by Lee Fang and Zack Whitaker
It was not what you heard, but what you did not hear. A deafening silence of hushed voices but seething anger. The video was painfully awkward to watch as an outside observer, whilst equally inspiring and poignant. The contempt could be sliced through the air from the disgust felt by the students there.
A few commenters and people on Twitter have asked why the chancellor is at the center of this firestorm over the police pepper spraying. Chancellor Katehi approved of the police action (though specifics of what she ordered exactly are still a mystery), and ordered the UC Davis cops to evict the protesters, resulting in the heinous pepper spraying video now plastered everywhere on the web. She has not apologized to the students or worked to remedy the situation — for instance, one student who was pepper sprayed told me she still has health problems after the incident, and no one from the administration contacted her to see if she’s okay. Katehi’s refusal to condemn the police action has only made a bad situation worse.
A press conference, scheduled for *4:00pm* between the UC Davis Chancellor and police with local press on campus, did not end in an hour, as planned. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.
On Wednesday, November 19, within hours of the attack on the students, UC Davis police were forced to issue a press statement defending their actions.
“Students were given warnings to leave their tents [pitched on campus] by 3 p.m.”, it said. “The protest initially involved about 50 students”, Annette Spicuzza, UC Davis’ police chief said. “Some were wearing protective gear and some held batons”.
The final insult was when she said: “Officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them”, adding, “There was no way out of the circle”.
It makes one see there could have been at least two sides to the story. Perhaps the students were being unruly, or defiant, or armed and ready to commit violence. It was possible, and had been previously witnessed in England during the student protests.
But the statement was spin, and the spin doctor who wrote that statement was clearly unaware that citizens had recorded the event in full, and could in no way document the blasé attitude of the police officer, spraying the students at point-blank range with a thick fog of violent pepper-spray.
The video had been published to YouTube, where it has amassed nearly a million viewers in just over 24 hours, but clearly had not been seen by those who released the pro-police spin.
The next day at a news conference, describing the video images as “chilling”, Katehi said that a task-force would be set up to investigate the actions of the police during the clearly peaceful demonstration.
A group of highly organized students formed a large gap for the chancellor to leave the press conference. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms (around 7:00pm).
Sources:
Zack Whitaker. "UC Davis: Official 'spin' crumbles in the face of "too many videos". ZDNet. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/uc-davis-official-spin-crumbles-in-the-face-of-too-many-videos/13347
Lee Fang. "Breaking Video: UC Davis Chancellor Emerges From Press Conf., Tells Me She Didn’t Feel Threatened". The Second Alarm. http://thesecondalarm.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/ucdavis-chancellor-video/
