In the know: UC Davis pepper spray report

Former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso’s task force has released a report implicating administrators and police officials at every level of authority in the events that led to last November’s pepper spray incident.

The Reynoso report depicts a chain of panic on the day of the incident. According to the report, administrators and police, led by UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, received word from UC Davis Chief of Police Annette Spicuzza that many demonstrators might not be affiliated with UC Davis, creating a liability issue for the administration. Rather than check these claims ““ which Reynoso’s report states are unsubstantiated ““ the leadership team ordered the police to take down the tents, according to the report.

Rather than develop a detailed plan, the incident commander ordered the police to advance on the protesters in a skirmish line, according to the report. Rather than calmly evaluate the threat posed by the crowd, Lieutenant John Pike, subordinate to the incident commander, deployed pepper spray, according to the report.

“Lieutenant Pike’s use of force in pepper-spraying seated protesters was objectively unreasonable,” according to the Reynoso report and the earlier report by risk management firm Kroll, Inc. After reading the report, the chancellor’s decision to call out the police and the incident commander’s decision to advance on the protesters also appear as objectively unreasonable uses of force.

In response to the report’s release, Katehi, in a public statement on Friday, promised the campus would move to address issues raised by the event through various avenues, including a campus forum on police accountability, the formation of a campus community council and independent audits of campus police. Each group will generate a series of recommendations to add to the recommendations that Reynoso’s task force has already issued.

These recommendations are simple and sensible: ensure that administrative communication is clear, remember that a university ought to be a place for free speech and have a plan for civil disobedience. The recommendations, in fact, are so sensible that one wonders why UC Davis administrators weren’t following them back in November, and how they could have made the long chain of mistakes that led to the pepper spray incident.

The first instinct of everyone involved was to use force, even when it wasn’t reasonable. Because of this, we can hardly expect the recommendations to have any weight the next time university officials panic. Reasonable recommendations won’t be followed if their target audience is rendered unreasonable by chaotic circumstances, and that’s exactly what led up to Lieutenant Pike pepper-spraying seated demonstrators. In order to prevent similar abuses from happening in the future, administrators and police need more than sensible recommendations to post on an office wall. They need to change their gut reactions to crises, such that the use of force is their last resort, not their first.

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