Linda Katehi in Hot Seat Amid Calls for Her Resignation After Students Pepper-sprayed at UC Davis

To the UC Chancellor: Pepper-Spraying, Baton-Wielding Police Do Not Constitute “A Safe Welcoming Environment”

In the wake of the horrific assault by police against UC Davis students protesting "in the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience," an open outraged letter from faculty member Nathan Brown calling for the resignation of chancellor Linda Katehi, who Brown calls "the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis." Wow.

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.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

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. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. 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.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BjnR7xET7Uo

by Abby Zimet

More stunning video from UC Davis: Chancellor Linda Katehi held a press conference and then refused to leave the building as students gathered outside chanting, “We are peaceful” and “Just walk home.” After several hours, she was persuaded to walk out through two long, seated, deafeningly silent lines of outrage. Faculty and pretty much everyone else is calling for her resignation after the attack by police and pepper-spraying by the now-I.D.ed Lt. John Pike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nmfIuKelOt4

by Falguni Sheth

Over the last week, among the multiple images that horrified and angered the American public, two stood out: One is an image of Dorli Rainey, an 84 year old protester at Occupy Seattle with milk dripping from her face after being pepper-sprayed by a uniformed Seattle officer. Another is the video clip of a uniformed Davis, California police officer pulling out two cans of pepper-spray and directing it at the faces of non-aggressive, stationary student protesters at UC Davis. Both images have gone viral. I suspect this is because there is something so grotesque and terrifying about watching a uniformed officer pull out a can of chemicals that are designed to seriously, if temporarily, cripple and paralyze the its victims. Watching the lurid spectacle happen in real-time has the effect of paralyzing the viewer.

Occupy Seattle's Dorli RaineyOccupy Seattle's Dorli RaineyBesides the outrage that these events provoked, several questions have been raised, even by those who have followed most global political news over the last decade: “What are they thinking? Why these heavy-handed tactics? Why is it ok to assault people instead of arrest them?” And others, perhaps without knowing why, are horrified but not at all surprised. Why not?

These heavy-handed tactics should come as no surprise to any of us. The ability to assault people prior to—no, instead of arresting and charging them with crimes—has become an explicit staple of United States foreign policy since the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, on Oct. 22, 2001. That bill, some 350 pages long and written over much longer than a month’s time, authorized the state police and army forces to wiretap, investigate, search and detain individuals as part of a pre-emptive strategy to seek out “suspected terrorists,” that is, before they could do damage to “US” (pun intended). Augmented to this was G.W. Bush’s presidential endorsement of torture and rendition strategies, along with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan under the auspices of waging a “War on Terror” and the associated military bombings of thousands of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (with President Obama’s continued support of rendition, the expansion of military drones targeted towards “suspected Al-Qaeda” buildings, and of course, civilians). Tack on Presidential Obama’s enthusiasm to assassinate suspected terrorists in lieu of a trial (Osama Bin Laden), even when they are American citizens (Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan).

What does any of this have to with police brutality in response to peaceful political dissent and protests in NYC, Berkeley, Seattle, Oakland, Davis, and elsewhere around the country? Everything. We are in an “Empire State of Mind,” with apologies to Jay Z and Alicia Keyes. We have become conditioned to accept and expect police brutality to be imposed on everyone but “US”: African-American men and women; Muslim men and women all over the world, including Western and Northern Europe; Latino migrants in the US. We have also become used to justifying police brutality as directed towards “people who deserve it.” This, at bottom, is an Empire State of Mind. An Empire State of Mind is one where those who order and those who carry out the brutalization and murder, can do so with the assurance of complete impunity because they have the approval of political and media elites, and through them, a widespread public.

Think about it: it is still laughable to consider the possibility of GW Bush and Barack Obama being put on trial for the torture, warrantless detention, or the innumerable murders that have been ordered on their watch. Was there ever a moment when someone thought that President Obama would order the punishment and reprimands of rogue bankers, or the arrest of CEOs who authorized their staff to push toxic mortgages or carry out irresponsible trades that eroded the pensions and life-savings of everyday working people? The evidence of widespread fraud and misconduct is widely available. But in an oligarchy, the prosecution of elites is left to the fantasies of action movies.

Why then are we surprised that the chickens have come home to roost? We have become accustomed to police and army brutality around the world. We have stopped protesting it to a large extent, in part because our sentiments have been mocked (witness the most recent endorsement of the president by the SEIU, with its promiscuous cooptation of OWS rhetoric). We have stopped, if we ever did, seeing the connections between the gluttonous disemboweling of the economic security and safety nets once available to the lower and middle-classes, and the war on immigrants. At a basic level, the latter is a distraction from the former: “Hey, look, a foreigner is taking your job,” says Congress, while they are being paid off by Wall Street bankers to prevent the passing of legislation that would protect pensions, salaries, and benefits of working folks from being plundered. Similarly, we have refused to make the links between the persecution and torture of Muslim men in the name of “fighting terrorism,” and the ever-greater harassment of US citizens: “We need to track devious elements for your safety.” We vote for these folks continually, and then are shocked when the same spurious logic is turned against American citizens.

We are shocked by the police brutality of Dorli Rainey and the Occupy Davis protestors because they are guilty of nothing but loud political dissent. Why then should we not revisit our suspicions of the unproven assertions of the criminal tendencies of millions of men and women around the world and here in the US? We need to see through the aspersions that have been unceasingly cast by the United States government, the 1%, and their minions in order to justify their assaults, brutality, and murderous actions? It’s an Empire State of Mind, not only abroad but increasingly here at home. And the way to dismantle an Empire State of Mind is to revisit our assumptions about the targets of violence and brutality. If brutality can be leveled at American students wrongly, then we need to accept that it’s been meted out unfairly in the Wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Terror, and Latino migrants, among others.

We shouldn’t be shocked. We should, however, continue to be outraged: the War on OWS, the War on Terror, and the War on Immigrants, are all part and parcel of an Empire State of Mind. We need to consider that each of these wars is equally dubious, intended to distract US by casting a spurious guilt on political dissenters, the working-class, the unemployed, the foreclosed, and other innocent civilians. This is the most basic step needed to resist those state officials, the 1%, and their minions who plunder the government coffers, our taxes, our bank accounts, our equity, our homes, and our livelihood and security, while pretending that their theft and their brutality is conducted for our protection.

Falguni A. Sheth is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College. She is the author of Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (SUNY, 2009), explores state-driven racial divisions and persecution. She was formerly an Immigrant Rights Commissioner of San Francisco.

by Brian Stetler

The chancellor of the University of California, Davis, said Monday that its police chief had been placed on administrative leave, three days after two campus police officers sprayed seated protesters with pepper spray during a demonstration aligned with Occupy Wall Street.

The university’s chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, indicated that she was trying to calm the campus community amid widespread outrage at the police tactics. Referring to the temporary removal of the police chief, Annette Spicuzza, Ms. Katehi said in a statement Monday, “It has become clear to me that this is a necessary step toward restoring trust on our campus.”

She named Matt Carmichael as interim police chief. Ms. Katehi also sped up an internal probe into the incident and asked the district attorney’s office to conduct an investigation into her police department’s use of force on the protesters.

On Sunday, the university said that two police officers had been placed on administrative leave with pay pending an investigation into Friday’s incident. In videos that were widely distributed over the Internet, two police officers in riot gear were seen dousing about a dozen protesters with pepper spray as they sat on a sidewalk with their arms entwined.

The announcement about Ms. Spicuzza came hours before a planned protest by students affiliated with the Occupy U.C. Davis movement.

A Facebook page for the protests asked attendees to call for Ms. Katehi’s resignation and to “show solidarity and support to the students who were beaten and sprayed by U. C. Davis police in riot gear.”

The Facebook page also suggested a way for sympathizers to donate tents and pizza for the protests. Another Internet site, an Amazon.com page that was established to solicit donations, indicated that about 100 tents had been given by Sunday evening.

The use of pepper spray came after students and other protesters set up tents on campus in a show of support for the Occupy movement and in solidarity with earlier protests at the University of California, Berkeley.

The reactions to it — cries of police brutality and pledges to reconvene protesters on a larger scale — seemed to mirror the reactions in New York, Seattle and elsewhere when the police quelled recent protests with force.

As police officers moved to take down the tents at Davis on Friday afternoon, some protesters on a sidewalk on the campus quad linked arms and refused to stand.

In one of the many YouTube videos of the episode, bystanders chant, “Don’t shoot students” before an officer shakes a pepper spray canister and walks before a line of seated protesters, spraying them. The protesters’ faces and clothes are quickly covered in the orange-tinted spray.

Some protesters are heard screaming and crying as they are arrested. One bystander is heard shouting: “These are children! These are children!”

Eleven protesters were treated at the scene after being sprayed, and two of them were then sent to the hospital. Ten protesters were arrested on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and failure to disperse and were later released, according to the university.

After the episode, a police official suggested that the officers felt threatened and encircled by the protesters. The videos, however, show no evidence of threats from the protesters.

The university said Sunday that it had been flooded with comments, including some from alumni who pledged to stop donating.

“We’ve been inundated with people sending messages,” said Mitchel Benson, the associate vice chancellor for university communications. “It literally brought down our servers.”

In her statement on Sunday, Ms. Katehi said: “I spoke with students this weekend, and I feel their outrage. I have also heard from an overwhelming number of students, faculty, staff and alumni from around the country. I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident. However, I pledge to take the actions needed to ensure that this does not happen again.”

The president of the University of California system, Mark G. Yudof, did much the same on Sunday, saying in a statement that he was appalled by the images and that he would convene the system’s 10 chancellors to discuss “how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to nonviolent protest.”

“The time has come to take strong action to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest,” he said.

In the capital, Sacramento, protesters marched to a home owned by Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday to denounce what they called violence perpetrated by the police.

Copyright 2011 The New York Times

by Allison Kilkenny

Perhaps the single biggest factor that helped lead to the Occupy movement’s success in capturing the media and public’s attention has been its creativity. Novel protest strategies have served as OWS’s foundation since its first days. The very idea of occupying, and sleeping in, a park twenty-four hours a day was new and exciting.

Up until Occupy, most protests had become exercises in futility. Protesters would show up with their sad, limp carboard signs, march around for a little while—maybe press would show up, but most likely not—and then everyone would go home. Hardly effective stuff.

Even when the protests were massive, say during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, media had learned to ignore protests as being the hallmark of a bygone era of granola-munching hippies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the media helped hand protesters loss after loss, perhaps recognizing the fact that protest waged within the perimeters constructed by city officials is completely ineffective.

Demonstrators need a permit to march, and even then must remain on the sidewalk and never disrupt traffic; they need a permit to use a bullhorn, a permit to play music, etc. Protesters, in other words, can protest as long as they never disrupt the normalcy of everyday living, which of course defeats the concept of meaningful protest in the first place.

After a while, all protests began to look the same. Protesters show up, march around, chant X or Y slogan, and if it’s super-exciting, clash with the police and everyone goes to jail. Repeat chorus. It’s no wonder the corporately controlled media were so easily able to write off protest culture as being unimportant or ineffective. The horrible truth was, it had become futile.

That is, of course, until Occupy showed up and refused to play by the city-written rules. No, they wouldn’t be getting permits. No, they wouldn’t be going home at curfew. They would remain in camps as permanent monuments to the injustice and inequality of America’s society. There was no “normal” anymore. There was only what Occupy chose to do, and to not do.

Beyond the creativity of the camps themselves with their libraries, clinics, food tents, media centers and very own newspapers, Occupy chapters are full of young protesters who are extremely savvy to what captures the media’s attention.

Hero Vincent, a young man who is one of the more well-known Occupy protesters and who has been arrested four times since the beginning of the occupation, one day casually remarked, “We need a bat signal. The 99%.”

And that idea came to fruition as thousands of protesters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge Friday. (photo by @OccupyJudaism)

Business Insider reports that a single mother of three named Denise Vega volunteered her apartment in a subsidized housing building across the way to set up the projector. When Occupy tried to pay her for the use of her apartment, she refused the money. “This is for the people,” she said.

From Denise’s windowsill, the projector shone the massive “99%” image across the side of the Verizon building. Not only was the image perfect media bait, it served as a profound statement. Verizon, famous for tax dodging and mistreating union members, has been an Occupy target for a long time. Here was the protesters’ chance to not only defiantly march by an archetype of corporate greed but also physically leave a mark, albeit temporary, on Verizon’s face.

The symbolic moment: the candlelight march, the projector’s alternating messages, including, “We are winning,” every element expressed awesome power. You could see it in the faces of the marchers that they had never experienced a profoundly empowering feeling like this before.

And it wasn’t just happening in New York. It was happening everywhere. The projector’s shutter closed and reopened, presenting a new message, “Occupy Earth.”

The Occupy protesters talk about Tahrir and Egypt’s youth not like they’re some foreign, abstract concept, but rather comrades in a common struggle. They express genuine love and solidarity for people who live 5,000 miles away from them, whom they’ll never meet, but with whom they recognize they have more in common with than Bank of America’s CEO.

Perhaps one of the eeriest and most powerful recent Occupy moments occurred when UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi left a press conference in which she was responding to the horrible images and video of UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike nonchalantly pepper-spraying peaceful protesters.

Students must have been overwhelmingly tempted to shout at the chancellor, or chant “shame,” but such scenes have unfolded a thousand times before, and would have run the risk of being drowned out by similar displays in Oakland, New York City and elsewhere.

Katehi, who hadn’t leaved the press conference for three hours because “the crowd outside was perceived to be hostile,” finally exited the building and was not greeted with lobbed insults or slogans.

Rather, she was greeted with deafening, crushing silence.

Katehi cannot conceal the emotion from her face as she walks past the hundreds of stoic students, the chancellor’s heels clicking upon the pavement serving as the moment’s soundtrack.

When a reporter asks her if she still fears her students, she turns and softly says, “No…no…” But the look in her eyes is unmistakable. She has just attended the funeral of her legacy.

Where Occupy has flourished and other movements have perished is in the group’s refusal to be swept under the rug. Part of this resistance is displayed in moments of pure grit where protesters simply don’t give up when confronted with snow, rain, derision or the unyielding brutality of the police state.

But resistance also occurs when activists adopt guerilla tactics, including non-traditional protest. Much like Anonymous, OWS is a new wave of protest, a direct and significant challenge to the elite who are unaccustomed to such confrontation.

And the one percent find such evolved protest—this kind of global awakening—absolutely bone-chillingly terrifying. If the elites can no longer exploit xenophobia, red state–blue state civil war, racism, sexism or homophobia, how will they keep the underclass bickering while they run off with the country’s wealth?

This is why a well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry proposed a $850,000 plan to smear the activists, or as they put it, “opposition research” in order to construct “negative narratives.”

This is also why Mayor Bloomberg had the NYPD raid Liberty Park’s encampment in the dead of night, and perhaps offers a clue as to why he chose yesterday to parade around yet another alleged bad guy, whom the NYPD had been tailing for two years, yet chose Sunday night as a good time for the Big Bust.

As Bloomberg’s popularity wanes, and the public cries out about vanishing First Amendment rights and police brutality, what better time to simulate a terrorist attack on television and remind everyone to remain terrified and compliant to the billionaire mayor and his army?

I’ve seen countless speculations about “What’s next?” for Occupy, but such theorizing is made in vain. No one knows what’s next for Occupy because the group isn’t like any protest movement that came before it. Yes, OWS borrows from concepts like Hooverville and the global justice movement, but in other ways it’s completely new, so speculating about what they’re going to do a month from now is pointless.

However, there has been some indications that in the coming cold winter months, the occupations will move indoors to condemned buildings and foreclosed homes. Such a maneuver would again place Occupy at the forefront of creative protest.

Ever since the wave of foreclosures began, there have always been rogue sheriffs who refused to kick people out of their homes, and community organizers who help move homeless people into abandoned houses, but there has never been a serious, organized national movement to reclaim the homes.

If ever there was a protest group equipped to attempt such a feat, it’s Occupy.

© 2011 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/node/164729

Allison Kilkenny is the co-host of the progressive political podcast Citizen Radio (http://wearecitizenradio.com) and independent journalist who blogs at http://allisonkilkenny.com. Her work has appeared in The American Prospect, the L.A. Times, In These Times, Common Dreams, Truthout and the award-winning grassroots NYC newspaper The Indypendent.

by Robert Hass

LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.

[Mario Savio] Mario SavioIt is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent undergraduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.

My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.

I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

© 2011 Robert Hass
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat...

Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States.

by Robert Reich

You’ve been seeing this across the country … Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed … Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly — protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

And what’s Washington’s response? Nothing. In fact, Congress’s so-called “supercommittee” just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year ended all limits on political spending. Millions of dollars are being funneled to politicians without a trace.

And a revolving door has developed between official Washington and Wall Street – with bank executives becoming public officials who make rules that benefit the banks before heading back to the Street to make money off the rules they created.

Other top officials, including an increasing proportion of former members of congress, are cashing in by joining lobbying power houses and pressuring their former colleagues to do whatever their clients want.

Millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street and in executive suites aren’t contributing all this money out of sheer love of country. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.

Why else do you suppose tax rates on the super rich are now lower than they’ve been in three decades, and why – even though the long-term budget deficit is horrendous – those rates aren’t rising? Why else do the 400 richest Americans (whose wealth is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans) now pay an average tax rate of only 17 percent?

Why do you think Wall Street got bailed without a single string attached – not even being required to help homeowners to whom they sold mortgages, who are now so far under water they’re drowning? And why does the financial reform legislation have loopholes big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari’s through?

And why else are oil companies, big agribusinesses, military contractors, and the pharmaceutical industry reaping billions of dollars of government subsidies and special tax breaks?

Experts say the 2012 presidential race is likely to be the priciest ever, costing an estimated $6 billion. “It is far worse than it has ever been,” says Republican Senator John McCain.

If there’s a single core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top endangers our democracy. With money comes political power.

Yet when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they’re told the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Instead, they’re treated as public nuisances – clubbed, pepper-sprayed, thrown out of public parks and evicted from public spaces.

Across America, public officials are saying Occupiers have to go. Even in universities – where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct – peaceful assembly is being met with clubs and pepper spray.

The First Amendment is being stood on its head. Money speaks, and an unlimited amount of it can now be spent bribing and cajoling politicians. Yet peaceful assembly is viewed as a public nuisance and removed by force.

This is especially worrisome now that so many Americans are in economic trouble. The jobs recession grinds on, seemingly without end. Homes are being foreclosed upon. Qualified students cannot afford college. Or they’re forced to take on huge debt loads they can’t repay in a jobless economy. Schools are firing teachers. Vital social services are being axed.

How are Americans to be heard about what should be done about any of this if they are not allowed to mobilize and organize? When the freedom of speech goes to the highest bidder, moneyed interests have a disproportionate say.

Now more than ever, the First Amendment needs to be put right side up. Nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake.

© 2011 Robert Reich
http://robertreich.org/

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

by Jon Wiener

Berkeley is not only a school with an honored history of campus protest; it’s also our greatest public university, and its faculty include some of the country’s most brilliant and accomplished people. So when those faculty members meet to debate police violence against the “Occupy” movement on their campus, it’s big news.

[Occupy Cal - November 9, 2011] Occupy Cal - November 9, 2011On Monday, the Berkeley Academic Senate will vote on a resolution expressing “no confidence” in their chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, because of police violence against Occupy Cal campus activists there on November 9. The chancellor’s defense of police conduct was particularly outrageous: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms,” he declared the day after the police confrontation. “This is not non-violent civil disobedience.”

Linking arms is “not non-violent”? Former poet laureate Robert Hass, who teaches at Berkeley, was one of the demonstrators; he described what happened in an op-ed for the New York Times: Alameda County sheriffs in full riot gear, “using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students” who had linked arms. The sheriffs “swung hard into their chests and bellies.… If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.” Afterwards fellow poet Geoffrey O’Brien had a broken rib. “Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair.”

A million people have seen the YouTube video of peaceful demonstrators with linked arms being jabbed by cops with batons. Many more saw the video on TV—Stephen Colbert featured it on his show, commenting “Look at these vicious students attacking these billy clubs with their soft, jab-able bellies!”

In response to the chancellor’s statement that linking arms “is not non-violent,” students covered the campus with pictures of Martin Luther King linking arms with other civil rights leaders at the 1963 March on Washington. And some faculty members responded by proposing a vote of “no confidence” in the chancellor.

But what exactly does “no confidence” mean? Some say they will vote against the resolution because they don’t want to get rid of the chancellor, who, they say, has been good at other tasks. But Wendy Brown, professor of political science, one of the authors of the resolution, says “we’re not calling for his resignation. We’re trying to effect a dramatic change in policy.”

Indeed, the resolution, co-authored by Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature, and Barrie Thorne, professor of sociology and of gender and women’s studies, concludes that the faculty has lost confidence in the ability of the chancellor “to respond appropriately to non-violent campus protests, to secure student welfare amidst these protests, to minimize the deployment of force and to respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus.” It doesn’t say anything about calling for his resignation.

But the chancellor does have defenders, most notably history professor David Hollinger, who wrote at a university website that the police were enforcing a ban on overnight camping on campus, which “has some reasonable justifications” and “does not impede political advocacy.” Fighting with the police, and the chancellor, over the tents is “an unfortunate diversion” from the real issue, he argued—declining funding of public education, and growing economic inequality in the US at large.

This protest, Hollinger says, is not like the Free Speech Movement of 1964, which challenged university rules that did prevent political advocacy. Focusing the campus Occupy Wall Street movement on the Berkeley chancellor “implies that the UC Berkeley itself is integral to the economic inequality against which Occupy Wall Street is directed,” which “grossly underestimates the role of UC Berkeley in advancing egalitarian goals.” Thus, Hollinger concludes, “It will not do to blame this on Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.”

It’s true that fighting over the tents is a distraction from the real issues. But who made the tents an issue? It wasn’t the kids—it was the chancellor. UC Berkeley Police Capt. Margo Bennett told the LA Times that the cops attacked and clubbed protesters because “the administration said no tents.”

The signs carried by the demonstrators at Berkeley didn’t say anything about a right to sleep in tents. The signs said, “Re-Fund Education” and “Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence” and “81% fee hikes = death of public education” and, of course, “we are the 99%.” I found only one sign about the tents: “We are not camping. We are assembling peaceably to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Even if the chancellor has a “reasonable justification” for banning the tents, why not grant an exception in this case? Let the tents stay, and then everybody can focus on the real issues. University administrators everywhere say they have to take down the tents because of their concern for the “health and safety of students.” But of course being clubbed by the cops, or pepper-sprayed, is a lot worse for your health than sleeping in a tent.

I didn’t find anyone among the faculty supporters of the “no confidence” resolution who thought they were fighting for the right to overnight camping on campus. Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor of art history, was one of the authors of the first faculty petition expressing “no confidence” in the chancellor—co-authored by Gregory Levine, associate professor of history of art, and Peter Glazer, associate professor of theater, dance and performance studies. Bryan-Wilson says “of course” the key issue is public funding for higher education. “I hear people saying, Why are these privileged kids complaining? That sickens my heart. The students I teach are not privileged. They are immigrants, first-generation college students, struggling to make ends meet, under a tremendous student debt burden. These students have worked so hard to get here. It’s heartbreaking to see what is happening to them. After tuition jumped, Berkeley’s Latino student population went down 16 percent in one year. An 81 percent tuition increase over four years will completely change the face of that population.”

A different argument made by defenders of the chancellor points to his apology on Tuesday. Just before Thanksgiving break, the chancellor declared, “I sincerely apologize for the events of November 9 at UC Berkeley and express my sympathies to any of you who suffered an injury during these protests. As chancellor, I take full responsibility for these events and will do my very best to ensure that this does not happen again.” That, his defenders say, should suffice; his critics should declare “mission accomplished” and move on.

Paul Rabinow, professor of anthropology, and a supporter of the “no confidence” resolution, disagrees. “No one in his administration or the highly paid police has been fired or really sanctioned,” he says. “Nothing has changed in the administration. This is like Wall Street—protesters are arrested, but no one else…. Of course the core problem is the lack of budget support from the state. But strong leadership from the administration…not press releases and e-mail letters—would be appreciated.”

At the faculty meeting on Monday Wendy Brown expects “significant opposition” to the no-confidence motion from the sciences and the professional schools. It’s possible that some on the left may argue for a stronger resolution, calling for the chancellor’s resignation. Students have made such a call, but I couldn’t find any faculty members planning to introduce that proposal.

On Wednesday, the last day of school before Thanksgiving break, the Daily Cal reported that two alternative proposals will be offered. One, to be presented by Hollinger and history professor Tom Laqueur, is “essentially a watered-down version” of the no-confidence resolution. It condemns the police actions on November 9, but instead of “no confidence” in the chancellor, it expresses “greatly diminished” confidence.

Another proposal, authored by professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Brian Barsky and professor of law Jonathan Simon, offers nine policies that would regulate more strictly the police use of force on protesters. It concludes that, “following any incident in which forcible methods were used, the Chancellor should convene a public meeting…to explain the rationale of the decision to employ them.”

Wendy Brown concluded, “We need the Senate meeting to get at questions like chain of command—who ordered the violent policing? And policy—why has violent policing against nonviolent protests occurred three times in the last two years? Why do investigations and reports of each incident never add up to anything?… We’ve got a pattern here.”

© 2011 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/164798/berkeley-faculty-no-confidence-chan...

Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble. He sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act for its files on John Lennon. With the help of the ACLU of Southern California, Wiener v. FBI went all the way to the Supreme Court before the FBI settled in 1997. That story is told in Wiener's book, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files.

by Noel Randewich

DAVIS, Calif. - Violent confrontations between police and protesters at two University of California campuses have drawn a new cadre of students into the Occupy Wall Street movement and unleashed what some historians call the biggest surge in campus activism since the 1960s.

While Occupy Wall Street protesters have a broad set of grievances that include income inequality and perceived corporate greed, many students have more specific concerns: soaring tuition, campus budget cuts, and fear of heavy student loan debt and lack of job opportunities upon graduation.

Student protests related to these issues have broken out sporadically on U.S. college campuses over the past few years, but the Occupy protests - and the police response to them - have swelled the ranks of campus activists in recent weeks.

A crowd of about 2,000 students, professors and parents held a rally at UC Davis on Monday and called for university Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign after police last week pepper-sprayed students sitting passively on the campus quad.

Video of an officer spraying an orange-colored pepper spray directly into the faces of cross-legged students circulated heavily on television and the Internet, prompting outrage as well as a wave of cartoon parodies.

"We didn't really know what it was until we actually were here on the quad (quadrangle) seeing fellow students getting maced," said John Caccamo, an 18-year-old biology student at UC Davis. The campus, near Sacramento, is not known as a hotbed of activism.

"This is the first time in the 11 years I've been here that students have said - 'Wait a minute, I need to wake up to where I am and what's going on,'" UC Davis art professor Robin Hill told Reuters at the Davis rally.

At UC Berkeley, a cradle of 1960s student activism, students and faculty members were hit with nightsticks earlier this month when campus police moved to break up an Occupy encampment.

The president of the 10-campus UC system, Mark G. Yudof, said he was "appalled" by the Berkeley and Davis incidents and has hired William J. Bratton, former police chief of New York and later Los Angeles, to lead an investigation.

TUITION HIKES

The uptick in student activism has coincided with the efforts by authorities in many cities to shut down Occupy encampments. College campuses are increasingly a focal point of the movement in California and elsewhere.

In New York, protesters at Baruch College who were demonstrating against tuition increases scuffled with police earlier this week, leading to a dozen arrests.

At UC Davis, an encampment of some 100 tents has sprung up since Monday's rally. Encampments are also in place at UC Berkeley and other California campuses.

New York University historian Robert Cohen said the Occupy movement on California campuses is accelerating quickly compared with the student movement of the 1960s.

"If you date things from the Port Huron Statement and the summer of '62, it wasn't really until the fall of '64 that there was a mass student movement on campus," he said. The Port Huron Statement was the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the key groups of the 1960s New Left movement in the United States.

The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of great social unrest as college students rallied against the Vietnam war and in support of minority and women's rights.

Angus Johnston, a historian at City University of New York, said, "What we have had up until now is something very similar to the early 1960s, where you had not a huge number of activists but a committed core who were working really hard but weren't getting huge amount of traction from media or fellow students."

California students have regularly protested tuition hikes since the economy slumped three years ago. Tuition for in-state students in the ten campuses of the University of California reached $12,192 this year, up from $2,274 two decades ago.

At the 23 campuses of the California State University system, which is increasingly plagued by overcrowding, tuition this year is $5,472, up from $1,572 as recently as 2002-2003.

In part because of the tuition hikes, a growing number of students now face large student loan debts, with two-thirds of 2010 graduating seniors nationally in debt an average of $25,250, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. That is up 5 percent from the year before.

Some earlier California demonstrations over tuition resulted in serious scuffles with police that included use of pepper spray and Tasers. One woman had reconstructive surgery after a UC Berkeley police officer hit her with a nightstick.

But those incidents received far less attention than those recently associated with the Occupy movement.

"When a cop pepper-sprays a student, everyone can sort of imagine their children, or their nieces or nephews, their friends who are students," said Kyle Arnone, a 26-year old teaching assistant at the University of California's Los Angeles campus.

"It's harder for the public to stigmatize student protesters as being a bunch of hippie, unemployed people that are difficult to relate to."

(Additional reporting by Laird Harrison in Berkeley and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Paul Simao.)

© 2011 Reuters
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/occupy-movement-inspires-rise-in-us-c...

Like Coaches, University of California Campus Chancellors Who Do Not Measure Up Must Go. UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police use brutal baton jabs on students protesting Birgeneau’s increases in tuition. UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau ($450,000 salary) is in dereliction of his duties.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police report to the Chancellor and the campus police take direction from the Chancellor. University of California (UC) campus chancellors vet their campus police protocols. Birgeneau allowed pepper spray and the use of batons on students in his campus police protocols.

Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau must be fired for the brutal outrages on students protesting Birgeneau’s tuition increases.

Opinions count, Email the UC Board of Regents marsha.kelman@ucop.edu

Foreign student tuition at UC Berkeley (UCB) is subsidized in the guise of diversity while instate student tuition/fees are doubled. UCB Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau displaces Californians qualified for public UCB with a $50,600 payment from foreign students.

UC Berkeley is not increasing enrollment. Birgeneau accepts $50,600 foreign students and displaces qualified instate Californians (When depreciation of assets funded by Californians are in foreign and out of state tuition calculations, out of state and foreign tuition is more than $100,000 + and does NOT subsidize instate tuition). Like Coaches, Chancellors Who Do Not Measure Up Must Go: remove Birgeneau.

More recently, Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police deployed violent baton jabs on students protesting Birgeneau’s tuition increases. The sky will not fall when Birgeneau and his $450,000 salary are ousted. Opinions make a difference; email UC Board of Regents marsha.kelman@ucop.edu

UC Berkeley (UCB) pulls back access and affordability to instate Californians. Qualified instate applicants for public Cal. replaced by $50,600 payment from born abroad foreign and out of state affluent students. And, foreign and out of state tuition is subsidized in the guise of diversity while instate tuition/fees are doubled.

UCB is not increasing enrollment. Birgeneau accepts $50,600 foreign students and displaces qualified instate Californians (When depreciation of Calif. funded assets are included (as they should be), out of state and foreign tuition is more than $100,000 + and does NOT subsidize instate tuition). Going to Cal. is now more expensive than Harvard, Yale. Like Coaches, Chancellors who do not measure-up must go.

More recently, UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police deployed excessive force - rammed baton jabs - on Cal. students protesting Birgeneau’s doubling of tuition. Tough choices must be made: the sky will not fall when Birgeneau and his $450,000 salary are ousted. Opinions make a difference; email UC Board of Regents marsha.kelman@ucop.edu

Pepper spraying incident 'should and could have been prevented'

by Common Dreams staff
http://www.commondreams.org/

Months after students at UC Davis were filmed being soaked in pepper spray and arrested by police in riot gear after peacefully protesting at their university, a UC Davis 'task force' has finally released a report on the incident today.

The report includes a number of criticisms against police and administrative action on the day stating, "The pepper spraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011 should and could have been prevented." The report is critical of the actions of Police Chief Annette Spicuzza. It states, “the command and leadership structure of the UCDPD is very dysfunctional.”

The 190-page Reynoso Task Force Report said the use of pepper spray was “not supported by objective evidence and not authorized by policy.”

According to CBS News, the report finds:

The incident was not managed according to plan.
The pepper spray used (MK-9) was not an authorized weapon for UC Davis police officers and officers were not trained in how to use it.
Chancellor Linda Katehi bears responsibility for deploying police at 3 p.m. to remove tents rather than earlier in the day or the night before
Chancellor Katehi bears primary responsibility for failing to communicate her position that physical force should be avoided.
Lt. John Pike bears responsibility for the use of pepper spray on the students.

The Reynoso task force will be presenting the report live at UC Davis from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Eastern, which will be available via webcast here.

* * *

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EsGog5MD22Q

AP news:

Report: CA Pepper-Spray Incident was Preventable

A University of California task force says the pepper-spraying of student protesters by UC Davis police could and should have been prevented.

That conclusion was contained in a report released Wednesday on the Nov. 18 crackdown on students who had set up an Occupy Wall Street camp on campus.

The university published the document online a day after a judge approved its publication without the names of most officers involved in the clash. [...]

The 13-member task force was created to investigate the notorious incident, when officers shot pepper spray on the heads of sitting protesters.

The pepper-spraying prompted national outrage, campus protests and calls for the chancellor's resignation after online videos of the confrontation went viral.

* * *

LA Times reports:

UC study criticizes, places blame in pepper spray use at Davis

The study strongly refutes campus police assertions the band of Occupy demonstrators posed a violent threat and it also says administrators wrongly assumed that many off-campus troublemakers were part of the tent-city protest that officials wanted evicted. It details a chain of miscommunication and poorly timed efforts to remove the protesters, leading to the incident that gripped the nation via an online video showing campus Police Lt. John Pike spraying a line of seated students at close range.

“On balance, there is little factual basis supporting Lt. Pike’s belief that he was trapped by the protesters or that his officers were prevented from leaving the quad. Further, there is little evidence that any protesters attempted to use violence against the police,” the report stated.

* * *

Read the full report here:

http://issuu.com/jonqueally/docs/reynoso-report?mode=window&backgroundCo...

SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - The University of California has replaced a campus police chief who resigned over her role in the pepper-spraying last fall of peacefully protesting students allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Matt Carmichael, a lieutenant for the UC Davis Police Department since joining the force in 2002, was sworn in as chief on Thursday by Chancellor Linda Katehi, who herself has come under fire for her handling of the Occupy demonstrations.

Carmichael had overseen patrol operations on the campus, located near Sacramento, and was the department's main spokesman. He had served as acting chief since former Chief Annette Spicuzza was placed on leave on November 21 in the aftermath of the pepper-spraying incident.

Spicuzza resigned on Wednesday. In a statement to the Sacramento Bee newspaper, she said her decision came "after heartfelt discussions with my family."

Spicuzza and other police officials and campus administrators, including Katehi, were sharply criticized in a report issued by an investigative panel last week that said they showed poor judgment and used excessive force in forcing students to remove a protest encampment on campus.

Video footage widely seen on television and the Internet showed campus police dousing a cluster of protesters seated on the ground. The confrontation led to the suspension of Spicuzza and two police officers, and briefly thrust the normally quiet, mostly apolitical UC Davis campus to the forefront of nationwide anti-Wall Street "Occupy" protests.

"As the university does not want this incident to be its defining moment, nor do I wish for it to be mine," Spicuzza said in her statement emailed to the newspaper. "I believe in order to start the healing process, this chapter of my life must be closed."

In the immediate aftermath of the clash, many faculty and students called for the resignation of Katehi, who publicly apologized to a crowd of jeering students three days later. University of California President Mark Yudof warned the heads of all 10 UC campuses, "We cannot let this happen again."

Carmichael's appointment as chief is for one year, and the campus will launch a national search for a new permanent police chief later.

(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Paul Simao)
http://www.reuters.com