We’ve been busy covering election issues and other pressing matters, but the fully weaponized police military state that the U.S. has become post-9/11 — as we reported in great detail late last year — continues apace.
Last night, another horrifying example occurred out here near Los Angeles at Santa Monica College were campus security guards reportedly pepper sprayed some 30 students, without warning, in the hallway just outside of an open Board of Trustees meeting. Several hundred had shown up to try and voice their opinions during (ironically enough) the Public Comment period about the cost of some classes being raised by as much as 400% percent.
We’ve yet to see video of the actual use of the chemicals said to have been used, but this was the scene just after it…
While I don’t believe it’s yet been confirmed, there were several reports of either a 4 or 5-year old being among those doused with pepper spray, even while there were no arrests made.
In other words, the use of chemical weapons on peaceful demonstrators (and, perhaps, infants) now appears to be among the first, rather than a last resorts used in the disturbing rise of “police” violence against peaceful citizens expressing their First Amendment rights.
Via Xeni Jardin’s report at BoingBoing, we’re pointed to the following disturbing observation from blogger zunguzungu — a student at UC Berkley, where cops resorted to the violent use of batons to break up peaceful student demonstrators last November (video here) — on the troubling implications of what happened last night in Santa Monica and at several other recent attempts at peaceful demonstration…
Or, rather, it was. A crowd must be dispersed before it does something, goes the logic of the new preemptive policing; a crowd is, itself, a clear and present danger. If you wait until the crowd actually does something, you’ve waited too long. And so you preempt it by striking first.
If you doubt that this is the way these people think, I’d invite you to read Jeff Young — the current assistant police chief at UCLA — writing his “operational review†of UC Berkeley’s police actions against protesters from last November 9th, and note that his main takeaway was that campus police should have probably been allowed to use pepper spray. For more successful protest management, he decides, what the police need is more force options. Perhaps Tasers?
That’s not a joke. He actually observes that while Tasers are “a fairly new crowd management tactic for police,†they “have proven to be very effective,†and notes that a “special panel of the Chancellor of UCLA rigorously reviewed the use of these devices [and] found the use of this level of force within applicable law and police policy.â€
Again, this wasn’t even an official metropolitan police force using pepper spray in Santa Monica. It was the campus security guards. Nonetheless, the Santa Monica Police were called out, in force, shortly thereafter.
Santa Monica College is not the only one facing extraordinary increases in student tuition. A report last month detailed that it may now cost more to attend the University of California and California State University systems than it costs to go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale.
A report published yesterday by Demos details how, from 1990 to 2010, state funding for higher education, per full-time student, has plunged 26%.
“As state support has declined,” the report explains, “institutions have balanced the funding equation by charging students more. Between 1990-1991 and 2009-2010, published prices for tuition and fees at public four-year universities more than doubled, rising by 116 percent, after adjusting for inflation, while the real price of two-year colleges climbed by 71 percent.”
All the while, as tuition costs for educating our citizens have increased across the nation, we’ve fought two incredibly long and unnecessary wars, have been forced to lay off nurses, police and firefighters, cut public services to the most needy and, at the same time, give huge tax cuts to the rich who don’t need it, billions in free money to the Wall Street firms who tanked the world economy, all the while as U.S. corporations continue to turn all-time record profits.
Jardin’s BoingBoing report included a tweet from @mary_menville on the incident last night which seems to have captured the American disease well…
This is an outrage, but one of many. I think it’s pretty clear we can no longer trust the police anywhere in the country. They no longer protect the people. They are instead there to “control” them.
The SCOTUS and the POTUS also back these brutal tactics as evidenced by laws like the aggressive strip search law which was supported and upheld by them recently. This law is obviously designed to make people afraid to go anywhere as a group to protest.
We have come to this, and under a Democratic president and a Democratic California Governor to boot. What could possibly be next?
4earth writes:
Chris Hedges appears to have anticipated your question.
Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You.
How about assault and battery charges brought against these so-called security guards?
The gulagosphere, aka gummit, is going to destroy us, a once beautiful nation.
This is completely consistent with our foreign policy. Apparently it’s the way we roll now. Whether we’re dealing with Iran or Santa Monica College students.
Maybe, they’re right. After all, who wants to see Santa Monica College students with nuclear weapons? And you know that’d be the next step. First it’s letting them into public meetings, which might sound reasonable. But then, what if next thing you know they’re holding the Chancellor hostage and tied to a centrifuge making weapons grade plutonium? I read on a BigGov site that some Santa Monica College students were working on a nuclear reactor for a science fair.(It’s hard to make up shit crazier than what we’re doing, but it’s fun to try.)
We need to make a BIG fuss about this. We’re going to have to object loudly and for a long, long time. This shit is not gonna be reversed tomorrow. It’s slid into acceptance by too many people. Just horrifying.
Then again, our overall cultural drift has been horrifying for quite some time. Things’ll get worse before they get better. If they get better…
I’m no expert on California law, but if you’re not being arrested, you do have the right to defend yourself against police assault, don’t you? Maybe protesters need to start carrying “crowd management tactic[s]” of their own.
Jon,
I agree with you in emotional principle. My first thoughts were fantasies about tasering and pepper spraying back. But as gratifying as that may be to imagine, I suspect that in reality, upping the ante by embracing the same nightmarish tactics against these goon squads will only intensify the problem. The powers that be have such a surfeit of force tools at their disposal and the fear-based mindset to feel justified in using them. And that’s with us doing NOTHING except peacefully exercising our constitutional rights. We’re exercising while they’re exorcising. (Funny how much difference a letter can make.)
So as much as I instinctively want to smash back, I think we’ll need to be more creative than that with various non-violent tactics, if we’re to have any hope of shifting culture towards the ideals we supposedly hold dear.
I just wonder how much of the “police” training has happened in our Wars. I know most of our military folks are doing a tough job, and if one has paid attention you can see the same tactics in our domestic police/para-military/corporate compliance division or whatever. I was stopped for a minor traffic thing and I was surrounded by severely armed police at the ready. My wife and 8 year old freaked out. So now we are guilty until pepper sprayed or shot.
4EARTH @1:
Under our Democratic president’s leadership we have seen:
increase in domestic oil drilling
increase in drone attacks and drone use
increase in arrests and deportations of unauthorized immigrants
increase in gestapo-like tactics by our police force
use of military drones in the USA to spy on civilians
…to name a few.
And our “Democratic” president has either remained silent or promoted these things.
The police have only protected the favored race/class/gender in all our history. It’s just that now, more and more of formerly privileged folks are finding themselves on the wrong end of the pepper spray can.
Which means, if you even speak up against the ruling [rabid right wing] class, you are now “one of them,” regardless of your former status, and thereby deserving of various illegal, unconstitutional, misery-enhancing and sometimes life-threatening tactics that in the past were only reserved for hippie and rebellious youth, Blacks, women who were not in their place, Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, etc. etc. etc.
So tired of voting for “less bad than the other option”…
Did you read this: http://gma.yahoo.com/gun-sales-booming-doomsday-obama-zombies-193929184–abc-news-money.html
The rest of my family is “Obama gon’ take ma guns”, but y’know, they’re probably right, because the police state tactics won’t face any serious countermeasures once the public is disarmed. Hard not to be sympathetic to that line of thinking these days.
Be nice if those people and these people could all figure out that we have been neatly divided and opposed by the corporate state. Anything that threatens profit margins (especially the very lucrative student loan market) must be immediately suppressed and contained.
Boycott Santa Monica College.
Have a day when *no* students show up for classes. Involve faculty.
Involve staff.
Call for the resignation of the College president.
Call for the resignation of the campus chief of security guards.
Inundate the school with calls, emails, and mail complaining.
{Ed Note: Comment removed for advocating violence. You might have been joking, but I’m removing it anyway. – BF}
Brad,
This sounds like an incredibly right wing proposal for such a progressive community. What’s really weird is a state senator, Julia Brownley, proposed essentially the same thing and only withdrew the bill after fierce opposition from teachers unions, usually her staunchest allies.
I wonder if didn’t start with someone right wing think tank and got a push from a local political sugar daddy of both the college and Brownley.
Could you look into who is pushing this? If not, maybe bring the story to the attention of someone who could.