Sunday, November 20, 2011

ows preliminary "use of force" results: maybe it's time to occupy the police state?

Forbes | When the first major evacuation of Occupy Oakland was ordered, and police responded in full riot gear, I wrote at the time:

A little friendly advice for the police: if you want a protest or a rally to dissipate, ignore it. Until it turns into a violent riot, ignore it. Even if it goes on for weeks and months, eventually people go home.

If you want to make the protests more poignant, more profound, if you want to swell the ranks of the protesters and give them even more legitimacy, attack them with tear gas and flashbombs. Arrest them en masse.

Even better, pepper-spray unarmed, nonviolent protesters while they sit in a line. According to James Fallows, police are claiming that the officer who pepper-sprayed a number of Occupy protesters at UC Davis Friday responded in self-defense during a tense moment. Here’s the picture he uses to illustrate the absurdity of this claim:


It’s almost as if the police here don’t want the protests to end. Instead of waiting for boredom or cold weather to siphon off protesters, or hell instead of just using zip-ties and arresting the ones who wouldn’t move, these guys nonchalantly pepper-spray a bunch of peaceful protesters in the face. Because they could.

11 comments:

CNu said...

Expendable "one-time" exemplar who engaged in "fairly standard police procedure" now being thrown into the wood chipper of "see it with your own eyes" popular resentment and rejection of "fairly standard police procedure" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45374977/ns/us_news-life/#.TslTu_JaXko

Tom said...

Yeah, the officers take it on the chin.  (Maybe NYPD ranks were a little more worldly.)  Which, no sympathy for the dude in the video, but I want the Chancellor's job.    And, expanding on Nomad's thinking over at CDV's place, UC students have parents and some CA parents must have enough dough and will to field lawyers.    

But the fairytales get traction fast.  A few months back you saw me wondering whether pepper spraying of an elementary school kid was right or wrong.   And I already today discussed this with one of my fellow liberals.  Friend explained to me the story that pepper spray was "standard procedure"  and "safer for the students."  I questioned whether prying young people's mouths open to apply pepper spray to trachea was in fact done for safety's sake, and if so whether we need to review whether that meets the objective.   But he wasn't hearing me.  Somehow it was time to change the subject.   

CNu said...

ossifer davis, don't spray him!!!! priceless.comedy.gold....,

Tom said...

:X  I know, I know.   Kid is to baby squirrel as "who cares?" is to "OMG!"  The emeny within.

Tom said...

CNu is kind enough not to link it, but I will  ... Eight-Year-Old Pepper Sprayed, aka "It Takes a Squirrel."

CNu said...

expanding on Nomad's thinking over at CDV's place, UC students have
parents and some CA parents must have enough dough and will to field
lawyers.


those same factors giving pause to a full and unbridled expression of one-time standard operating procedure are the factors indispensible to the correct and fruitful operation of a public school system..., it is endlessly fascinating to me how that works and how something so simple has been systematically overlooked over the course of generations in America. But then, the experience of a whole lotta folk at the hands of one-time has been conspicuously overlooked in America, hain't it?

Tom said...

Yep, and what's really impressive is the imagination needed to believe we were gaining something by more or less deliberately overlooking that mountain of data.

brotherbrown said...

70 people were arrested Thursday in Occupy LA.  My son went there Friday and took some pics, which I will post when I get the chance.

So this is how a formerly great nation implodes?

CNu said...

nah brotherbrown, this is how America begins to remember itself....,

umbrarchist said...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9NcPIJL6ko8/TslftNABG3I/AAAAAAAABPQ/9k7LGj3eQSM/w402/305216_325075804176130_100000211387561_1514079_51579341_n.jpg

nanakwame said...

It shouldn't have not forgotten. 

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