http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjnR7xET7Uo
Less than a week after police were recorded beating students with batons at the University of California, Berkeley, here’s the unedifying sight of Lt John Pike casually dousing peaceful protesters with military-grade pepper spray at the UC Davis campus on Friday.
According to an open letter to the University’s chancellor Linda Katehi by English professor Nathan Brown, the brutality didn’t end there:
Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper- sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper- sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty- five minutes after being pepper- sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.
Yesterday, Chancellor Katehi, who initially approved Friday’s police action, received an epic helping of the silent treatment from still-protesting students as she walked to her car.
Now that’s free speech.
