Reading about what happened at UC-Davis yesterday doesn’t have the same impact as watching what happened.
It’s an eight-minute video. I don’t expect you to watch the whole thing. It begins with a Davis police officer pepper-spraying a bunch of sitting students. Then the crowd begins to chant “Shame on you” for several minutes as the police haul the victims away. Finally, the crowd begins to chant “You can go” to the police officers. And they retreat, to much applause and revelry.
You might want to know why the police were there in the first place. The thing is, it doesn’t matter why they were there. There’s no excuse for pepper-spraying people who pose no threat to you.
But the answer is that the school administration wanted them to clear a quad of camping equipment.
All they accomplished was a massive international black-eye for their institution. And, I guess, they just radicalized a few dozen bystanders.
