Birgeneau Gets Served

And not just Birgeneau. A class action lawsuit has been filed in federal court against a number of UC Berkeley officials by members of the Wheeler 66, who were arrested without warning in the middle of the night during the Live Week occupation in December 2009. The Daily Cal reports:

Six individuals, including former and current UC Berkeley students, have filed a federal class action lawsuit alleging that four campus officials violated their constitutional rights by punitively arresting and jailing 66 people participating in a December 2009 demonstration.

According to the complaint — filed Oct. 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California — the plaintiffs seek damages for violations they alleged to have occurred during the “Open University” demonstration in Wheeler Hall, which occurred from Dec. 7 to Dec. 11, 2009.

The four campus officials — Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande, UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya and UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode — were served with the complaint Monday afternoon, said Kevin Brunner, an attorney with Siegel and Yee, the law firm representing the individuals filing the lawsuit.

The complaint seeks to stop the officials from continuing what it alleges is a policy of sending nonviolent detainees taken into custody during campus protests to the Alameda County Jail rather than citing and releasing them.

“The policy of jailing non-violent protestors is punitive and a violation of the protestors’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly,” the complaint states.

According to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore, the lawsuit is still being reviewed by campus counsel.

“We can’t comment on the details of the lawsuit at this time because it is still being reviewed by counsel,” she said. “Nevertheless, we are confident that the university’s actions were legally justified.”

Sacramento State Occupation Evicted

In the early hours of the morning, police from both the CSU and SFPD, dressed in full riot gear entered the administration at Sacramento State -- which was going into the fourth day of occupation by student protesters -- advanced on sleeping students in attack formation and from multiple directions, and ordered them to leave. Occupiers left voluntarily, with no arrests. Here's part of their statement of the eviction:

This morning on the fourth day, April 16 at 3:24 A.M. we were met with the administration’s opposition expressed through a riot taskforce.

Earlier that morning at approximately 12:30 A.M CSUS police entered the building for the first time accompanied with San Francisco State police. We were told that the new forces were needed, and that our own police were showing them the layout of our building. At this time we asked to be updated about the situation and we were refused that request.

Our police liaison Yeimi Lopez, again approached CSUS police with questions and she was told that they could no longer release information, and that they were following the orders given to them.

At 3:24 AM there was a police officer at the front doors unlocking the entrance, when asked what was happening and why, we were told that he could not answer that question. At the same time police were assembling in a militant formation with full riot gear, batons, and a large amount of zip ties. They were approaching sleeping students from multiple directions within the building. They threatened with force that if we did not leave we would face arrest. Our police liaison met with Lieutenant Christine Lofthouse that if we did not leave the peaceful demonstration that we would face arrest.

This is to be expected. In the end, these administrations don't care whether student action, especially direct action like occupation, is "peaceful" -- in any form it constitutes a threat to their ability to impose whatever measures they deem appropriate. At UC Berkeley, for example, we experienced something similar in December 2009 during Live Week, when riot police descended at 3 am on sleeping students and arrested 66 of them. We scare them. As our compañeros at Anti-Capital Projects wrote,

From this perspective, the bottom line is: fuck yeah Sac State! Solidarity with occupiers everywhere!

* OCCUPY * DISRUPT * RECLAIM * FIGHT BACK *

Against the Day

The new issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly includes a section called "Against the Day," in which a number of UC students reflect on the struggle over public education in California. Most of the essays focus in some way or another on the protests that took place in and around the UC during 2009-2010. From the introduction, by Christopher Newfield and Colleen Lye:

The essays collected here are all written by University of California students who were active in the California student movements of 2009–2010. These movements were the largest and most widespread campus-based actions in the United States since the 1960s. They were also remarkable for their intellectual diversity, their successful efforts to link generally disconnected issues, their systematic attempts to rethink student movement strategies, their reflections on their own internal divisions, and their escalating confrontations with local administrations and the police.

The movements became visible to the public in November 2009, when the UC Board of Regents voted for a 32 percent tuition increase -- on top of the doubling of tuition that it had already implemented over the course of the decade. But many of the group participants had been operating for years, and the conditions that reached a crisis in 2009 had been reshaping UC and its companion system, the California State University, for two decades.

Links to free downloads of the essays (via) are below the fold.

US and Europe / Strategic and Tactical Differences

The recent wave of occupations and massive protests in the UK are incredibly inspiring for those of us in California who have been fighting the privatization of public education. There are some clear parallels, not only in terms of the economic and discursive forms the austerity measures take but also in the tactics being adopted and developed to challenge and combat them. But there are also significant differences.

In an essay published a couple weeks ago, Michael Hardt analyzed some of these differences. "Whereas in Britain, Italy, and other European countries students battle police in the streets and experiment with new means to protest such government actions," he writes, "there is a relative calm on U.S. campuses." What explains this calm? One relevant factor, he suggests, is that the movement toward privatization in the US has been much more gradual than in the UK. The broadest, biggest, and most intense protests in California took place in November 2009 when the UC Regents were voting to approve a 32 percent tuition hike; in the UK, parliament just voted in a 300 percent increase, and slashed the overall budget for higher education by some 80 percent. A second factor is the difficulty of national coordination, since the education policies vary from state to state.

But Hardt is most interested in the big picture, the roots of difference: "The most significant reason for less student activism in the United States, however, may derive from a much deeper national condition. The social value placed on education for all, especially higher education, has declined dramatically." Education is no longer a central mission of the US government as it was in the post-Sputnik era, and what Hardt (and Negri) identify as the shift toward "biopolitical production" has made the focus on hard sciences and engineering that dominated the industrial model less and less important:

University policies throughout the world have not kept pace with these changes. The private money that universities solicit to compensate for the decline in public funding is dedicated overwhelmingly to technical and scientific fields. The human sciences, which are increasingly relevant in the biopolitical economy, are deprived of funds and wither. In this case the student demands actually point in the direction of economic prosperity. The current student protests thus reconfirm a general rule of politics, that social struggles proceed and prefigure social development.

Hardt raises a number of questions that are clearly important for us to consider. In some ways, however, his broad vision obscures some of what I think are the most interesting differences at the micro-tactical level. Here I want to really briefly lay out two that I've been thinking about recently.



First, cops with guns. In this video from last week's protests in London, cops struggle to hold their own line as the "book bloc" of protesters attempts to push through using reinforced banners and shields in order to break out of the "kettle" where they're being kept against their will. In contrast, at the UC Regents' meeting at UCSF Mission Bay in November, the police used chemical weapons (pepper spray) and even drew guns to shut down protesters. What would demos look like here if the cops couldn't rely on such overwhelming firepower? How would we confront them?



Second, private property law. Dozens of universities in the UK were occupied in November, and many of these occupations are still ongoing. University College London, for example, has been occupied for about three weeks now. It's inconceivable for an occupation to last that long in the US. Even "live week," the open occupation of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley that took place almost exactly a year ago, lasted just four or five days. Not only was there a heavy police presence the entire time, we've since learned through a public records dump that the administration was scheming to shut it down from the start. They were just waiting for an opening to send in the cops, which they eventually did, making 66 arrests. But the legal context is different in the UK. As Angus Johnston wrote last week,

Some two hundred students at University College London have been occupying the Wilkins Building on campus for the last two weeks in protest against planned funding cuts and fee hikes at Britain’s universities. On Thursday the university demanded that they leave.

In the US, the university’s next step would have been obvious — call in the cops. In California, student occupations are becoming a regular occurrence, and police evictions accompanied by mass arrests are almost inevitable.

But this isn’t the US.

In the UK, you can’t evict students who are peacefully occupying a campus building without a court order, and the university has in this case so far failed to get one.

In comparison to the broad strokes of Hardt's brush, these examples may seem less significant. Obviously there are other critical differences -- for example, the strike culture that makes it possible to paralyze campuses in Puerto Rico, for example -- but the ones presented above are useful for thinking about horizons of possibility. Maybe what's at stake is the distinction between strategy and tactics. But sometimes this distinction gets blurry -- the normalization of cops with guns and the fetishization of private property shape the kinds of tactics we deploy and the kinds of violence we face in response. To some extent, they produce the field on which political action occurs. Actions or campaigns to push cops off campus or to disarm UCPD, for example, could significantly shift this ground and immediately add to the repertoire of tactics at our disposal. They won't turn California into London or Rome, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

Lawsuit vs. UCPD

Before dawn on December 11, 2009, UCPD illegally arrested 66 protesters and sympathizers who had been participating in the week-long open "occupation" of Wheeler Hall. While university spokespeople feigned concern over a concert planned for that night, internal administration emails reveal that in reality they had planned to shut down the action from the beginning, and were simply looking for the opportunity to strike. But the concert was held anyway at an off-campus location, and from there a group of protesters marched to the Chancellor's house to demonstrate. Some minor property damage occurred, the police arrived quickly, and the protesters scattered. Eight were arrested.

Two of those arrested were UC Berkeley students, who suffered abusive and unconstitutional punishment at the hands of the Office of Student Conduct (OSC) and the UC administration more generally. OSC and the Code of Student Conduct together constitute one arm of the university's repressive apparatus, but it can only be deployed against students -- not their sympathizers.

The other arm is UCPD. Also arrested that night was Indybay reporter David Morse, who had been taking pictures of the demonstration. After arresting Morse, the cops illegally tried to use his photos in order to gather evidence against the protesters. Morse had the search warrant they used to justify stealing the photos quashed, and they had to be returned. Now, a year later, he's posted some of the photos on Indybay (including the ones used here).

Furthermore, Morse has filed a lawsuit against UCPD for the illegal arrest. From the press release announcing the suit:

Oakland — On Thursday, December 9, veteran journalist David Morse filed suit against University of California, Berkeley Police officers and other defendants in U.S. District Court for violations of the First, Fourth and Eighth Amendments and for violations of a federal law barring the use of search warrants for unpublished journalistic materials. The lawsuit follows Morse’s successful motion to quash a search warrant that issued for his unpublished news photographs.

Morse is a 42-year-old journalist who has covered hundreds of demonstrations and other events since 2002. He was arrested without probable cause at a protest he was covering at UC Berkeley on December 11, 2009. The arrest occurred after officers allowed a rowdy group of demonstrators, many of whom were wearing masks, to flee. Instead of giving chase, Morse’s arresting officer pulled his car up to Morse and said, “I saw you take a picture of us. We want your camera.” Officers arrested Morse despite the fact that he informed them of his journalist status six times and denied all wrongdoing.

Officers jailed Morse, then increased the charges against him in order to buy themselves time to prepare a misleading search warrant affidavit that omitted any mention of Morse’s newsgathering activities. First Amendment Project successfully quashed that search warrant in June on the basis that it violated Section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code, which absolutely bars search warrants for unpublished journalistic materials. Federal law also bars such warrants.

Although Morse’s charges were dropped at his first court appearance, the defendants refused to return his images for more than six months and even made surveillance photographs of him when he attempted to retrieve them in person.

The federal suit filed today seeks damages against the various defendants, as well as a judicial order mandating additional training. High-ranking UCPD officers are separately being sued under similar causes of action by the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation for searching a newspaper office in 2008, litigation that was ongoing at the time of Morse’s arrest. Nonetheless, UCPD Captain Margo Bennett has been quoted as stating that UCPD has not considered changing the way it deals with journalists.

UCPD must pay for its authoritarian actions. In our efforts to get COPS OFF CAMPUS, anything that puts pressure on the police is helpful. More coverage of the lawsuit here.

Corpses in the Mouth

from occupyca:

BERKELEY, California – A California Public Records Request has revealed a 300+ page pdf of email correspondence between UC Berkeley deans, chancellors, public relations officers, cops on how to stop the building occupations in Fall 2009.

Read up here.

Choice quotes below the fold. Feel free to add your own findings in the comments.

New Radio Documentary on Liveweek & "Terrorism"

(via Indybay)

UCB Fucking Lies

The official SAO report is out and is circulating by email. It's been posted here. It's damning:

The Student Advocate’s Office (SAO), a non-partisan and executive office of the ASUC, is deeply concerned with the circumstances surrounding the university arrests of 66 individuals, including approximately 40 students, from Wheeler Hall on December 11, 2009. While we do not condone conduct that threatens the safety of the campus community and recognize that the planned unauthorized concert lacked the necessary safety precautions, we believe the administration did not adhere to procedures that were in the best interest of students. The following is a statement that addresses our concerns:

Following the arrests of students involved in the week-long “Open University” protests, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof stated in a university press release that “there had been an understanding of access to certain areas and [the protestors] began to violate those understandings.” He continued by stating that the arrests were made “once the group refused to reconsider plans to hold an unauthorized all-night concert in an academic building.” However, when members of the SAO met with Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard out of concern for the arrested students, he provided reasons for the arrest that were not in line with the university’s public statements. Dean Poullard acknowledged that the university’s call for police intervention was not initially linked to the concert, but rather had been discussed earlier that week before the concert was publicized. His statements indicated that the arrests would have been made earlier in the week, but the university feared that the students would reoccupy campus buildings upon their release. This risk meant that arrests at the beginning of the occupation would be more costly to the university. Considering that the arrests were discussed prior to administrative knowledge of the concert, the SAO believes that the actions taken by the university were disingenuous. We believe the campus should be made aware of this discrepancy.

The prior discussion of the arrests calls into question the validity of the administration’s attempts to communicate with student organizers

Throughout the duration of the “Open University” protests, there was an understanding between the administration and the protestors that they would be allowed to stay inside Wheeler until Friday evening. At the same time, university officials were engaged in dialogue to plan the arrests of the protestors. The intentions of the administration must be called into question. The efforts to negotiate with the protestors were conducted in bad faith, leading students to believe that there was room for collaboration and communication when the administration had intended to move forward with police action all along.

The lack of an immediate dispersal warning was unfair and could have seriously jeopardized particularly vulnerable groups of students

The university had warned individuals in Wheeler Hall of legal and student code of conduct violations for four nights without taking any measures to enforce those warnings until the arrests that Friday. The routine nature of those warnings gave many students the false impression that their actions were an acceptable form of protest that was tolerated by the administration. This tacit agreement led many students to participate in the events who would otherwise have avoided Wheeler Hall had they anticipated the risk of severe punishment. The routine warning was administered at roughly 10 p.m. Thursday with a 6-7 hour gap before the arrests were made at 4:30 A.M. the following morning.

This large span of time between the last warning and the arrests ignores the possibility that some of the students present at 4:30 A.M. had not heard the warning. While the university states that its primary concern was preventing any disruption that could have been caused by the concert, it is unreasonable to assume that students present in Wheeler Hall at 4:30 A.M. would be the same attendees at the concert that was scheduled for 8 P.M. or involved in its planning. A significant number of students came to Wheeler Hall primarily to study, and most were asleep at the time of the arrests. The drastic shift from treating students as peaceful protestors for four days to hostile occupiers on the fifth was unnecessary and shows a disregard for student well-being. Beyond creating a criminal record for these students, the administration’s actions will also result in university conduct records that will have negative implications on the students’ academic careers.

Further, by not giving an immediate dispersal warning, the university failed to assess the danger that their actions posed to any AB540 or international students on site. Legal charges against any student under either category could have put the students at risk of deportation. Administrators did not take into account these potentially severe consequences.

The response to the “Open University” protests demonstrates the administration’s adversarial attitude towards student protestors

The discrepancy between university press releases and actual administrative plans to end the protest shows the administration’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for its actions. The failure to correct inaccurate information released to the public has misrepresented the indicted students’ behavior. It avoids any formal recognition that arrests were discussed earlier that week, and reveals a lack of sincere communication between student protestors and the administration leading up to the arrests. The SAO believes that in future instances of student activism, the university should not prioritize its reputation and financial concerns over the well-being of students. We hope that in the future the university will take measures to distinguish between those who pose a legitimate threat to campus safety and students who wish to engage in peaceful protest.

Update: Further analysis here:

The university’s stated justification for retaking Wheeler Hall — its need to to pre-empt a potentially disruptive concert that night and to ensure the building’s accessibility for finals twenty-eight hours later — explains none of the above decisions. But the reason the SAO offers — a desire to prevent students from mobilizing in the aftermath of the Wheeler Hall shutdown — explains them all. Indeed, the SAO’s charges lend new weight to a concern expressed by the ACLU of Northern California on the day of the arrests — that the mass arrests, and the decision to transport the arrestees to jail, may have been intended “to chill or prevent constitutionally protected expressive activities or to retaliate against demonstrators for their speech.”

What Yaman Said

Don't give Birgeneau a free pass to shut down student organizing:

One need not agree with whatever happened at the Chancellor’s mansion to resist the administration’s attempt to co-opt independent student forces by soliciting their blanket condemnation of the incident.

Governor Schwarzenegger finally took notice of public education after the incident, calling individuals who were allegedly involved “terrorists.” Earlier today the Chancellor and his PR spokesperson Dan Mogulof echoed a similar approach, calling them “extremists.” Of course, we have no idea what actually happened yet, or if police provocateurs played any role, but it is clear that with this incident the administration and police hope to obtain a pretext to further suppress student organizing efforts. Students should not give it to them -- even if they disagree with what their peers are accused of doing.

Problems began last Friday morning when the Chancellor’s police raided the Open University, a beautiful show of a student-run university, at 5am, sending over 60 students to jail for the day despite agreements between administrators and Open University strikers to keep the hall open until the evening.

After the arrests, the University was quick to invoke its new doctrine of “preemptive” police raids, claiming that an advertised concert was actually an intent to violate that agreement. The University gives itself away here, though, because if protestors merely “intended” to break the agreement, then the University is admitting they had committed no such violation. Instead, the Chancellor himself was the first to violate it. Such a breach on the University’s part only re-affirms that the administration cannot be trusted in these matters, given its eagerness to shut down the student movement as a whole. Why else would it use such extreme punitive measures of raid and arrest and jail time to students in their pajamas, if not to send a deterrent message to other students?

One week ago marked the anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Today, that movement is praised on a consensus even by University officials and conservative parts of the student body. However we should not forget that when that movement was still growing, University officials took strong positions against it, engaging in smear campaigns against the strikers similar to the one we see today. One need only visit the Free Speech Cafe at Moffitt Library to confirm this by reading the headlines printed on the coffee tables. What won out in the end was not conforming to the behaviors and ideologies espoused or tolerated by administrators, but strong student resolve against the administration and even against police attempts to arrest strikers. Today the very same people maligning the student movement pretend to praise the FSM, but their position is incoherent and does not actually show any regard whatsoever to political activism.

Students today face a similar scenario. The administration wants to impose a specific topology on the student movement, pressuring all students to affirm their belonging to one area of the map and not another. The governor has adopted the Bush language of terrorism to demonize the movement that his own gutting of public education created, and the administration has invoked the Bush doctrine of pre-emption to justify police raids and mass arrests even in the absence of criminal activity or evidence thereof. Students should not allow the administration to set parameters on discourse or action. If such parameters are to exist, they should be created by students with common aims and not by the administration when it exploits events like these for its own sake.

In forging a new language of political engagement and action, students will face vigorous resistance from the powers that be. Minor events like today’s, involving few students, will be characterized by administrators and cooperating media as flash points marking the ominous direction of the student movement at large. Incidents where police deployment was so clearly inappropriate will be let aside as incidents like these are foregrounded to justify future police presence and action against protesters. Everybody will pay attention to violence against the Chancellor, even as the Chancellor orders violence against student strikers acting well within their rights.

What gives the Chancellor the pretext to shut down the student movement, though, are not the actions of a few people but the reactions of the rest of the movement. If we allow them to shift the focus to these incidents, instead of fee hikes, program cuts, police brutality, and abominable mismanagement, then they have done all they need to do to preserve their own power. Even if a wrong is ever committed, students should never give the administration or police a free hand to do with the accused as they please. After all, no rhetorical concessions are necessary on the part of student organizers and activists to keep moving forward -- and they must move forward, because -- do not forget this -- the administration is comfortable not moving at all.

"Happy Finals"

Transcript here.