Yes, more on the “let’s use pepper spray on these kids sitting on the ground where we don’t want them to” story from UC Davis.

First thing that struck me just yesterday: these were apparently UC Davis police. Whut? O_õ Since when do universities have their own police?

And since when did they get paramilitary riot gear like that we have seen in all the footage and photographs?

Messed up.

Second thing was to read (in a number of places, but here it is quoted on the Daily Kos) that what was done is seen as “fairly standard police procedure”.

However, a law enforcement official who watched the clip called the use of force “fairly standard police procedure.”
…

Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.

“When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them,” Kelly said. “Bodies don’t have handles on them.”

After reviewing the video, Kelly said he observed at least two cases of “active resistance” from protesters. In one instance, a woman pulls her arm back from an officer. In the second instance, a protester curls into a ball. Each of those actions could have warranted more force, including baton strikes and pressure-point techniques.

“What I’m looking at is fairly standard police procedure,” Kelly said.

Further, we read why the pepper spray was in fact necessary:

UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza said the decision to use pepper spray was made at the scene.
“The students had encircled the officers,” she said Saturday. “They needed to exit. They were looking to leave but were unable to get out.”

So, let me see if I have this correct… The police, wearing full riot gear and carrying guns (rubber bullets one presumes) were being cruelly threatened by these students who were menacingly sitting on the ground with their arms linked. Rather than push past them or pick them up and move them out of the way, which might have hurt them, the police – wanting to avoid causing any hurt – decided their best option was to Spray. Fucking. Pepper. Spray. Down. Their. Fucking. Throats.

Y’know, because if they’d lifted them out of the way they might have hurt them.

Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

Just as well nobody lifted him off the ground and moved him.

And as for the notion of “active resistance”, two things:

First: pulling away one’s arm? Curling into a ball? These are instances of “active resistance”? – Which is such a bad thing that it warrants being sprayed in the face with military-grade (reportedly) pepper spray?

Second: so the frak what? So we the people should not resist? Ever? If someone in a uniform tells us to do something it should be an automatic “yes sir no sir three bags frakking full sir”? Screw what you believe in. Screw what is right. If those in power tell you what to do you do it.

Or you get pepper-sprayed in the face.

An excellent article in Salon looks at the roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying. One of the points Glenn Greenwald makes in that article is that:

“If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist.”

It becomes meaningless to guarantee rights to assemble, and to voice dissent, when to do so means suffering this sort of violent abuse.

So I say: Disobey. Resist. Do not comply.

Sure, don’t go out of your way to do meaningless acts of vandalism or violence or antisocial wossname, but do not kow-tow to those in power. The power structures that feed them were created for a reason, and that reason is was to serve the people. There has been such a perversion of these institutions that clearly, they do not any longer serve that purpose.

If what you are doing is right, keep doing it. Do not comply if told to stop. Resist (peacefully) if your compliance is being forced.

Do not obey.