The Glade 4.0

There's no presentation of force or commission of trespass in their behavior; but, as I said, that matters not one whit. The First Amendment is fundamentally empty at this point.

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The protestors that had the tents erected were engaged in trespass, or some other similar violation by doing so on University property in violation of the law. They were the ones arrested.

The ones actually engaged in, you know, protesting, as opposed to having a camp-out, the police expressed no intention of arresting. There is, however, a presentation of force in their behavior. They surround the police and prevent them from leaving with the arrestees.

Surrounding a person, or preventing them from proceeding on their way, is a use of force. The protestors had absolutely no right whatsoever to prevent the police from arresting those refusing to remove the tents. Their surrounding of the police is a highly aggressive action in and of itself. It is fortunate that they did not actually engage in anything like rock-throwing or something like that; it is obvious from the video they're mostly a bunch of nincompoops interested in taking video to edit for YouTube, giggling, and laughing, and generally pretending as if the police are actually doing anything to them. The police expressed no intention whatsoever of dispersing the protest or doing anything to the people that were just protesting until they were surrounded, and then they spent considerable time just standing there in a cordon while one officer, presumably a sergeant or something, talked to individual protestors and tried to get them to move so the police could leave.

Then, after they get sprayed, the protestors admit they aren't being peaceful; they tell the police "we'll give you a moment of peace" to leave.

Preventing anyone from going about their business is a serious crime in and of itself. Just because you're doing it while giggling, laughing, chanting, and linking arms means nothing. In this case, the police were going about their business of arresting someone, and if they shouldn't have arrested those people, that's what we have courts for. We do not allow emotion-driven mobs to decide who is and is not to be arrested in this country.

It has nothing to do with the First Amendment either. The first Amendment is just fine. All that's happened is that we as a society do not allow people to simply take over any property they want for any purpose they want simply because they aren't throwing firebombs.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The same. Don't use your liberty as a "Cloak of maliciousness" to block access and take away the rights of others. The protests in questions have damaged property prevented access to private and collective property. In short they have damaged the rights of others to have their own. I dont think that's right. In my opinion the basic role of government is to intervene when your rights infringe mine, giving both of us as much of our rights as we can without stepping on each other's toes.

The officers in question started with verbal requests, a warning, then force.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

It seems to me that you think any non-conciliatory action toward police officers presents a threat. We're not talking about the tents; we're talking about the protesters in the video, who present no threat of force or violence to anyone.

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I can't watch the video at the moment, but:


If this is the case, then I'm going to have to agree that the police were justified in using force, regardless of why the police were there in the first place. I might be more inclined to agree with Khross had the protestors been surrounding the tents and refusing to allow the police to remove them. However, at the point that you surround anyone -- police or not -- and refuse to give them any egress, that qualifies as trespass if not necessarily in the property sense, at least as to:
(emphasis mine)
Arguably, it qualifies as force too.

Personally, the "you're blocking traffic" argument against protests doesn't hold much weight with me. It presupposes that the use of the public land for transportation and access is necessarily more important to society than its use for demonstration. But even so, you can't hold people captive and you can't completely cut off public access to property. I.e., I'd be okay with blocking a road, so long as there's a detour around it. But if you block off all the roads leading to a piece of property, then you aren't peaceably assembling anymore even if you are peacefully assembled.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

It's a little more complex than that ...

People commit trespasses against each other all the time, both directly and indirectly, without ever knowing it. "Actionable wrong" is a terribly vague marker. More to the point, no one was prevented from accessing the property or traversing the property. Police officers were prevented from exerting force on the protesters until they responded with an escalation of force.

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If the police had kicked in the door of a suspected murder and were taking him out of the house when a group of neighbors came and blocked them from removing the murder suspect would we still be having this asinine discussion?

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That's not a protest in a pseudo-public space, so it's not comparable in any way.

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Of course Hop. What board are you reading? If a Leo sneezes in the wrong direction and there is an Internet article about it, we have a thread about it

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Oh, and egress through the building is never obstructed. Funny that ...

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Did you watch a different video than I did? Protesters were blocking a thoroughfare. While I'd be totally for a jacked-up 4X4 plowing the field with the idiots, I would be happiest if they were simply removed from the road... which, given what I saw in the video, is what happened.

And, given what I saw, the intention was to block traffic, so your excuse for their behavior fails in view of their obvious objectives.

Hell, the whole objective of the movement is to "occupy". Look that up in your dictionary and tell me if 2 physical bodies can co-exist within the same space. They want to be in the way, it's their goal.

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In time, this too shall pass.

If the protesters completely surrounded the police then they were, in fact, prevented from traversing the property (or anything else, for that matter). Again, I can't watch the video right now, but this is what I'm being told.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

This is what people are wanting to see ...

They keep ignoring that passage to what appears to be the Dining Hall is unobstructed the entire time; the Police Officers could have gone back the other way. And, the first actionable act of force was committed by a police officer at 2:48, where he pushes a girl and instructs her to stop filming.

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Occupy also means to possess or gain sexual experience with a particular sexual partner.

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Where do I sign up for that one?

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Yeah, I never get the good causes either.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Okay, here's what's going on.

Law enforcement officers arrive at the scene. There are two conflicting laws to be enforced here. One is the law stating that those protesters have a guaranteed right to assemble and protest. The second is whatever law the state or local government invoked to squelch the protest.

The police officers made a choice to ignore the highest law of the land which explicitly allowed the protesters to be there, and instead enforce the lesser of the two laws. The First Amendment is a law. Law enforcement agents chose not to enforce it. Furthermore, the police officers could have left. They could have left long before they were surrounded by protesters. They chose not to, because they wanted to be seen as Billy Badass. They were afraid that if they left it would look like they were running away. All of those police officers are cowards who placed following orders above their duties as law enforcement agents.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Well, that's the curious thing ...

UCSD involved the SDPD instead of campus police ...

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Maybe; maybe not. I would argue that anything beyond the minimum force necessary to achieve compliance (i.e. a simple hands-on arrest in the case of passively resisting protestors like these) is punitive in nature. That aside, it seems like your and Mus's evaluation of the police response here is based, in part, on a sense that the protestors had it coming:





In any event, my view is simply this: if protestors are breaking the law and refuse a valid order to disperse, the cops may legitimately arrest them, but the cops may only use the minimum amount of force required to effect the arrest, which, in the absence of a threat to safety of the officer or the public, does not include the use of pepper spray, tasers, etc.

That's what I din't get, what happened to picking them up and carrying them to the "paddy wagon"? Now it seems as if they use pain compliance techniques as their go to methods instead of picking them up and carrying them away.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

See, I was right there with you on this. Pepper spray is not a compliance tool. It's a reduce-a-threat tool.

Now that I see the full video, I have flipped 180 degrees. Initially, I thought "move them, or arrest them". Now, I see that they were completely surrounded, terribly outnumbered, and being held captive (hostile action). Attempting to arrest or physically involve themselves with the protestors to move them would have put them at a greater disadvantage, and started a physical pushing/shoving match with forces that overwhelmingly outnumbered them.

While watching that I tried to put myself in the officers shoes. It was a potentially dangerous situation for everyone. I would have come to the decision that pushing them out of the way or arresting more would have escalated the situation rather than calmed it. I would have used the pepper spray.

As it is, no one was hurt, the officers completed their task, and all is well. It was the right call. If they started shoving protesters out of the way, and the crowd moved in, a lot of people could have been seriously hurt.

There's no evidence of this in the video anywhere. You just think it happens because biased edited video by guy with an agenda is biased. I think the Occupy whatever protests are stupid; I think these students say stupid things. They don't and didn't, however, do the things you suggest.

And, again, none of you want to address the fact that the State Police department on hand (UCSD Campus Police) did not involve themselves in this action. Seriously, when the state cops defer to local police for an on-campus issue, it means they're fishing for a local ordinance the students may be breaking.

Stupid cops did stupid things to stupid people.

For all of you who think stupid should hurt, well stupid needs to hurt stupid cops, too.

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Oh, ****, you were there??

If not, then you don't know that. What I have is clearly the intent of the protestors to block the police officer's retreat. Did they do this? The officers seem to think so. And those that were maced clearly intended to do so.

Officers +1

No, but since I happen to personally 4 professors at UCSD who were there ...

I'll take those professors' word over that videos and the cops.

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Perhaps, but I'd counter with four points: (i) pepper spraying the seated protestors was at least as likely to escalate the situation; (ii) the cops' body language doesn't suggest they felt they were in immediate/serious danger; (iii) the cops seemed to have plenty of time to just stand there and wait for additional back up (in fact, the cop who used the pepper spray was part of a backup team, outside the circle, that arrived to help);and (iv) the unseated students calmly moved out of the way for the backup team when it arrived, further illustrating the lack of immediate threat.

Plus - and I can't stress this enough - we're talking about dozens of cops with riot helmets, batons, pepper spray, tasers and guns facing off against a bunch of college students sitting/standing there chanting slogans. If that's too frightening and unmanageable a situation for these guys to handle without reaching for the pepper spray, then they really aren't the kind of people I want wearing a badge.