2 Year Anniversary Wheeler Hall November 20 Occupation

Occupying Everything Since 2009.

UCPD Officer Brendan Tinney [Updated]

Is the asshole who, as thosewhouseit has discovered, smashed our compañera's hand so hard with his baton that he literally severed her fingers. For no reason. She was resting her hand on a metal barricade. The image above comes from this video, taken outside Wheeler Hall during the occupation (the important part starts around 1:35). It was filmed just before Tinney's attack:



What did the police review board say about this? After doing an investigation, they declared it a "reasonable" use of force. It was "proper, lawful, and appropriate under the circumstances." Here's the key paragraph from the review board's report:

The Board’s goal was to look at the actions of the officer and determine if they fit within the parameter of reasonableness. The officer clearly communicated several warnings to you with instructions for you to keep your hands off the barricades. In fact, you initially complied with those warnings and temporarily removed your hands from the barricade. It was only after your failure to heed the repeated warnings that the officer increased his level of force from a verbal admonishment to a strike against the rungs of the barricade. When you again returned your hand to the barricade, the officer applied the next level of force by striking you. The Board determined that the officer used a continuum of force that was within reason and within his authority during these circumstances. The Board’s finding of your allegation is exonerated.

Which makes sense. In the end, cops will never indict other cops, just as UC administrators will never indict other administrators -- as long as they can get away with it. Within the structures they have created to facilitate their rule (internal review boards, specially-appointed task forces, and so on), no challenge to that rule can possibly emerge. The only possible line of attack evades their attempts at capture, going outside the bureaucratic procedures laid out precisely by those responsible for the violence. That's why this lawsuit is so important.

The lawsuit names UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya and second in command Captain Margo Bennett. Why them and not Officer Tinney? Because they refused to disclose the name of the officer responsible for the brutal attack. This is to be expected. But now we've figured it out on our own.

Special bonus: Officer Brendan Tinney's LawOfficer Connect page, which seems to be something like LinkedIn for pigs:

Why does Brendan love being in Law Enforcement? "No day is the same as the day before (usually)." True! Yesterday you were being protected -- and today you've been exposed!

[Update Monday 3:17 pm]: We've just learned that Officer Brendan Tinney has a twin brother named Sean, who is also a member of UCPD. No, we're not making this up. It's possible, then, that the Tinney in the picture above is actually Sean Tinney and not Brendan. Word on the street, though, is that Brendan is more of an asshole than Sean is. (The tree-sitters referred to the Tinney brothers as "B for bad" and "S for so-so.") In any case, this development certainly gives the story an interesting twist.

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.

Another Open Letter to OSC

From the email:

Center for Student Conduct and Community Standards
2536 Channing Way, Building E
Berkeley, California 94720-2432

March 9, 2011

To Whom it May Concern:

This letter and the attached signed disposition confirm my acceptance of the informal resolution I have been offered in reference to campus actions I took part in two years ago as part of a mass, community-based protest against the financial mismanagement of this university that has detrimentally impacted its educational mission. I accept this resolution in recognition that the Center for Student Conduct and Community Standards (CSCCS), despite its stated mission to aid this community in upholding the standards outlined in its Code of Student Conduct (Code), has acted in violation of the due process rights and procedural protections afforded me by this Code. The CSCCS's arbitrary and negligent application of the Code and the actions it has taken in violation of my rights under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) preclude me from proceeding to a hearing with any expectation of a just outcome.

Of the several due process and procedural violations the CSCCS has committed since it initiated disciplinary actions against me over a year ago, the following incidents are the most recent:

1. CSCCS Student Conduct Specialist Jeff Woods refused to honor the timeline outlined in the attached Administrative Disposition which explicitly affords me three business days in which to consider, sign and return the disposition, a significant decision that impacts my academic record and student standing. Permitting me just two business days, Woods justified the shortened timeline with the justification that I had "had time to consider it" and that the offer was similar to earlier iterations. Regardless of the material content of this or any other disposition I've been offered, Woods effectively denied me the procedural protection outlined in the very document I was being asked to consider signing.
2. In September 2010, I participated in a lengthy pre-hearing conference during which the Hearing Chair, Paul Vojta, made several rulings on procedural issues that would greatly inform my preparations for my hearing, including which version of the Code would govern the hearing and the role my legal counsel would be permitted during the hearing. As the conference was not concluded before I had to leave to attend class, we adjourned with the agreement that the second half of my conference would take place at a later date. Instead, in November, the CSCCS held a second, complete conference with its new Hearing Chair, Lynn Huntsinger, during which she made several rulings that directly contradicted the rulings from my first conference, without ever having informed me that those first rulings would be subject to amendment by a second Chair. Because I had relied on the rulings made by Chair Vojta in preparing my defense, Chair Huntsinger's arbitrary amendments -- some clearly less favorable to my position than were Chair Vojta's -- were detrimental to me.

As I have waited for the timely resolution to this matter that the Code provides for but the CSCCS has not delivered, I have seen indisputable evidence -- through the incidents I've cited and numerous other lapses and inconsistencies on the part of the CSCCS -- that the CSCCS is not prepared to uphold its part of the Code regulating this campus community.

If the CSCCS's mission is indeed to serve an educational purpose in encouraging this community to "hold each other responsible for living up to the standards outlined in the Code," consider this letter aligned with this purpose in holding CSCCS responsible for failing to live up to the standards outlined in the Code.

If the CSCCS's student conduct procedures are indeed governed by the value of "Responsibility," demanding "accountab[ility] for our own behavior and acting in accordance with community standards, including intervening when there is a concern," consider this letter an intervention motivated by great concern that the CSCCS has ceased to fulfill its stated function for this campus community.

And most importantly, if the CSCCS truly claims to uphold U.C. Berkeley's "Principles of Community," wherein "we believe that active participation and leadership in addressing the most pressing issues facing our local and global communities are central to our educational mission," I urge this office to consider the hypocrisy inherent in taking disciplinary, silencing, punitive actions against students who uphold this community principle by actively participating and taking tremendous leadership roles in addressing the most pressing issues facing this campus community and the state- and nation-wide public education system.

These students are standing with their local and global community of activists in demanding greater accountability from their public institutions and their governments. This letter serves as one among many voices demanding that the CSCCS recognize its failure to uphold the educational mission and community principles it claims to value, and its attending incapacity to justly determine and regulate standards for student conduct. The greatest educational benefit to my lengthy subjection to the CSCCS's disciplinary process has been the recognition that actions to challenge its assumptions and procedures are more urgent than ever.

Sincerely,

XXX

Another Lawsuit Against UCPD (Davis)

Mrak Hall, November 2009. As occupations spread across the state, cops arrested 52 people in the administration building at UC Davis. Criminal charges -- the usual charges cops throw at people after beating them up: assaulting an officer and resisting arrest -- were only filed against one of them, Brienna Holmes. In fact, supported by a conservative DA (as we're seeing in Irvine now), Holmes was forced to go through a criminal trial, which was declared a mistrial last July and the case was finally dismissed.

Now, Holmes is suing UCPD, the Yolo County Sheriff's Department, and the DA. Pay close attention to what the pigs were posting on Facebook, and remember that cops always think that other cops "acted appropriately" -- even when they crush people's hands. As reported by the California Aggie:

[O]n Feb. 4, 2011, Holmes filed a civil lawsuit alleging unreasonable seizure, excessive force, malicious abuse of process and battery. She is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

According to the complaint, the arresting officers, Yolo County Sheriff's Deputies Ryan Mez and Gary Richter, violently slammed Holmes onto the hood of a patrol car and pinned one of her arms that had gotten tangled in the strap of her bag. The two officers repeatedly jerked and grabbed Holmes, ignoring her screams that her arm was stuck and in pain.

UC Davis Spokesmen Andy Fell said the police officers acted within their rights.

"Based upon the information available to us, we believe the officers acted appropriately and certainly have no legal vulnerability," he said in a statement.

While preparing for the civil lawsuit, Holmes and her attorney, Stewart Katz, reviewed Facebook updates by one of the arresting officers, Deputy Sheriff Mez.

In a Facebook status on Sept. 25, 2010, Mez posted, "is looking to ruin somebody's day! Anybody wanna go to jail today?"

Then a few months later in November, he posted, "I hate the people I'm with. Fucking Davis people!"

Katz said the Facebook postings might be relevant to the officer's state of mind during the arrest and whether or not he is liable for punitive damages.

"If he operated under ill will or malice, that would be a factor to be considered in terms of whether or not he should be assessed for punitive damages."

Mez was not available to comment in response to the Facebook postings.

"Proper, Lawful, and Appropriate"

It's moments like this where concepts like "reasonableness" (also, "proportionality") are rendered so obviously ideological. The language is made to appear so highly rationalized, removed, bureaucratic. The police are trained in the various "levels of force" that are to be deployed in a measured manner:

The Board’s goal was to look at the actions of the officer and determine if they fit within the parameter of reasonableness. The officer clearly communicated several warnings to you with instructions for you to keep your hands off the barricades. In fact, you initially complied with those warnings and temporarily removed your hands from the barricade. It was only after your failure to heed the repeated warnings that the officer increased his level of force from a verbal admonishment to a strike against the rungs of the barricade. When you again returned your hand to the barricade, the officer applied the next level of force by striking you. The Board determined that the officer used a continuum of force that was within reason and within his authority during these circumstances. The Board’s finding of your allegation is exonerated.

It is these "levels" that are responsible for exonerating the cop. But there's a revealing slippage here. In the moment of violence, marked by the smashing of bone against metal, "levels" are abruptly transformed into a "continuum." On the continuum of repression, what begins as dialogue, say, ends in batons, pepper spray, and pistols. Even the police's own "Sufficiency Review Board" understands that "levels" are an illusion: all there is is force.

Full story below the fold, from thosewhouseit:

One, Two, A Thousand Wheeler Halls

On the one-year anniversary of the occupation of Wheeler Hall, happy reading:
- Remember, Remember the 20th of November
- A New Metapolitefsi
- The University and the Ruins of the Present

Faculty and the UC Protests [Updated]

There's an interesting conversation developing on twitter right now around faculty participation (or lack thereof) in the protests around fee hikes and budget cuts at the UC. It started with this post by Angus Johnston, who noted parenthetically in a discussion about the protest at yesterday's regents' meeting, where a cop drew his gun on unarmed students and pepper spray was used indiscriminately, that "The faculty, meanwhile, have mostly stayed silent and disengaged." Check out @studentactivism, @javierest, @reclaimuc, @santacruztacean, @dettman for their thoughts.

Here's an email that speaks to this discussion. It's a little old, and obviously is not really generalizable, but it's nevertheless a fairly striking statement on the interest, energy, drive, and engagement of the faculty. In part, this is because of who wrote it: UC Berkeley professor Ananya Roy, the star of that (in many ways problematic) New Yorker article from last winter about the student movement in the UC. The email comes in response to discussion on the faculty listserv about whether to hold a teach-in on October 6, the day before the October 7 Day of Action. In 2009, faculty led a teach-in on September 23, the day before the massive walkout in which 5000 people participated. The teach-in in the Wheeler Hall auditorium was packed to capacity, so much so that many of those who couldn't get in held their own teach-in outside on the steps. Clearly, faculty engagement contributed to the massive turnout in September 2009. Contrast that with Professor Roy's take on the situation in October 2010:

From: Ananya Roy
To: Saveplus
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 6:30 PM
Subject: Re: Re Oct. 6th teach-in

Dear Barrie [Thorne] and friends,

Thanks for the update. I teach a large undergraduate class this semester - as I did last Fall - and the difference is palpable. Only 2-3 students out of a class of 700 have spoken to me about Oct 7 or seem actively engaged in the planning for it. Our class midterm was scheduled for Oct 7 and I moved it to Oct 5 but I did so because I wanted to have the flexibility to honor a walk-out if one takes shape rather than because of a call by students to do so. I think there is very little energy or enthusiasm among the general student body about Oct 7. It is not that these students don't care about what is happening to public education in California - they do and they are experiencing it first hand. But I am of the opinion that the activist students, even brilliant activists like Ricardo [Gomez], are engaged in conversations with themselves - within SWAT, within the General Assembly. The task of building a popular movement seems to have collapsed. And perhaps this year we (faculty) are not as willing as we were last year to serve as mediators or interlocuters. I will honor Oct 7 but I am not sure what that will mean. But I am also quite convinced that a teach-in will not draw the students who most need to be energized and that a teach-in on Oct 6 is terribly late in the game to build momentum for Oct 7.

Best,
Ananya

One way to read this would be that Roy is just being realistic -- the state of the "movement" was very different in October 2010 than in September 2009. But what's hard to reconcile is the sense that faculty are standing on the sidelines, observers of what is essentially a student movement. They are bystanders. It is the fault of the students that the movement is dead, and there's nothing faculty can do to change that. All they can do is wait for students to organize something -- but really, those students aren't even doing a decent job of it. They're talking to themselves, they're not getting anything done. They've failed. So much so that the faculty should not even put together a teach-in to mobilize for October 7.

In the end, a teach-in happened, and it was supported by SAVE and the Berkeley Faculty Association. It was much smaller than the year before, and only one professor spoke. The walkout the next day seemed large considering the level of mobilization on campus, but it too was still far smaller than the previous year's. Anyway, the point is not that there's some causal relationship between Roy's email and the smaller numbers on October 7. Rather, it provides a sort of snapshot of a faculty view of these protests -- student protests -- about their horizon of possibility, and about the ways in which faculty can (and cannot) participate.

[Update Thursday 12:04pm]: @javierest tweets, "worth noting:faculty leaders. TJ Clark: retired. gone to london.Nelson Maldonado:on leave.recruited away? wendy brown and judith butler: also on extended leave. pos leaving. who's left?"

In fact, from the Wheeler occupation on, almost all of these professors have had a highly ambivalent relationship with student protests. I'm going to copy some of the things that they've written here below the fold, so you can get an idea of where they stand. Of course, they've also said and done other stuff, so what follows shouldn't be taken as an across the board rejection of faculty support (although often the faculty seems to be condemning student action).

Contextualizing the UC Conduct Hearings

From occupyca:

BERKELEY, California -- Last Fall saw a 32 percent tuition increase in the UC system, but perhaps equally memorable was the array of occupations throughout the UC and CSU systems. At Cal, dozens of occupiers, now better known as the Wheeler 43, took over Wheeler Hall on November 20, 2009. Only now, nearly a year later have we seen any judicial proceedings on the matter -- albeit, proceedings in a kangaroo court. Laura Zelko opted and fought to hold her hearing open to the public; even after 12 hours at the initial meeting that continued past midnight, the hearing panelists were unable to decide the verdict. This case will continue today at 5:30pm. (SF Chronicle published a story on Ms. Zelko’s case.)

According to ReclaimUC, the possibility of a lawsuit potentially being brought against the UC Berkeley Office of Student Conduct is unnerving the administration a little. Additionally, Cal is now paying tens of thousands of dollars on merely technical and staffing aspects of the hearings, let alone legal costs potentially yet unreported. So far, the sanctions against student protesters include such things as 7-month suspensions and reflective essays that serve more to “re-educate” protesters on the the proper protocols of innocuous political demonstrations than actually provide insightful ruminations. Seemingly, the high cost of punishing demonstrators is well worth it for the UC administration as long as it’s able to push its political will onto campus. With the coming 8% tuition increase and a slew of mini-crises hitting the UC -- including the troubling police and judicial repression of protest to the pension fight of low-paid workers to the contract struggle for teaching assistants -- it’s a wonder the university isn’t splitting at the seams.

Update [Wed 11/10, 12:25 am]: @reclaimuc live-tweeted the hearing. OSC recommended a sanction of a 1-year suspension. The panel's final recommendation, however, was:

Now the only question is whether the UC administration will once again arbitrarily impose a harsher sanction, as they did in the previous hearing.

The Only Violence Is Violence Against the State

Birgeneau and Breslauer on last year's campus protests:

[Senior Editorial Board of the Daily Cal]: Continuing on the idea of unrest and going back to protests, there was a lot of mistrust between students and administration and campus officials after last year's various protests. Part of that was objection to the way police forces acted during the Wheeler Hall protest. Now that the Police Review Board has released its report and knowing that there is a protest scheduled for Oct. 7, what is the course of action for campus officials now, on that date, and in preparing for that date?

Birgeneau: George, you can talk about this, in part. So we learned ourselves from the Wheeler Hall protest, and students will have noted that there was nothing comparable that happened in any of the protests after that, and that there was essentially no violence after that. Good example of that was the hunger strike which occurred at the end of the semester, which I think in the end was handled probably as well as it could have been. We have a crisis management team and we also have a committee, by the way, that's looking at the recommendations of the Brazil report, again, to help us in terms of how we implement those recommendations. I would say, sort of my point of view, probably the biggest failure on the Wheeler Hall thing was communicating with the people outside of Wheeler Hall adequately and making sure that people understood what was happening. And of course, things were not helped by the fact that the first serious injury was to a policeman who was out of work for two and half months. So that set a tone for violence, which was really unfortunate. George, want to add to that?

Breslauer: I would just add to that, that occupation of buildings is not something that we can take lightly or tolerate. And if that is the form that protest takes, we may have no choice but to - and if it is intransigent - use police force in as discreet a manner as possible, as nonviolent a manner as possible, to end the occupation of buildings. On Nov. 20 last year, we were, throughout that day, sort of haunted by the fact that there were 3,800 students, in a week close to final examinations, that weren't allowed to take their classes in Wheeler Hall that day because of that occupation. And to whom do we owe the greater responsibility? And this is something we're...

Birgeneau: The Code of Student Conduct is absolutely clear. Especially in an era of high fees, the university's ultimate responsibility is to allow students to take the classes that they've paid for. That's unambiguous in the Code of Student Conduct and that's the responsibility of the faculty and of the administration to ensure that students are able to attend their classes. And, again, we hear a certain amount of noise from people who are unhappy about certain aspects of how things were handled, but we got huge numbers of e-mails from students who were very unhappy about their inability to attend class or having their classes disrupted. Students come here because they want to be educated. It's our obligation to ensure that students can obtain the education that they've paid for.

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.

Direct Action Works: UC Davis Edition

Mrak Hall sit-in forces administration to sign onto demands. More updates here.

Occupy Everything!

Remembering and reinscribing the violence of this police response into our collective memory of the occupation is of more than historical interest, however, and consists of more than merely remembering the pain inflicted upon our comrades, however necessary this may be. It is in this violent police response that a strategically correct interpretation of events lies, and this fact makes efforts to conceal the conflict of the day more than merely an effort to prevent further violence. The police response showed precisely what was at stake in the occupation, and what remains at stake in the movement more generally. The police response showed exactly how far the UC Regents, President Yudof, and the local administrations are willing to go in order to drive the privatization of public education down our unwilling throats. It showed us, in short, that we were doing something right, and we can expect more of the same if we ever hope to win.

And that’s not all: the final police and administration response -- that of opting to let the occupiers walk out of Wheeler of their own accord--tells even more of the story. It tells us just how powerful our collective presence was on that day. There can be no doubt that every single occupier would have been arrested, likely beaten and abused to some degree, and hit with the trumped-up felony charges, had the crowd not been assembled outside. And this was not merely because the crowd was bearing witness to injustice or expressing its verbal non-consent.

It was not moderation and negotiation that created and sustained this pivotal moment and generated its outcome: it was the unmistakable show of force that the students gathered represented, a force that was not merely symbolic. As the great revolutionary CLR James once put it: “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” The same could be said of today’s privatizers of public education, and those running things more generally. Oakland’s Oscar Grant rebellions taught us this much in January, as it was only the threat of continued rioting that put BART officer Johannes Mehserle behind bars. The Berkeley occupation movement teaches us the same lesson today.

And we have late word of a library occupation at Cal State Fresno, and more are on the way, at Berkeley and elsewhere. Earlier today, marchers occupied the UC Office of the President in downtown Oakland to demand a face-to-face with Mark Yudof. Further, the contagion is international, as the students who have held Austria in a constant state of occupation for weeks on end descended en masse yesterday onto the US embassy in Vienna as a demonstration of solidarity with the California occupations and outrage at the images of police violence that have been broadcast across the globe. This is a force that is expanding as we speak, and will do so as the months pass and contradictions become more acute. The university struggle has turned a crucial corner on the UC Berkeley campus, and a qualitative leap in consciousness has occurred, by weight not of peaceful entreaties but of forceful demands.

Read the rest here.

From the Inside

Baton strike @ Wheeler Hall

Update: Students in solidarity with occupation have surrounded Wheeler Hall, blocking off all the exits so the cops can't get anyone out. It's raining hard, but spirits are high! The occupiers have published a new list of demands... more to come.

California is...

And more to come. Updates here.

(photo)

Update: Wheeler Hall @ UC Berkeley Occupied! Police busting in with tear gas, pepper spray, batons. Big crowd outside in support -- come out and join!

STRIKE NOV. 18-20 @ UC BERKELEY