Rogueish
Field Notes on Fashion and Occupy (Part One) – The New Inquiry→
06/15/12
Also on fashion and Occupy, the UCB police review board report includes this gem:
Some of the protestors wore backpacks to protect themselves.
Speaking of baton thrusts
06/09/12
This paragraph seems particularly revealing:
A number of UCPD regulations also govern the specific use of batons. As a threshold matter, “[o]nly impact weapons issued or authorized by the Department may be carried,” and published departmental regulations do not authorize the use of 36-inch straight batons, but designate the 26-inch baton as the appropriate “crowd control impact weapon.” In fact, UCPD changed from the 26-inch baton to the 36-inch baton in 2011. UCPD officers were trained for the change in early June 2011. General Order F-6 has not yet been updated to reflect this.
So we have here a clear violation of written campus policies, but the only problem the review board notices is that the policies have not yet been re-written to retroactively make this not a violation.
“The vigor of these baton thrusts is most distressing and should not be repeated” « zunguzungu→
06/09/12
It isn’t even that some people think it’s okay to do so, in other words; it’s that when some people think its fine and some people don’t, the end result is: the police will do whatever they want. If they want to grab a non-resisting protester by her hair and throw her to the ground — this time, next time, every time — they will.
The Review Board’s report opens with the strange claim that “there is no obvious standard against which to judge these actions.” This is used to introduce the notion of “campus norms,” which the report suggests involve a greater respect for free speech than legal requirements or written policies. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single point in the report where “each committee member’s own understanding and interpretation” of campus norms leads to an unambiguous criticism of the police or administration. “Campus norms,” that is, turns out to be the name of the lack of standards which allows the board to refuse to judge the administration.
Report on November 9, 2011 (PDF)→
06/07/12
Some members of the committee do not think that pulling protestors by their hair is consistent with campus norms.
It’s kind of fascinating to imagine the context and mindset in which someone would write this sentence in the middle of a bureaucratic report, without stopping and thinking, “is something wrong here?”
11/20/11
After the unprovoked police assault on the pink papier-mâché dinosaur, I think Occupy Cal needs to escalate and deploy a real dinosaur to stand guard over protests. Hopefully the comrades in the division of Genetics, Genomics and Development are on that.
