Sometimes these reports come out and folks get all, "Oh, that again? Why are we dredging up news from (all of) six months ago?"
They forget, of course, that task forces to report on these sorts of things take time — time to gather up information, consult with experts, craft the report itself … heck, even time to fight back court cases seeking for the report to be quashed.
They also forget that often immediate reaction to these events his forestalled by the authorities with promises that there will be full and thorough investigations. "We don't want a rush to judgment! We want some careful examination of the facts, not just competing headline blurbs! Give us some time, and then we can react properly."
If that's not to be considered simply a stalling tactic, merely a way of getting people to forget what happened in favor of the next news cycle excitement … then it's necessary to actually pay attention when these things come out.
So the question then becomes, what happens now? Will there be some actual accountability imposed on the UC Davis police? Or the university chancellor? That's the real news story now. #ddtb
Embedded Link
Report On UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident Finds Police Conduct ‘Objectively Unreasonable’
Two reports commissioned by the University of California-Davis to investigate the infamous pepper spray incident from last fall have been released to the public, and they appear to verify most of the …
Google+: Reshared 1 times
I think anyone who is interested in this should look at this video:
UC Davis Pepper Spray – What Really Happened . It did open my eyes to the idea that this topic is a little more complicated than widely reported.
It shows that the protesters were not acting in a peaceful manner but in fact had formed a circle around the officers blocking their exit from the area. The police officers, after being blocked, warned the crowd several times to allow them to pass, showed them the pepper spray that was to be used multiple times, and then finally, unable to get the crowd to peacefully let them part, used the spray. After this occurred, the crowd chanted "you can go," indicating that there was a general consensus in the crowd that the officers were detained by the will of the crowd and that now the crowd was allowing them to leave.
Let's set aside the debate about the ethics of them detaining and removing the initial few protesters, it is the case that the state grants them the authority to do so. Because they had this authority, the students blocking them from leaving does count as an act of aggression under the NAP and is considered an unlawful act. There is no moral justification for one individual to block another individual's right of passage. It isn't fully apparent because nothing did occur, but with the officers surrounded in the way that they were, they were in a very precarious position. If the crowd had decided to attack en masse, the position of the officers made it so that they would likely be harmed or even killed, in spite of their protective gear.
+Fjord Lynn, if the campus police had formed up and moved forward to exit the situation, including having pepper spray available in case the group did not disperse that was blocking them, that would have been one thing. A lone officer walking up on his own and deliberately and carefully spraying a group of people sitting on the ground does not seem to me to reflect a concern about an angry mob about to rush them.
I'd also recommend looking at the Reynoso report (the one specifically linked to in the above article), particular pp. 18-19.