Criminal Charges To Be Filed Against UC Davis Bank Protesters

A little over than a week ago, the UC Davis Faculty Association circulated a petition in opposition to the decision of the UC Davis administration to forward information about its students involved in the highly successful US Bank protest to the District Attorney. The petition quotes from an official statement regarding the bank closure:

As of today (March 16), UC Davis police had forwarded six cases to the Yolo County district attorney’s office, recommending prosecution for violating Penal Code sections that make it a misdemeanor to ‘willfully and maliciously’ obstruct the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk or other public place, or to intentionally interfere with any lawful business.

Mike Cabral, assistant chief deputy district attorney, said March 15 that the district attorney’s office had not yet completed its review of the case files—and that a decision on whether to prosecute is likely to come Monday or Tuesday (March 19 or 20). If the decision is made to go forward, the district attorney’s office will notify the suspects by mail, ordering them to appear in court.

Today, we find that not six but 12 protesters will likely face criminal charges [Update: more from the Davis Vanguard here]:

Misdemeanor charges will likely be filed against 12 people connected to the on-campus U.S. Bank protests, according to an email circulated among UC Davis administration Thursday evening. The protests were part of an effort to get US Bank off campus, which is eventually what happened.

We have a call out to the Yolo County District Attorney's Office and will update when we have more information. Here's the email:

Yolo Co. D.A's office public information rep has confirmed that misdemeanor charges have been filed against 12 individuals in connection with the U.S. Bank protests. Letters are in the mail.

The Yolo County District Attorney's office has notified UC Davis that the D.A.'s office today mailed letters to 12 individuals, ordering them to appear for booking at the Yolo County Jail and then to appear at a later date for arraignment in Yolo County Superior Court on misdemeanor charges related to their alleged activities earlier this year at the U.S. Bank branch at UC Davis.

Starting in January of this year, these individuals frequently obstructed access to the bank branch, located in the Memorial Union at UC Davis. The bank chose to close during many of these events, and, in a recent letter to account holders, announced the campus branch to be "officially closed" as of Feb. 28.

As we've seen recently at UC Berkeley, with the filing of criminal charges as well as stay-away orders against a number of prominent student protesters, UC administrators willingly collaborate with the offices of their respective DAs. In order to do this, the administration sends UCPD to actively search out information ("evidence") against student protesters, which is then forwarded to the DA. At times, this evidence has come from the medical records of students who had sought treatment at University Health Services after being assaulted by the police themselves.

What this means, it appears, is that the Office of Student Conduct (OSC), which from 2009-2011 was charged with the quasi-legal repression of student protesters, is being superseded, its work passed off to the criminal (justice) system proper. This move, of course, is part of a broader trend that is becoming apparent at universities across the country: the militarization of campus space and of university life at large.

(Above video from yesterday's protest at the UC Regents' meeting at UCSF Mission Bay. Police arrested three protesters.)

UC Davis Faculty Petition in Opposition to Retroactive Legal Measures Against Student Demonstrators

Reposted from the Davis Faculty Association:

UC Davis Faculty who support the following petition concerning retroactive legal measures taken against student protesters should forward their name and title to petition@cucfa.org:

March 21, 2012

Dear Chancellor Katehi and Provost Hexter,

On March 16, The UC Davis Dateline newsletter for faculty and staff announced the closure of the UC Davis branch office of the US Bank and the cancellation by the bank of its contract with the University. The closure of the branch and cancellation of the contract were due to a blockade of the branch office carried out by student and faculty protesters from January through March. It is important to understand the political content of this blockade: the demonstrators continually stated their opposition to the substitution of private contracts for public funding of the UC system, and they continually pointed out conflicts of interest related to University contracts with corporations profiting from student loan interest as the UC administration continues to increase tuition, thus forcing many students to take out increased loans.

We reiterate our support for the principled and determined actions of UC students and faculty to defend the public character of the UC system against privatization, a goal with which the blockade of the US Bank branch was consistent.

The announcement of the bank’s closure in Dateline also included the following two paragraphs:

“As of today (March 16), UC Davis police had forwarded six cases to the Yolo County district attorney’s office, recommending prosecution for violating Penal Code sections that make it a misdemeanor to ‘willfully and maliciously’ obstruct the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk or other public place, or to intentionally interfere with any lawful business.

“Mike Cabral, assistant chief deputy district attorney, said March 15 that the district attorney’s office had not yet completed its review of the case files—and that a decision on whether to prosecute is likely to come Monday or Tuesday (March 19 or 20). If the decision is made to go forward, the district attorney’s office will notify the suspects by mail, ordering them to appear in court.”

We write in opposition to the UC Davis administration’s decision to have these cases forwarded to the DA by the police, and we ask that the administration recognize the *political* content of the US Bank blockade rather than treating it as a criminal matter.

Opposition to the use of force against demonstrating students in November 2011 was not only directed against police brutality, but also against the UC Davis administration’s repression of political activism on our campus. We view the use of retroactive legal actions against demonstrating students as an effort to carry out such repression of political activity while attempting to evade the public scrutiny to which the administration’s repressive measures have been subjected. Moreover, in this case these retroactive legal actions clearly target a small sub–‐group of the demonstrators involved in blockading the bank, suggesting that specific demonstrators are being targeted for selective prosecution so as to single out and intimidate the most active student protesters.

For these reasons, we ask that the administration urge the district attorney’s office, in writing, to exercise its option not to prosecute those cases that have been forwarded in relation to the US Bank blockade, or to reverse the decision to prosecute if it has already been made. Further, we request an end to the use of retroactive legal action as a punitive measure against political protesters on our campus.

Sincerely,
Don Abbott — Professor of English
Josephine Andrews — Associate Professor, Political Science
Raul Aranovich — Associate Professor of Linguistics
Carlee Arnett — Associate Professor German and Russian
Chris Benner — Associate Professor of Community and Regional Development; Chair, Geography Graduate Group
Gina Bloom — Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, English, Co-Director of the Mellon Research Initiative in Early Modern Studies
Larry Bogad — Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance
John Bowman — Professor, Department of Plant Biology
Anne Britt — Professor, Department of Plant Biology
Kenneth Britten — Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior
Nathan Brown — Assistant Professor of English
Marisol de la Cadena — Professor of Anthropology
Steve Carlip — Professor of Physics
Patrick E. Carroll — Associate Professor of Sociology
Seeta Chaganti — Associate Professor of English
Daniel Cox — Professor of Physics
Katayoon (Katie) Dehesh — Professor, Plant Biology; Chair of Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology
Natalia Deeb-Sossa — Assistant Professor, Chicana/o Studies
Fran Dolan — Professor of English
JoAnne Engebrecht — Professor, Molecular and Cellular Biology
Rida Farouki — Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Daniel Ferenc — Professor of Physics
Margaret Ferguson — Distinguished Professor of English
Jaimey Fisher — Assoc. Prof., German and Cinema & Technocultural Studies, Director, Cinema & Technocultural Studies
Jeff Fort — Assistant Professor, French
Laura Grindstaff — Professor of Sociology, Director, Consortium for Women and Research
Noah Guynn — Associate Professor of French
Robin Hill — Professor, Department of Art
Hsuan Hsu — Associate Professor of English
Suad Joseph — Professor, Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies
Caren Kaplan — Professor, American Studies
George Kaysen — Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine
Ian Kennedy — Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Richard S. Kim — Associate Professor, Asian American Studies
Joe Kiskis — Professor of Physics
Neil Larsen — Professor, Department of Comparative Literature
Lyn H Lofland — Research Professor of Sociology
Marjorie Longo — Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
William Lucas — Professor of Plant Biology
Markus A. Luty — Professor of Physics
Sunaina Maira — Professor, Asian American Studies
James Marcin, MD, MPH — Professor – Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Director, Pediatric Telemedicine
Darrin Martin — Associate Professor of Art Studio
William Mason — Professor Emeritus, Psycology
Bill McCarthy — Professor of Sociology
Sally McKee — Professor of History
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller — Associate Professor of English
Flagg Miller — Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Director of the Graduate Group in Religion and Director of the Middle East / South Asia Program
E. O. Milton — Professor Emeritus, Department of Mathematics
Susette Min — Associate Professor, Asian American Studies
Stephanie Lee Mudge — Assistant Professor of Sociology
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder — Professor of Anthropology
Almerindo Ojeda — Professor of Linguistics
Marijane Osborn — Professor Emeritus, English
Noha Radwan — Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Simon Sadler — Professor of Design
Valeria La Saponara — Associate Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Richard Scalettar — Professor of Physics
Seth L. Schein — Professor of Comparative Literature
Omnia El Shakry — Associate Professor of History
Scott Shershow — Professor of English; Chair of the Davis Faculty
Blake Stimson — Professor, Cinema and Technocultural Studies Association
David Simpson — Distinguished Professor of English, G.B. Needham Chair
Bradford Smith — Professor Emeritus, Veterinary Medicine: Medicine and Epidemiology
Eric Smoodin — Professor, Program in American Studies
Daniel A. Starr — Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Alan J. Stemler — Professor Emeritus — Plant Biology Dept.
Pieter Stroeve — Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Co-Director of the California Solar Energy Collaborative
Dawn Sumner — Professor of Geology
Baki Tezcan — Associate Professor of History, and Religious Studies
Steven M. Theg — Professor of Plant Biology
Eddy U — Associate Professor of Sociology
Archana Venkatesan — Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature & Program in Religious Studies
Evan Watkins — Professor of English
Karen Watson-Gegeo — Professor of Language, Literacy and Culture
Joe Wenderoth — Professor of English
Stephen Wheeler — Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture
Stefan Wuertz — Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Michael Ziser — Associate Professor, English

UC Regents Meeting, 3/29

From the Daily Cal:

SAN FRANCISCO – Three UCLA students were detained by UCPD Thursday morning during the final day of the UC Board of Regents meeting, following an interruption of the meeting during the public comment section that stalled the meeting for about 40 minutes.

The three students — who have been identified by a UCSF press release as Andrew Harkness-Newton, Cheryl Deutsch and Mathew Sandoval — were arrested by UCPD in the hall outside the meeting conference room. The meeting was briefly interrupted when board chair Sherry Lansing attempted to end the public comment section, which started around 8:35 a.m.

Audience members asked for an extension and for additional speakers to speak who were supposedly signed up on a public comment list. When Lansing said she could not extend the public comment period, audience members began a mic check, which then led to some board members leaving the room.

UCPD then arrived and surrounded the group protesting in the audience, asking them to leave the main conference room.

Police officers followed protesters outside the room, where a confrontation between police and protesters occurred and the students were arrested. Charges are pending against the students, according to the UCSF press release.

Open Letter About Nov 9 Charges

Dear Fellow Education Activists,

I'm writing today with an impassioned and profoundly frustrated heart about what is happening on our campus at UC Berkeley, the so-called "home of the Free Speech Movement," and beyond. It's extremely important to share this story with all of you, should it become a larger precedent for political repression--indeed, recent developments with Occupy Oakland suggest that it already is (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/21/occupy-oakland-protesters-stay-away?newsfeed=true). I'm also seeking your support to help pressure District Attorney Nancy O'Malley to drop the unjust charges against political activists.

As many of you know, on November 9th, several hundred students, professors, and community members attempted to erect an Occupy Cal encampment on this campus, an action that was part of a multi-year series of events to raise awareness about the effects of educational privatization and to build a movement that challenges this process. On November 9th, we were twice met with very brutal police force (itself a product of privatization), as the UCPD, working alongside several other area police departments, beat us with batons, dragging individuals by their hair from a line of peaceful protesters who had linked arms in front of our small encampment. Many individuals were very seriously injured as a result of this well-documented scene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovLQ9qyWQ), and they sought medical attention for broken ribs, bloody gashes, and nerve damage inflicted by the police. Moreover, email exchanges recently made public show that UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was not only aware of the situation that day but that he sanctioned it.

In early March, thirteen individuals (one of whom is a professor on this campus and several of whom have been very active in Occupy Education NorCal) received misdemeanor criminal charges in association with the November 9th events, charges which could result in fines of $1000 and up to a year in jail. Crucially, the majority of those being charged were not arrested that day, begging questions about how they were identified and targeted nearly four months later. The charges themselves raise additional red flags, with "malicious blocking of a sidewalk or public thoroughfare" being the most common: never before has that inconveniently located grassy space near the hedges to the north of Sproul Hall constituted a public thoroughfare of any kind, and if anything "malicious" happened on November 9th, I assure you, it was on the part of the police, not those who've been singled out for these charges. Moreover, the ACLU of Northern California has confirmed that the UCPD sought and obtained records from local hospitals and medical centers in an effort to help identify individuals who were later charged--not incidentally, the chargees were among the most seriously injured. Finally, the fact that most of the thirteen members of this cohort have been highly visible activists in the fight for public education over the past several years strongly suggests that these unjust charges represent a targeted attempt to silence political dissent.

Twelve people were arraigned this week, all of whom received "stay away" orders for all UC property. These orders dictate that the charged not individuals set foot on any UC campus unless it is to attend class (and in one case, to fulfill union duties), and these court orders are undoubtedly designed to disrupt the inter-campus network we're working so hard to build and to paralyze our collective public education movement. Judge Peter Seeman casually dismissed concerns raised by one individual's attorney that the stay away orders are in clear violation of First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly.

We cannot stand by while the legal system silences our brothers and sisters, and we cannot let the administrative bodies slow the momentum of our powerful movement. Please join me in standing in solidarity with these and other activists facing unjust charges and political repression by letting District Attorney Nancy O'Malley know what you think:

Mailing address: Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse / 661 Washington Street, Oakland, CA 94607
Phone: (510) 268-7500
Fax: (510) 839-0391
Email: askwwm-da@acgov.org

In Solidarity,
Beezer de Martelly
Graduate Student and Public Education Activist
UC Berkeley

P.S. Please visit the following blog for up-to-date information on the November 9th charges: http://berkeleynov9.wordpress.com/

On Violence and Non-Violence, Once Again: Lessons from Recent Political Developments on the Berkeley Campus (Part 1)

In one of his most widely read essays, Louis Althusser made the famous remark that ideology and its subjects never run around saying “I am ideological!”[1] From the perspective of the interpellated subject, there is no such a thing as an “outside” to ideology—because ideology has already profoundly structured the subject’s sense of self-understanding. We’ll ask the reader to indulge us and allow us to paraphrase Althusser’s statement with respect to recent political development on UC campuses after yet another year of protests, police violence, administrative impunity, and repression of political activism: One of the defining peculiarities of state violence today is that it never runs around proclaiming “I am violent!”

In the context of the ongoing prosecutions of student activists and a faculty member who were brutalized on November 9,[2] let us revisit a recent civil court case, in which a graduate student sued UCPD officer Brendan Tinney for breaking her finger at a large protest in support of the Wheeler Hall occupation on November 20, 2009. While silently watching the trial from the back of the courtroom, we learned a great deal. We witnessed how cops lie under oath with arrogance and impunity: we heard improbable accounts of students trying to snatch guns from cops and pull their batons—improbable because these incidents had never been reported up to that moment, even by the officers themselves. We saw—yet again—that the UC administration will spare no expense to crush its own graduates, teachers, students, scholars, and community members; that it will resort to grossly unethical practices and attack the integrity, dignity, and humanity of its own students, scholars, and workers; that, in blatant disrespect for its own professed “community standards,” it will engage in calculated humiliation and disrespect of those same members whose “outstanding academic achievements” it will then take credit for.

But we want to stay on point here, so we’ll focus on one fine yet significant detail from Officer Brendan Tinney’s and Sergeant Donald Jewell’s public testimonies. Why could these two police officers so easily claim, genuinely blind to the glaring contradictions, that what they did on November 20, 2009—by crushing the hand of a graduate student, by thrusting their batons into the stomachs, spleens, kidneys, and ribs of dozens of bare-bodied students in the vicinity of the incident—did not constitute an act of “violence”? How could they deny that their acts were violent?

One thing we learned from Officer Tinney’s public testimony is that police officers are trained to “separate out the injury from the reasonable force the police [have] to use.” In other words, in the mind of an officer who has undergone “proper training,” the causal relationship between the “force” used and the injury or death it inflicts, between the act of violence and the wounded, maimed, or dead body, is intentionally obscured. Their batons don’t injure bodies, they make “contact” with them. In the cryptic, sanitized language of crowd control policies and police training manuals, serious injury and even death are present simply as the collateral effect of maintaining “peace and order,” “health and safety”[3]; they are disembodied, bureaucratic facts that need to be filed away.

Further, the excess of violence (“force” in the idiom of contemporary policing) is never self-evident from the point of view of the police because ”force” is always the preemptive measure deployed against an imagined stable, ahistorical violent subject, projected onto concrete and diverse situations, humans, and realities. Shortly after November 9, 2011, the UC Berkeley Police Association published an open letter to the outraged public to explain their perspective and offer excuses (prefaced by a denial—“by no means are we interested in making excuses”).[4] Compared to 1964, the era of the Free Speech movement on campus, the letter states, “[o]ur society in 2011 has become an extremely more violent place to live and to protect. […] Disgruntled citizens in this day and age express their frustrations in far more violent ways—with knives, with guns and sometimes by killing innocent bystanders.”[5] Unlike the old days, in other words, the world today is a far more dangerous and unsafe place. This is a bizarre statement—the sense of threat could apply to any place and time; it reveals nothing but prejudice, verging on plain indoctrination. It gives us a genuine picture of the collective subjectivity of a “well-trained” cop, in whose imaginary an outbreak of violence is always imminent. So in response to students pitching tents and linking arms, the article continues, “[i]n the back of every police officer’s mind is this:  How can I control this incident so it does not escalate into a seriously violent, potentially life-threatening event for all involved?”[6]

For those of us who do not come from communities where police brutality is an everyday reality, it is worth repeating that the police are trained to “see” violence before it happens, and if it doesn’t happen—to invent it, to interpret every gesture with a prejudiced eye and imagine the aggressive, threatening, “violent” behavior. And then, to unleash a preemptive attack. Again, there is a long history of how many times police have murdered individuals because they have interpreted the gestures of their victims the wrong way. Such prejudice has long been racialized, exposing communities of color to chronic harassment, incarceration, and death. Currently, the state is engaged in promoting a new ahistorical stereotype of the “violent protester,” structured around a logic of prejudice, stigma, and exclusion—where violence against protestors appears a priori reasonable and justified. That the figure of the “violent protester” has become a trope in the liberal media and a target of condemnation in popular liberal discourse is a direct effect and continuation of the logic of the violent state, masqueraded behind the language of peace, order, and safety. We’ll continue this thought in another post.

In the immediate aftermath of November 9, 2011, Chancellor Birgeneau attempted to justify the brutality of the police by claiming that “linking arms is not non-violent.”[7] But the origin of this infamous claim—which Birgeneau reproduced uncritically—should be properly attributed to UCPD Captain Margo Bennet. According to Bennet, “[t]he individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence […] I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”[8] This is also how shaking or holding a barricade, chanting “hold the line,” linking arms, refusing to leave, or even simply being trapped and having nowhere to go after being ordered to leave, becomes an act of violence. Bennet’s and Birgeneau’s dangerous leap of logic has now culminated in UCPD’s sinister tactic of using their legal right of access to the medical records of baton-injured students who sought treatment at the Tang Center, to identify them for the purpose of prosecuting them. It is a classic example of how the police have increasingly turned statutes and laws, initially aimed at protecting the victims from its assailants, against the victims themselves (charging Occupy Oakland activists with hate crimes or lynching is another recent example). Such use of the law was rightly called “perverse” by ACLU attorney Linda Lye.[9] It shows that the state is making a causal link between wounded bodies and violent perpetrators, resulting in a tautological configuration that turns the victim of police violence into a violent subject, into an aggressor, while at the same time victimizing the real perpetrator and erasing from the picture the actual agent of violence.

If, then, one asks what remains in the category of “non-violence” according to the rationality of the police, it is the absolute, uncritical obedience to their authority, especially when that authority violates the rights of citizens or grossly abuses the means of violence and the power to incriminate—in short, “non-violence” according to the police means the uncritical compliance with the growing arbitrary power of the sovereign. This takes us to the somewhat self-evident point that the state has successfully instrumentalized and redefined the slippery term “violence” to repress and criminalize various forms of dissent against austerity measures, and to shrink and eliminate established spaces and practices of constitutionally protected forms of political expression. One may argue that, stripped of its legitimating rationality, this is the creeping logic of authoritarian power. And to a certain extent it is. But this is not the same as the classical expansion of the executive authority of the state, such as, for instance, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, passed with a provision that allows for the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects on US land, including citizens, without trial. Much more insidiously, the police operate within the juridical regime of the liberal state, while using interpretive tactics to bend definitions of crime and expand their own power to incriminate dissenting subjects.

If we take into account these drastic shifts in the meaning of “violence,” a much less self-evident point emerges—that violence is a discursive rather than an ontological category. Even some of the most astute political thinkers and philosophers who have written extensively on the question of violence have treacherously presumed, or even argued for, the ontological nature of violence. But if we take violence as a discursive construct, we can see how it has become a crucial terrain upon which the state wages a war against political dissent. Currently, it is being pushed to the limits of the intelligible in order to accommodate the expanding authority of the state to prosecute and eliminate different forms of political resistance against deepening austerity.

On the November 9 Stay-Away Orders: The University and its “Lawful Business”

Crossposted at berkeleynov9.wordpress.com

-written by three people among the thirteen charged

We are graduate students and teachers at UC Berkeley. Like thousands of other members of people here at Berkeley, we have participated in rallies and demonstrations and marches against the privatization of the University of California. In early March of this year, however, we each received letters from the Alameda County District Attorney informing us that criminal complaints had been filed against us. No details of the complaints were listed, only the date we were to appear at Wiley Manuel Courthouse.

When we called the DA to find out our charges, we learned they stemmed from November 9, 2011, the day riot officers assaulted hundreds of students, faculty members, and workers for setting up tents on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley. The planned encampment was to be established in solidarity with the growing Occupy movement. It aimed to raise awareness of the budget cuts at the UC. Internet videos of the brutal actions of police that day went viral, foreshadowing the international scandal UC Davis police would cause just a week later when they belligerently pepper-sprayed sitting students. In a now infamous turn of phrase, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau defended the pummeling of the protestors at UC Berkeley by declaring their act of civil disobedience (linking arms) to be “not non-violent.”

That we were suddenly being charged for participating in the events of November 9 struck us as odd. Four months had passed. We had not been arrested on November 9, nor did we suspect that we were under investigation. The UC administration had even granted amnesty from student conduct charges for those who took part in the protest. We soon discovered that several friends (also students) were facing similar charges. Like us, most of them had also not been arrested that day. In total, 13 individuals have been charged, including a professor of English, who, when surrendering herself for arrest on November 9, was pulled to the ground by her hair by police. The various criminal complaints against us include resisting arrest, battery of an officer, obstructing a thoroughfare, and remaining at the scene of a riot.

How the DA decided that we should face charges is not fully clear—although it is evident that they are bringing charges on the basis of recommendations received from UCPD, despite Chancellor Birgeneau’s protestations to the contrary. As UCPD spokesperson Lt. Tejada recently said, “We make our case, and the district attorney reviews the evidence, and if they feel they have enough evidence they will move forward.” Furthermore recent reports suggest that even campus health services had a hand in the selection and identification of protestors. Hundreds of people were on hand the afternoon of November 9. Even more were present on Sproul Plaza when police returned in the evening to again attack students and confiscate their tents, bringing out a crowd of at least 2000. Nearly ten thousand supporters joined in a student strike at UC Berkeley a week later in response to the appalling actions of police. Why are only 13 out of these thousands being charged? Is it a coincidence that some of those targeted are highly visible organizers at UC Berkeley? Is the UC Berkeley administration outsourcing the criminalization of dissent to the Alameda County District Attorney, just as the UC Police Department outsourced the brutal repression of dissent on November 9 to the Alameda County Sheriff?

Of course we are not taken aback by the situation in which we find ourselves. For months now, the Alameda County District Attorney’s office has been vindictively harassing anyone they suspect of taking part in the Occupy movement. Most recently the DA has started slapping stay-away orders on almost any activist brought before the court with ties to Occupy Oakland. This attempt to smother dissent through judicial means is simply a less spectacular (and far less bloody) approach than the hard-fisted tactics employed by their law enforcement brethren.

Since we knew full well how the judicial system is being geared to criminalize and stifle dissent in Alameda County, we should not have been the least bit astonished when our judge—without the slightest hesitation—granted the DA’s request to issue us indefinite stay-away orders from the University of California. Nevertheless, the stay-away orders first issued on March 19 took us all by surprise. Had administrators of the University of California deemed us worthy of banishment from campus, they could have used their own established protocols and procedures to do so—something they have hardly been hesitant to use before.

When asked why the stay away orders were to be applied not just to the UC Berkeley campus, but to all property owned by the University of California, the DA responded that we are known to travel to other campuses to protest meetings of the UC Board of Regents. The light this response sheds on the political motivation of the stay away orders should not be missed. We are now disallowed from stepping foot on any campus in the UC system for the simple reason that we might take part in political activity on UC property. The timing of these stay away orders, it should be noted, is extremely convenient for the UC administration: a major meeting of the UC Regents is scheduled at UC San Francisco next week.

In issuing these stay away orders, the judge granted a narrow exception to all of us who are students, as well as a few other exceptions to particular individuals (i.e. for living in university housing, or for performing official union responsibilities). Those of us with classes and teaching duties (which includes 12 of the 13 being charged) are allowed to visit campus for “lawful business.” We can attend our courses and meet with our students as usual. While a reasonable exception to an unreasonable order, this further reveals how the stay-away orders have been constructed expressly to eliminate our political engagement on campus. The stay-away-order-plus-exception effectively distills our lives as students and workers from all other trivial or superficial aspects. We are reduced to mere academics, without political or social lives, whose sole purpose is to work and study and return home. We cannot attend a lecture on campus. Or meet with a friend for coffee. Or stop to talk with a former student. And we most certainly can’t attend any protest. The court is permitting us to contribute to business as usual at the university so long as we do not do anything outside of the strict delimitation of such business, as long we do not attempt to challenge it in any way. We are made into model students and workers, perfectly obedient, without the encumbrance of feelings and thoughts beyond our academic work on campus.

Potentially complicating this analysis is the additional exception that one of us received for the performance of union responsibilities.  When this individual’s lawyer initially spoke with the District Attorney, letting the DA know that his client was an elected steward in the UC union of academic workers, the DA responded by asking: “Union work is totally unrelated to occupy protests, right?”  If this question betrays a basic unfamiliarity with recent organizing on campus, it also reveals something about how union activity is generally understood at this historical moment.  Union activity is imagined here as a form of labor, performed by elected bureaucrats, who are recognized by management as the legitimate representatives for, and regulators of, a particular workforce.  Such work appears unrelated to, if not in fact antagonistic toward, the forms of non-hierarchical direct action practiced by the occupy movement.  When partitioned in this way from protest, union activity can evidently appear as part of the lawful business of a student instructor, whose life is thus distilled into acts of labor, some instructional and others bureaucratic.  

Whatever the exceptions, we have little reason to trust that the campus police will interpret the stay-away orders in any predictable or consistent way. The actions of numerous John Pikes and Jared Kempers have taught us to never underestimate the lengths the UC police department is willing to go to punish campus protestors. We have little faith that the police will allow us to be on campus without also harassing us. This is, of course, their “lawful business.”

Direct Action Gets the Goods, UC Davis Edition

From the Bicycle Barricade:

On March 12, the parasitic US Bank notified its hosts customers that, as of Feb. 28, it had officially closed its UC Davis branch.

The bank’s closure was the result of a quarter-long blockade, in which an autonomous direct action group effectively prevented bank operations.

Despite sustained efforts at intimidation by bank managers, private security guards, UC Davis police and administrators, the bank blockade stood its ground, even when faced with arrest threats, student judicial sanctions, and physical confrontations.

The successful blockade is clear proof of the efficacy of direct action, in which a committed and organized group, willing to place its “bodies on the gears, . . . upon all the apparatus” can achieve victories against the capitalist system that transforms our classrooms into spaces of exploitation and forces us to sell our lives, our futures, to bankers and profiteers.

This action was part of an ongoing campaign to free the university from the grip of capital. Every space we retake from the managers, the bankers, the administrators, and the self-elected résumé polishers of ASUCD represents a step towards the autonomy required to transform this corporate university into the people’s university.

We celebrate this victory by planning our next action and restating our intention to remove the chancellor and police from our campus as a necessary step towards liberation.

Needless to say, the UC Regents aren't happy with this development. Their lawyer recently sent off a letter describing in detail the many efforts they made to get US Bank to stay. They really want the banks on campus. Above all, the Regents were hoping for US Bank to help them deal with the protesters -- as the letter states, "The Regents repeatedly asked for the Bank's assistance and collaboration in addressing the problems created by the protesters, and the Bank has either refused to provide such assistance or has delayed responding in a manner that has caused reasonable suspicion that the Bank was not genuinely interested in maintaining a long-term presence at the Davis campus." The bank, apparently realizing this was a losing battle and recognizing the potentially disastrous PR implications, was "unforthcoming in dealing with the Regents' representatives in Davis."

Pobrecitos, no one to bail you out this time...

[Update 6:01pm 3/18]: For a more detailed analysis of the Regents' letter as legal argument as well as a related statement from US Bank and the original contract, see this pro bono legal advice for the UC Regents.

Court support for November 9th Protesters!

8am to noon.

Wiley Manuel Alameda County Courthouse
661 Washington Street
Oakland, California 94607

Come out to show support for your colleagues and comrades who are facing prosecution by the UCPD and Alameda County DA for exercising their free speech rights in the face of police brutality on November 9th.

The first protesters - including Prof. Celeste Langan - will be arraigned at 9am on Friday.

Meet at Berkeley BART at 8am to travel to the courthouse together OR meet us directly at the courthouse (661 Washington Street in Oakland, on the 1, 1R, and 18 lines as well as near 12th street BART) for the 9am arraignment.

**Wear black or a black armband
**Bring signs for the press conference/rally after the event, but be aware you can't bring them into the building
**This will be a silent, respectful demonstration of support and outrage. Please respect the wishes of those with charges by following all courthouse rules.