The only official statement issued by UCLA following another major episode of unrestrained police violence against students and faculty on our campus June 10 came not from the university’s academic leadership, but from the new “associate vice chancellor for campus safety.”

This new appointee, Rick Braziel, has stepped into and now occupies a void left by the upper administration. For all intents and purposes, the chancellor and his team seem to have ceded decision-making at the nation’s top public university to a policeman – with predictable results.

Braziel was appointed overnight in a process that lacked transparency and input from the campus community he now governs arbitrarily, totally disregarding fundamental principles of academic freedom and constitutionally protected forms of freedom of expression.

It’s not clear if he understands the function and nature of life on a university campus: He seems to regard student protest as inherently illegitimate and illegal by default; his reactive impulse to any sign of student activism is to police violence as a first response.

Even without any sign of protest, UCLA is now alive with private security personnel whose very presence represents the diversion of valuable resources from public to private coffers – with little effect on campus security other than enhancing the generalized sense of anxiety and surveillance smothering our campus.

Under his watch, UCLA has come to feel less like a center of research, learning and critique than like a militarily occupied territory, to the dismay of students, faculty and staff alike.

All of these factors played into the campus response to the latest student protest on campus.

On the afternoon of June 10, UCLA students gathered to recognize and memorialize the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel during its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip. The students’ intent was to read aloud the names of those killed and to hold a symbolic funeral procession for them.

Despite their peaceful stance, the students were soon encircled by dozens of members of the multiple private security firms the university has engaged, backed up by officers from UCPD and eventually reinforcements from local police forces, California Highway Patrol and ultimately riot police armed with batons and rubber bullet launchers.

The police forced the students to repeatedly move from location to location as they declared each successive area off-limits to student protest.

The students were eventually corralled into the area between Dodd Hall and the UCLA School of Law, where, cornered and kettled by the police, they were ultimately prevented from responding to orders to disperse – then set upon for failing to do so.

The police continued to close in on the students, compressing them into a smaller and smaller area and putting them at serious risk of trampling and being crushed. Police wielded batons not only to push the students but also to repeatedly strike at them, pausing only to snatch individual students out of the crowd and bundle them away for arrest, as over two dozen students were.

Rubber and pepper bullets were fired directly at students from a dangerously close range; one student ended up in the emergency room with a bruised lung as a result of a rubber bullet striking him directly in the chest. Students suffered a variety of other injuries, including concussion and bruising, as a result of the police violence.

Faculty members who were on site to bear witness tried repeatedly to find an officer in overall command of the police, but to no avail.

Since the university has contracted several different security companies – some with murky reputations – and there were several different law enforcement agencies on campus, it was difficult to tell who was actually in charge, or whether, having washed its hands of its duty of care to its own students, the upper administration was content to have handed over campus to a loose confederation of police officers acting more or less on their own volition.

Rick Braziel’s message to the campus community the day after this ugly and unprovoked police violence sums up his disposition and attitude perfectly.

In characterizing the student protest as “activity (that) disregarded our values as a community,” he betrays his lack of awareness of this community’s actual values and his disregard for the university’s stated support for constitutionally protected principles of freedom of expression and of protest.

In stating that student actions “injured people, threatened the safety of our community and vandalized our campus,” he ignores the fact that had the students simply been allowed to express themselves, there would have been no threat to safety – not to mention that the main cause of injury and hazard to our community came not from the students but from the heavy-handed police response for which he is presumably responsible.

In claiming that protestors “prevented students from completing their final exams” or “entering classrooms,” he again ignores the fact that there would have been no disruptions to campus activities if the students had not been forced to relocate from one site to another by the police – and that the police themselves, not the students, were the ones blocking access to buildings and facilities and evicting students and instructors while exams were underway.

In focusing on the “violent attacks on safety personnel and law enforcement” and “acts of non-peaceful protest” that he baselessly claims are “abhorrent and cannot continue,” he completely disregards the amply documented injuries and harm inflicted on students – for whose safety he claims to be responsible – by police forces acting at his behest.

What stands out above all in Braziel’s message, in fact, is his total disregard for our students, his contempt for their right to express themselves and his inability to recognize that UCLA is a university, not an armed camp run by militarized police.

If June 10’s protest was “not peaceful,” as Braziel states, it was because of the police. And if “the campus community belongs to all of us and we must model the respect we expect to receive from others,” then Braziel and his junta should expect nothing less than continued escalation unless they try to adapt themselves to the norms of our community, rather than trying to compress us into theirs.

In any case, although Braziel has supplanted the recognized authorities on our campus – above all the now silent and invisible chancellor and provost – his reckless disregard for our students and our values is ultimately their responsibility.

They are the ones who appointed him; they are the ones who have ceded their authority to him; they are the ones who shrugged off – as they also did on the disastrous evening of May 1 – urgent faculty requests to intervene that appeared to have no effect.

It is to the upper administration, then, that we must direct our outrage.

We demand that they bring their policemen back under their control, that they restore cultural, political and intellectual order to our campus community by protecting rather than punishing expression and protest, and that they take steps to allow this community to breathe freely once more by reducing or eliminating – rather than enhancing – the police presence on campus.