vice | Remember pepper spray cop?
He's the campus police officer at the University of California, Davis
who decided to handle a seated line of peaceful, non-threatening Occupy
demonstrators in the most rational way he could: by calmly firing a
stream of pepper spray directly into their eyes from close range, like a
landscape gardener squirting pesticide at some overgrown flowerbeds.
At first, everyone was outraged at Officer John Pike's blasé manner of
temporarily blinding peaceful protesters, then the internet got
involved, turned the image into meme—photoshopping Pike into basically every pop culture image ever created—and everyone kind of forgot about it. Until last week, when it emerged that he has been awarded $38,000 in
workers compensation by California's Department of Industrial
Relations—more than the $30,000 each of his victims received—for the
"psychiatric injuries" he's experienced since that day in November of
2011. UC Davis will foot the bill, in addition to the $70,000 the school
paid him in salary while he was on adminstrative leave.
I spoke to Bernie Goldsmith—an ex-Wall Street attorney and social
activist who was an Occupy organizer at UC Davis and there the day of
the pepper spraying—about what his fellow protesters think of Pike's
payout.
