By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

Yes, you read that right; it is now considered a violent act to resist police orders by linking arms to form a human chain.

Such a violent act apparently justifies the brutal treatment handed out to students at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) on November 9^th.

UCB police along with Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies outfitted in riot gear ordered students to disperse from a grassy area outside of the school’s administration building.

When the students refused to move, police began to indiscriminately assault the crowd with batons.

Amazingly, the UC police are taking the stance that the students, by linking arms and standing passively around seven tents, were taking a violent stance against the police.

“You’re beating students,” was chanted as the police went on the offensive arresting 39 people, 22 of which were students and one of which was a professor, according to police sources cited by SF Gate.

However, Mercury News reports that by Thursday afternoon 32 students, one professor and seven non-campus affiliated individuals were arrested.

This includes one man who set up a tent on the steps in front of Sproul Hall on Thursday morning where the earlier clashes occurred, although the majority of the arrests occurred on Wednesday.

UC police Captain Margo Bennett defended the actions, saying, “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence. I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

Apparently standing with arms linked is a violent act, regardless of the fact that it would be literally impossible for anyone in the chain to attack the police given the fact that their arms are restrained due to the nature of the chain itself.

The statement from Bennett is so nonsensical it is almost laughable, if it were not for the grim reality that this is what they actually believe and use to justify brutalizing American youth.

“Students who linked arms were interfering with the officers who were attempting to remove those tents,” Bennett said.

Passively interfering with police attempting to break up a constitutionally protected assembly is now apparently justification for indiscriminate beating.

Thankfully, individuals outside of the thuggish police force and callous administration are not taking a similar stance.

Jim Chanin, a Berkely based attorney specializing in police misconduct told SF Gate, “Using a baton to go through a nonviolent crowd is as inappropriate today as it was in the South when they used it to enforce segregation in the 1960s”.

A professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Sam Walker, who has also served as an Oakland Police Department consultant said that the police response was not only “completely unnecessary” but also “unprovoked”.

Not only that, Walker points out that the way police used the batons is highly dangerous, something which the police are surely well aware of.

The poking motion you can see in the following two videos make it so “you’re very likely to hit the groin or kidney,” according to Walker.

I might also add that it could also easily break ribs or hit the liver which is unfathomably painful.

“Any use of force against an encampment is illegitimate,” Amanda Armstrong, a UCB head steward for UAW Local 2865 (a union representing graduate student instructors) said to the Daily Californian. “All the violence the police perpetrated is the responsibility of the administration.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Lawyers Guild said that they had “grave concerns about the conduct” of the campus police force in a joint letter to UCB officials.

“Video recordings raise numerous questions about UCPD’s oversight and handling of these events, including whether law enforcement were truly required to beat protesters with batons,” they wrote.

I believe this is putting it lightly, the incident was a clear example of excessive force and police brutality, and unfortunately it is not the first.

In November of 2009 a similar incident occurred when students were protesting budget cuts.

Hundreds of students organized a day-long rally and at one point, activists pushed back a police line by some six feet.

Without orders from commanding officers, the police began to strike students with batons using the poking motion shown in the above videos along with overhead strikes.

A retired federal magistrate judge and UCB law professor, Wayne Brazil, said the officers’ reaction was “incomprehensible” and “resulted in chaos, confusion and considerable violence.”

The latest UCB policy on crowd control was published 11 years ago in 2000 and gives absolutely no guidance on the usage of batons by police.

A professor of criminology at the University of Missouri at Saint Louis, David Klinger, defended the actions to SF Gate, arguing that you can’t really tell if the officers were following through with their strikes from the video.

One graduate student who was struck twice by the police said, “The one that hit me was going kind of crazy. He was kind of fierce.”

The video does not give the impression that the police were applying little force, in fact some of the strikes look quite vicious.

Disturbingly, UCB police have said that they will react the exact same way if demonstrators pitch tents again, according to Mercury News.

This is a clear threat of violence made against peaceful protesters, something which one might expect from a military dictatorship in a country like Egypt but not from police in the United States.

Police are taking the stance that resisting police orders cannot be considered a nonviolent protest, even when the protest is completely nonviolent.

This kind of self-contradictory logic is rampant and reflected in statements by police.

“When people are chain-linked together and are not complying, they make it hard on the officers,” UC Police Chief Mitch Celaya said.

Making it hard for the officers is not justification for indiscriminately assaulting peaceful young people, and I sincerely hope that outside observers don’t see this as a legitimate excuse.

“The campus is not a campground and we will do our best to enforce the rules and regulations,” Celaya said.

Rules and regulations do not supersede the constitution and basic human rights; this is something that municipalities across the United States seem to fail to grasp.

Thankfully, not everyone is backing up the brutal UCB police, reflected earlier this week when the Berkeley City Council refused a mutual-aid police agreement with UC police, citing the reaction to the 2009 protests in which one woman’s fingers were broken by a police baton.

Despite the brutal history, the sheriff’s department is holding up its own mutual-aid agreement with UC police, according to Sergeant J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the department.

“This is UC Berkeley’s gig,” Nelson said. “At some point, they’re going to go in and complete their task, whatever their task is, and we go in and help them achieve that.”

Apparently they will blindly back up the UC police, even when it means brutalizing peaceful students trying to stand up for economic justice and equality.

Peter Glazer, a professor at UCB and chairman of the theater, dance and performance studies department made a great point in saying, “any use of force on this campus is inappropriate. Is a tent encampment in front of Sproul more important than violence perpetrated on students?”

Despite the police’s brutal assault, the activists are committed to nonviolence, as freshman Josh Daranciang pointed out, “It’s important that, although the police may use violence against us, we practice nonviolence.”

Indeed, this puts the activists on the moral high ground, making it that much more clear that the violence dished out by campus police is wholly unnecessary.

School administrators defended the police brutality as well, saying that because they had warned protesters tents would not be tolerated on campus, the police were thus somehow justified in their assault.

“We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals [read: the poor and homeless population] gain control,” UCB administrators wrote. “We call on the protesters to observe campus policy or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly nonviolent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions.”

This statement is implying that they take the police stance that linking arms in protest is not “truly nonviolent civil disobedience” or that being attacked by police batons is a natural consequence of “truly nonviolent civil disobedience”.

Both of these positions are wholly ridiculous and exemplary of the illogical thinking required to reconcile the indiscriminate beating of peaceful young activists attempting to make a change in the horrific direction our country is taking.

Unfortunately, the police response just reinforces the conception that our constitutional rights only count when and where the government says they do, something which is antithetical to the entire notion of constitutional rights.

UPDATE: It has now emerged that it was not only students being brutally assaulted by the thuggish police, indeed the police actually attacked professors as well. One of the professors who fell victim to the onslaught was Robert Hass, a 70-year-old former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner along with Geoffrey O’Brien, an English professor who had his ribs broken.

According to reports, police wouldn’t stop beating these individuals even when they had fallen to the ground, clearly not fighting back in any way, shape, or form.

I guess it can only be expected from a police department that thinks interlocking arms to form a human chain is an act of violence.

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