated in the same cross-legged-on-the-ground position their fellow students were yesterday just before Lt. John Pike pulled out a can of pepper spray and pulled the trigger.
Note that Katehi remains silent during what looks like her perp walk. She does not acknowledge