Brad Hicks reviews the UC Davis Pepper Spray Report (.pdf here) and discovered that as awful as we thought this event was, it turns out it was much, much worse:
But before it even came to that point, the student protesters had, with the help of Legal Services, gone over all the relevant state laws, city ordinances, campus ordinances, and campus regulations and concluded that no matter what the Chancellor thought, it was entirely legal for them to set up that camp. When the university’s legal department found out that Chancellor Katehi was going to order the camp removed, they thought they made it clear to her that the students were right.
I kept having to stop and slap my forehead over that one repeated phrase in the report: (this person or that) was under the impression she had made it clear that (some order was given), but nobody else present had that impression. Anybody who is “under the impression that they made it clear” that some order was given who who didn’t put it in writing and who hasn’t had that order paraphrased back to them? Should be slapped. Or at the very least demoted. Unless you actually said it, you didn’t “make it clear.”
It turns out that it is illegal for anybody to lodge on the campus without permission, but the relevant law only applies to people trying to make it their permanent dwelling. The law prohibits non-students from camping on campus for any reason, but neither student affairs nor the one cop sent to look could find any non-students who were there overnight. A campus regulation says that students can’t set up tents without permission, but that regulation is not enforceable by police, only by academic discipline. Campus legal “thought they made it clear” that the law was on the students’ side, but according to multiple witnesses, what they actually said was “it is unclear that you have legal authority to order the police to do this” and Chancellor Katehi heard that as “well, they didn’t say I don’t have that authority, only that it’s not clear.”
Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.”
Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use. It turns out that the relevant law only permits the use of up to Mk-4 pepper sprayers. The consultants were unable to find out who authorized the purchase and carrying, but every cop they asked said, “So what? It’s just like the Mk-4 except that it has a higher capacity.” Uh, no. It’s also much, much higher pressure, and specifically designed not to be sprayed directly at any one person, only at crowds, and only from at least six feet away. The manufacturer says so. The person in charge of training California police in pepper spray says that as far as he knows, no California cop has ever received training, from his office or from the manufacturer, in how to safely use a Mk-9 sprayer, presumably because it’s illegal. But Officer Nameless, when he wrote the action plan for these arrests, included all pepper-spray equipment in the equipment list, both the paint-ball rifle pepper balls and the Mk-9 riot-control sprayers.
You really need to read the whole report and Brad’s summary. I can’t believe Katehi still has a job, and the Buffalo Beast was too kind to her.
(via that Facebook thing)
Brachiator
I keep reading this as Jeff Spicoli
Sadly, this incident has become a kind of precedent for California schools. The most recent occurrence was at Santa Monica City College
And of course, there will be a full investigation…
jayackroyd
see also, Aaron Bady
zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/reading-katehi-the-pepper-spray-chancellor/
LanceThruster
My old roommate was arrested and prosecuted (charges were eventually dropped) for spraying his ex GF with a legally possessed pepper spray product when she drunkenly attacked him.
Cops will generally throw you to the wolves for any infraction, technical or otherwise, but these clowns arm themselves with illegal substances and use them not in accoradance with the manufacturer’s guidleines and *they* get a pass?
Same deal with those who ignored the findings of the campus’s legal eagles.
What a freakin’ circus.
Catsy
I’m sure that given the overwhelming amount of evidence that at least one cop did in fact possess and use it, charges will be forthcoming.
Why is everyone laughing?
AA+ Bonds
The system is the police state and it seemed to work pretty well
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Gosh, it sure is a good thing that universities aren’t in the business of teaching people how to communicate clearly and effectively so that they are understood.
__
Has the English Dept. staff been put on mass suicide watch yet?
Gus diZerega
The cops should unemployed along with their boss and the disgrace of a Chancellor. Incompetents at best, and for the cops, bullies and sadists As well.
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
I wholeheartedly agree with with this article, but the notion that cops can be fast and loose with the law has always driven me nuts. C’mon guys, that’s not just a legal technicality–it’s the fuckin’ law you know, that thing that you are charged with enforcing.
terraformer
Huh. Seems like people in position of power and authority think they can break rules and laws, if even only the spirit of them, and get away with it without repercussion.
I wonder why they have that idea?
the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)
Until the 1% and their bootlickers are under threat from far worse, no report is going to change anything. Too bad the left believes that sternly worded letters, reports, news coverage and blog posts will create shame in the shameless.
Brachiator
@Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E):
Cops have always had the benefit of a version of “stand your ground” laws.
trollhattan
Sickening, from start to finish. A couple cops lose their jobs, everybody else keeps theirs and the students are less safe than ever, with the main threat coming from inside the University.
I wish Robert Mondavi were still alive. As their primary private donor he’d have not tolerated this nonsense and it seems it takes the financial lever to get anything changed anymore.
Biggest UCD campus issue du jour: getting the frats and sororities to not drink themselves to death on Picnic Days this weekend. Carry on, folks.
evinfuilt
@terraformer:
It’s as if when people look at their superiors doing such, they see no reason not to.
I mean, don’t look back, this happened in the past, we must look forward to a time where we can all pepper spray students for any reason we desire (see 1st post.)
Forum Transmitted Disease
And yet, in California, if I bring an AR-15 rifle with an thirty round mag into the state and say to the cops “So what? It’s just like the Ruger Mini-14 except that it has a higher capacity” – a provably true statement – my ass will be sitting in jail for a good long time and my life will be ruined forever.
Three sets of laws. One for cops, one for the rich, one for us.
Argive
I can’t think of anything better to say than this:
-Mario Savio, Berkeley, CA, Dec. 2, 1964
Odie Hugh Manatee
I can’t believe Katehi still has a job…”
I heard this AM that she has resigned (or is in the process of).
Your welcome. :)
RP
Amazing. In retrospect, the cops are lucky that the people watching this incident were didn’t freak out. It’s not hard to imagine one of the people on the sidelines rushing Pike, and the rest of the bystanders joining in. It could have quickly turned into a full scale riot with serious casualties.
Snowwy
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
The only report I’ve seen is Chief Spicuzza falling on her sword. Got a link?
dollared
We really need to understand: the level of accountability and integrity that we took for granted in the 1970s, and even in the 1980s, has gradually disappeared, to the point where it is absolutely gone.
Obama’s special commission on mortgage abuse has 55 investigators. Reagan’s FBI had 1000 investigators working the S&L scandal. Yes, we are that far gone.
That’s why anyone who wants to improve our country must support Occupy. It has been incredibly effective, but this is a 10 year push. And yes, some are messy hippies, but they are fighting harder for us than anybody in the White House, or in the Congress. Period.
ruemara
@trollhattan: You have to admit, the key fact that “It is illegal to drink when you are under 21”, plus the public pissing, throwing up and drinking starting at 7am, is a huge damned problem.
Snowwy
@dollared:
I hope you’re not one of those who fails to embrace the power of “and”.
LanceThruster
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
KROQ’s Kevin and Bean did a bit on OJ’s suicide note supposedly outside of the English dept of OJ’s alma mater.
It was funny as hell, whether they actually did that or not.
Anonymous
Brad’s opening line:
I add that the same people who tell us this also tell us, when the facts do come in (usually some time later), that it’s all in the past and who really knows what happened way back then anyway. My guess is that this line of reply will surface here, and will also be part of the defense of Zimmerman.
300baud
Oh, I know what happens with systemic failures! We send the system to jail! But until that dastardly monster is caught, we must support our leaders.
trollhattan
@Snowwy:
There’s nothing local at present on the Chancellor. Here’s an article on the chief’s resignation, updated this a.m.
sacbee.com/2012/04/19/4425270/uc-davis-police-chief-retires.html
LanceThruster
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
And the kicker is I actually *can* have a high-round magazine for my Mini-14.
El Tiburon
Welcome to the New America. Extreme police brutality against liberal groups with little or no accountability or real national outrage is just how it is.
The silence from our national leaders is deafening.
The government routinely spies on liberal groups. They infiltrate and attempt covert sting operations.
Yet right-wing terrorists continue to murder cops and kill doctors who provide certain medical procedures. Government reports detailing this are withdrawn and forgotten, natch.
Yet many of you continue to defend those innocent drones now flying over this land.
They came for the students – yet I did nothing. They came for the OWS – yet I did nothing. And on and on and on.
Sacrablue
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Chief Spicuzza didn’t get fired, she is retiring effective today.
trollhattan
@ruemara:
It’s not nothing, but it’s also pretty much SOP at every college not named Liberty University. They’ll have it fixed by the time my kid is ready for college, of course!
I’m certain it’s getting extra media attention this year as part of a strategy to redirect attention from the pepper hosing incident report.
Eric
could this just be poor wording on the writer’s part? just because the phrasing was “___ thought they made it clear” doesn’t mean that ___ never actually put it in writing. of course, the report never mentions any official communiques saying “you can’t do this shit” so maybe this is accurate enough, but I wonder if the authors of the report just kinda blow at writing exactly what they need to, which, incidentally is not too much different from thinking you made something clear…
#runonsentence
trollhattan
@Sacrablue:
One small bit is she’s “retiring” w/o the usual golden parachute, just her pension. That’s as outwardly as they’re going to reveal that she was ushered out the door.
Brachiator
@Sacrablue:
Sent an email to the Sacramento Bee
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Snowwy:
I was bouncing between stupid and somewhat sane (CNN/MSNBC) and I caught a blurb about it, just not sure which talkinghead said it (I’m not usually an AM watcher, don’t know them all). They were talking about the Chief resigning and it came up. I may have misinterpreted it but it sure sounded like she was moving on.
I would rather be right than wrong in this case…lol!
trollhattan
Also, too, the report could open further the path to a metric buttload of civil suits against the individuals and the university. Somebody hit the Republican’s big red “tort reform, nao!” button, stat.
ruemara
@trollhattan: Naw, we won’t. Right now the UCD student government is upset that the City wants to enforce drinking laws by expanding police ability to pick up visibly drunk underage drinkers. Once again, no one is pointing out, “It is illegal for you to drink under age 21”, much less be a drunken mess out on the street. Whatev.
Nutella
So it’s illegal to possess or use that kind of weapon, yet Officer Pike did possess it and did use it. Officer Pike committed at least two crimes. Officer Pike is a criminal.
Will he be arrested and charged? Or do criminals get a free pass if they’re wearing a uniform?
No and yes, respectively.
SATASQ
Nutella
So it’s illegal to possess or use that kind of weapon, yet Officer Pike did possess it and did use it. Officer Pike committed at least two crimes. Officer Pike is a criminal.
Will he be arrested and charged? Or do criminals get a free pass if they’re wearing a uniform?
No and yes, respectively.
SATASQ
Forum Transmitted Disease
@dollared: I was in San Francisco this weekend. Thought I’d stop by the Occupy camp. Say hi.
To all ten of ’em, as it turns out. God, that was heartbreaking.
Again, liberals drop the ball in favor of the next shiny thing. Occupy is done, that much was agonizingly obvious.
dmsilev
I call bullshit on this. Unless the campus’s purchasing system is completely FUBAR’d (always a possibility), knowing the supplier and the part number should be enough to figure out who ordered the things, who signed off on the budget charge, etc.
elmo
@dmsilev:
I call bullshit on this.
Then let me rephrase it for you.
There. That help?
Lex
@the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady): I don’t know anyone on the Left who thinks this. In fact, all I’ve been hearing from them ever since Ford pardoned Nixon is that there’s no accountability.
And I look at Iran-Contra, Bush 43’s illegal invasion of Iraq and other crimes against humanity, the banksters who blew up the economy, the Roman Catholic Church’s decades-long continuing criminal enterprise of sexually assaulting children and obstructing investigations into those assaults, and on and on, and I’ve been a Republican since ’78 but I have to think, “Hmm. Gee. Maybe they have a point.”
Sacrablue
@trollhattan:
Sorry, I didn’t read the entire article. I got stopped by the photo of the Swainson’s hawk on page B3 and started daydreaming about what I had just seen flying overhead.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@dmsilev: Not even if their system is FUBARed is this within the realm of possibility. Like UC Davis, my job involves government funding, and I can produce paperwork with authorizing signatures for every single item in my entire building, if needed. And auditors, sometimes, will ask for just that. So they’re lying. Again.
muddy
I was saying yesterday or the other day in here about Pike being on paid suspension since November. Pepper spray = nice vacay.
Origuy
Is it possible that the MK-9 sprayers were purchased with “private donations” from a “supporter of the police”? Cops will sometimes use their own equipment regardless of department policy.
Roger Moore
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I’m willing to bet that you’re wrong about that. You may be able to find paperwork for everything in the building that was purchased through official channels, but that’s not the same thing as every single thing in the building. There’s probably a bunch of stuff- mostly minor but possibly a few things substantially bigger than you’d expect- that people purchased with their own money precisely because they didn’t want to deal with the official bureaucracy. That may be because they think avoiding the hassle of official channels is worth the money or because it’s something they’ve been denied when they tried to buy it the right way. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the campus cops bought that pepper spray out of his own pocket because he wanted it and wasn’t allowed to buy it through formal channels.
pat
I read “thought I made that clear to so-and-so” as “I’m lying about this to cover my own ass and pass the buck.”
trollhattan
@Origuy:
Oddly enough, they look identical to bear repellant spray sold to backpackers and other outdoorsy types headed to griz country, so they could have simply wandered over to REI and bought that. Which also, too, offers an interesting parallel between student protesters and heartless, godless killing machines. /Colbert
Martin
@dmsilev:
You’re possibly right. UC isn’t the greatest about some of this stuff, but every purchase has to be signed off at 2 levels for pre-approval and documentation submitted post-purchase – and there are daily random audits on purchasing. No way they shouldn’t know who approved it – and its been like that for ages. However, purchasing records only need to be kept for a certain period of time (usually 5 years) – and it’s possible the stuff was bought ages ago and the records already (appropriately) purged.
Reading between the lines on the report summary above: Faculty felt they didn’t need to adhere to what staff told them, and budget and staffing cuts resulted in everyone cutting corners on paperwork and formal communication.
The Dangerman
I used to work at a CSU; I have no problem believing Katehi has a job. I saw shit that had to be seen to be believed…
…and not a soul got fired to my knowledge. One person who I know committed multiple acts of fraud is now a VP in Financial Aid.
Seriously, if CA taxpayers had a clue about some of the shit that goes on at CSU’s (and I assume UC’s), they would (in Mitt’s words) clean house. It’s that bad.
Sad_Dem
I can’t believe Katehi still has a job…
I can, and I can predict a promotion. She carried the water like a good girl, so she may well be rewarded. I figure, ever since her days in Athens, she’s been doing the same job.
Darkrose
For me, the best part of the report was Vice Chancellor Castro from Student Affairs, who was met with confused silence when she pointed out that the protesters were, in fact, students, and that with Thanksgiving break coming up, the protest was going to fade out naturally in a couple of days.
The decision-making process, or lack thereof, is a shining example of how UC Davis (doesn’t) work. Upper management calls meetings where there are no action items or anyone saying, “This is what we decided.” Then they expect their underlings to correctly interpret their bumps on their heads and come up with what they wanted, without actually having to say anything and therefore take responsibility. When it inevitably dissolves into a complete clusterfuck, everyone in management blinks and says, “I have no idea how this happened.”
Meanwhile, the rest of us bang our heads on our desks and think, “I could have told them everything in the report for a lot less than $500,000.”
The Crafty Trilobite
One of the hardest parts of a lawyer’s job is telling his client bluntly, “You CANNOT do that.” It’s particularly hard in the increasingly Asian-style mores of the West Coast, where an unadorned “no,” is considered impolite. Also too, lawyers are trained to look for ways for their clients to avoid risk, and sometimes forget that the client has not been trained that way – so the lawyer says, ‘it’s not clear you can do X,’ thinking that’s a clear warning not to do it. That doesn’t work, but most lawyers make that mistake–once. The pepperspray foulup may have been this lawyer’s lesson in client management.
The best way to break the news is, always come in with 2 alternative courses of action that ARE legal, and suggest the one you prefer in the same breath. As in, “doing X would not comply with the law, but what we can do that will produce the same result is y.”
g
Campus legal “thought they made it clear”
Actually, I work with a local agency’s attorney’s office, and they are practically ALLERGIC to putting anything in writing, for fear it could be used against them in the future. They will not commit themselves to anything.
Lolcat Liberation Front
Beautiful. The legal department thought they made the law clear to the Chancellor. The Chancellor didn’t interpret it that way.
The Chancellor thought she made her instructions clear to the Campus Police Chief. The Police Chief didn’t interpret it that way.
The Police Chief thought she made her own instructions clear to Lieutenant Pike and her other underlings. They didn’t interpret it that way.
This, folks, is the holy grail of bureaucratic unaccountability: not merely one person covering their ass, but a complete ass-covering conga line.
I hate to Godwin the thread, but the American version of the Nuremburg trials would be a thing to behold. “Duh, I was just following what I kinda guessed were my orders.”
Mike S.
recall two facts:
1) The same week that Katehi arrived in Davis it was revealed in the Chicago Tribune that Katehi had been intimately involved in UIUC’s “clout admission’s scandal” which culminated in the resignations of 12 of 14 members the UI BoT and the UI president.
2) Katehi was a member (and the only Greek member) of panel making recommendations for various reforms of the university system in Greece. The panel advocated ending near 40 year old ban against using police to respond to or regulate student political activities on Greek campuses. The ban was in fact rescinded, and shortly thereafter police were repeated called into forcefully quell student uprisings in 2010-11.
Katehi should never have been offered the job at Davis due to her prior record of corruption and authoritarianism.
Mike S.
@Lolcat Liberation Front:
yup.
although there may be some recourse: administrators taking/directing action which violates students rights under well established law are subject to personal financial liability.
She can claim not to have known or understood, but this is not enough for absolution: the standard is ‘knew or should have known’. Willfully misconstruing her own legal advisers opinions is not going to fly in front of a jury.
Certainly the report shows that UCPD knew there was no legitimate basis for the arrests and the use of pepper spray violated their own written procedures. Clearly charges of false arrest and use of undue force are available.
So there may be some accountability, it will just take a long time, some lawyers fees and isn’t guaranteed to work out…