What We Need Here Is MORE FORCE OPTIONS
by zunguzungu
Yesterday, at Santa Monica College, campus police pepper sprayed about thirty students. I have seen no allegation that any of the students were violent or even used civil disobedience; the main problem seems to have been — in the college president’s words — that the small boardroom wasn’t able to accommodate all of the students who wanted to speak: “We expected some students, but we didn’t expect that big of a crowd with such enthusiasm.”
When students demanded entrance to the room the meeting was being held — a tiny room, with room for only a handful of outsiders (by a great coincidence) — the police went wild.
As the Los Angeles Times writes, students were protesting the creation of a two-tiered payment system:
[I]t’s perfectly understandable why Santa Monica College officials, scrambling to make ends meet, have proposed increasing fees for certain in-demand classes to about $600 to $800 per course, or a little more than four times the standard price. The courses would pay their own way, allowing the college to accommodate more students.
Understandable, but wrong. Creating a two-tier system of fees sets a serious precedent that could change the basic nature of the community college system. Once a handful of courses pay for themselves, the temptation to add more would be hard to resist, and the temptation for other campuses to join in would be overwhelming. College fees are set by the Legislature and overseen by the systemwide chancellor’s office in Sacramento. A single campus should not have the authority — and it’s doubtful it does — to set the price for a community college education.
But to the question of the moment: how does this happen? How does pepper spray become the act of first resort? Even the anodyne phrasing of the LA Times admits that pepper spray was used proactively (“Several were also overcome when pepper spray was released just outside the meeting room as officers tried to break up the crowd”) and not in response to some kind of clear and present danger.
Or, rather, it was. A crowd must be dispersed before it does something, goes the logic of the new preemptive policing; a crowd is, itself, a clear and present danger. If you wait until the crowd actually does something, you’ve waited too long. And so you preempt it by striking first.
If you doubt that this is the way these people think, I’d invite you to read Jeff Young — the current assistant police chief at UCLA — writing his “operational review” of UC Berkeley’s police actions against protesters from last November 9th, and note that his main takeaway was that campus police should have probably been allowed to use pepper spray. For more successful protest management, he decides, what the police need is more force options. Perhaps Tasers?
That’s not a joke. He actually observes that while Tasers are “a fairly new crowd management tactic for police,” they “have proven to be very effective,” and notes that a “special panel of the Chancellor of UCLA rigorously reviewed the use of these devices [and] found the use of this level of force within applicable law and police policy.” He makes some observations about how they should be used (he notes that “the use of ECD should almost always be limited to the “drive stun” mode, which is the direct contact with the intended target and not the deployment of probes…Just the display and “sparking” of the ECD usually has the desired effect of moving a crowd back from a protected area or police skirmish line”) but, overall, he makes it quite clear that the problem with what happened last November, as he sees it, was primarily tactical. Mistakes were made, but to him, these mistakes seem primarily to consist of: not enough “pain compliance” technology, not used soon enough.
Now, at this point, we should note that this is the same UCLA campus police who racially profiled a student in the UCLA library, tasered the hell out of him, and then were hit with a civil suit for doing so, leading to a $220k decision against UCLA. The operations executive of the UCLA police department that was in charge of the “UCLA Taser Incident” — notorious enough that it has its own wikipedia entry — actually came to my school and extolled the virtues of using Tasers to break up crowds. He even cites the fact that “A special panel of the Chancellor of UCLA rigorously reviewed the use of these devices [and] found the use of this level of force within applicable law and police policy.” He doesn’t so much mention the fact that the panel was only convened because that massive clusterfuck, a clusterfuck that happened because of UCPD’s shoot first policies. He actually had the gall to point to a panel convened to re-assess the use of Tasers — after a huge and disastrous misuse of them — as part of the evidence that Tasers can and should be used to break up crowds. It’s something like pointing t the 9/11 commission as an example of best practices for how to stop terrorist attacks.
Anyway, I think we should pay just as much attention to the fact that a fellow like Young is, also, all for using pepper spray to clear crowds, in exactly the same way as Santa Monic college police did. While UCPD at Berkeley used their batons appropriately and effectively, Jeff Young wrote in his report that they could have been even more appropriate and effective if they’d been able to use pepper spray. For example, he writes that:
“One officer interviewed recalled explicitly asking for clarification on this point as they “went over the rules of engagement.” He wanted the command staff to confirm that, “that only leaves us with our batons. I said so I need to hear it. You’re saying that we use our batons because there’s nothing left?” In this officer’s opinion, the use of OC spray could have been a “tremendous” help and would have likely reduced the number of people injured.”
And that, during the melee,
“a request to use OC spray from front-line supervisors was routed to Chief Celaya, who denied approval of the use of OC spray. This was a difficult decision that was influenced by the previous discussions with campus administration. The use of OC may have been very effective if used at the main point of conflict at the first confrontation.”
And then in his findings, he argues that any misuse of batons — any problems that may have arisen as a result of that baton use — were really caused by inappropriate limitations on police options:
by receiving an outright ban on the use of OC spray, officers were limited to few force options. They could have stood there and done nothing, retreated or use their batons, the action taken. Having such a limited number of options is inappropriate for crowd management and takes away several very effective options that most of the officers are trained to use. Probably, the most appropriate for this situation was the use of OC spray.
He does acknowledge that pepper spray isn’t actually all that popular, and makes a very veiled reference to the infamous “Pepper Spray Cop” at UC Davis (which happened a week after the melee at Berkeley), before concluding, again, that pepper spray is very effective:
OC or Pepper Spray is a controversial type of force. This is especially true in light of recent events at campus demonstrations. Controversies aside, OC Spray can be a very effective tool for crowd control.
“Controversies aside,” he says, the right application of “pain compliance” techniques and technologies could have been used to clear this crowd, and — we can all hope — next time, it will be. Which is why this story from Santa Monica College is only the latest in what will be a continuing trend: when students protest, they will be preempted by a wide range of force options.
I am more sympathetic to the use of OC spray in the Santa Monica case than in the Davis case. In the former, I assume it wasn’t used as a first resort, but after police at least loudly ordered the crowd to disperse. A large number of people in an enclosed area can actually be dangerous, though I imagine they weren’t being dangerous enough in this case to warrant spray.
In the Davis case, there appeared to be no attempt to just step over the protesters and leave. There was no stampede or other pressing concern, no reason to rush past loud and repeated earnings of
Great, an opinion.
Ben, I know you’re not trying to defend the police, exactly, but I do find the logic of your comment troubling: the idea that if the police “at least loudly ordered the crowd to disperse” then it is “more sympathetic” to pepper spray a crowd, including a 5 year old child, putting two people in the hospital. In other words, note that while the consequences of using OC Spray on a crowd are pretty serious, it becomes possible to sympathize with the people using the violence (as opposed to the people on the receiving end) if you can see the protesters as disobeying a police order. But what made the police order legitimate? The freedom to assemble is a pretty basic constitutional right, not to be abridged lightly; if a police officer is going to command a crowd to disperse, there needs to be a serious fucking reason for it. Not not only do you not know that it *was* legitimate — as opposed to a capricious decision by a cop on the spot — but the tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to that police officer is a really dangerous road to go down. I suppose it is true that “A large number of people in an enclosed area can actually be dangerous,” but only in the sense that if you create a stampede — say by unloading with OC Spray on a crowd — someone might get trampled.
[…] in Berkeley, who has been covering tyro protests and campus military savagery via California, rounds adult news couple and posts about a occurrence this morning. An […]
if you ever feel like it, go digging up the history of non-lethal weapons. I worked for a counter-terrorism outfit years ago – counter-cyberterrorism – around the turn of the millennium where banks and financial outfits were increasingly under attack, especially WRT bugs related to Y2K bugs and the like.
Early on, I had an assignment to dig up everything I could on the use of non-lethal weapons. There’s was a boatload of military research on this kind of weaponry, mostly under the assumption throughout the 90s that warfare would increasingly be asymmetrical (against ‘terrorists’) and urban. Thus, the u.s. mil would be fighting mano-a-mano, in an urban landscape, amidst lots of civilians. Thus: billions invested in non-lethal weaponry designed to fight in the streets.
Alas, at the time (90s), it looks like there was a lot of military development but no guerrilla wars to fight. What to do, what to do. Voila! The first place military contractors pitched was: to the prisons! to the prisons! No reason to dump these lucrative non-lethal weapons research contracts. We can test this stuff on prison riot control. Conveniently, there was also homegrown terrorism such as Tim McVeigh and the rise of the militia movement. Voila! not only can we use these weapons on prisoners, there’s the Michigan Militia. And then there were those crazy kids in Seattle proved that these non-lethal weapons would definitely be great for crowd control.
Anyway, that’s the trajectory of how research started on non-lethals, pain compliance techniques, crowd cntrol etc.
But what you will find utterly fascinating are the disquisitions, authored by military personnel, on the use of force by the state, what a democractic citizenry can and should tolerate, etc. all quite fascinating.
Was there not a law that alowed students to have guns at campus? Maybe its time to use them.How many times violence is comming from the police?When i see a cop doing that to my kids, i wil shoot him without a blink of my eyes.One of my kids is at collage , and i hope he wil protest some time to.Its part of growing up. Make a stand for your ideas.Its a part of live. But when i see cops doing what i see happening there i wil go to jail for it. But those cops wil NOT do that again to my kids.Thats a promice i make for the freedom of my kids.
[…] What do campus police need when dealing with protesters? More force options! […]
[…] the real source of problems at Berkeley on November 9th was that police weren’t allowed enough “force options”—particular, pepper spray. Shortly thereafter, a quasi-independent review board at Davis came […]
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