My Facebook was flooded with "shame on you"s and tons of posts about the UC Davis pepper spray incident. I had yet to see the actual video, but I had heard about it from lots of other people and had painted a picture of it in my head. And then this was posted to my Facebook newsfeed...
If you have time to watch it, it is certainly worth your time. This video gives a timeline of events through a video stream that shows the events of the Occupy Davis event from start to finish. It shows how the students not only were blocking the police from getting through but also threatening them as well. The students literally make a circle around the cops and tell them that they will only let them leave once they release the students who were previously arrested. It also captures the police explicitly asking the students ofer and over to move and telling them of the consequences if they don't. The students sort of laugh it off and don't take the police seriously. When the other cops run up and the students still won't move, they resort to pepper spray.
From this point of view, the police did everything in their power to avoid using painful tactics. They were more or less defenseless and had no other option.
This article explains the events by saying nothing about the events that occured beforehand but making it seem as if the police simply randomly started spraying a whole bunch of students with pepper spray. One girl even says, "I think UCD just got radicalized," Carla told the World Socialist Web Site. "We're going to meet back here next week... I feel like we have to understand that this system is not set up to protect us—we have a human response to say, 'that's completely unjust'."
When the media acts the way they do, it is so hard to ever find the truth within a story. Every story has at least two sides, and the media jumps right on the most flashy, interesting, emotional side they can grasp. I simply hope that the students at UC Davis are able to watch the video above, see the events unfold, and realize that the pepper spray usage may not hae been as "completely unjust" as they originally claimed. Lots of my friends go to UC Davis, so it will be interesting over Christmas break to ask them if they watched it. (Finally, something to talk about other than Sandusky and Joe Paterno!)
I think the UC Davis case is the perfect example of how every story has multiple viewpoints and opinions. There are two distinct ways that this story has been interpreted. That the students were abused by police on one side, and that the police were forced to use pepper spray due to the uncooperative students.
ReplyDeleteIn the study of Rhetoric, there is a concept known as the stasis questions. This is the idea that there are five questions that one can ask about any issue. Briefly, they are questions of fact, definition, cause, value and action. There can't be productive discussion unless all parties are operating at the same level. Unfortunately, there are several disagreements that agree at various levels regarding the UC Davis situation.
The first conflict is one of definition. Some view the use of pepper spray in any situation as an abuse, no matter what the cause. These people would consider the events that transpired police abuse no matter what the other facts of the situation were.
Even more so, there is the value issue of whether or not the police had the right to expel the students in the first place. Many of those who defend the police in this situation are operating under the assumption that the police had every right to expel the students. From the students point of view however, they were peacefully protesting, when the police came to unjustly expect them. If one views the situation this way, the students are victims as the police are doing something they are not authorized to do.
I don't have an answer, but I think the question that needs to be looked at is whether or not the occupy protesters around the nation have the right to occupy the places they are occupying and is this a local, state or federal issue? Until everyone is trying to answer the same question, no productive analysis can be made.