Though you may use my first name, you are not welcome to. Another poster found your use of the familiar offensive, yet you continue to use the familiar with those who are not your friends.

>the exact chant from the protesters was “if you let them go, we will let you leave”. Sounds threatening to me, telling the police to release the arrested students and we will let you leave.

I agree this was not a productive chant. Threatening maybe, though consider who has the weapons. You realize how chants go. Someone starts one and people repeat it. It is not planned in advance.

There was bad behavior on the part of both students and police. The point is that all of it was set into motion by the initial, absurd decision to send police in riot gear out against peaceful protesters. The administration had the advantage of planning, and botched it, and the police have the advantage of weapons, and allowed themselves to be overwhelmed and outnumbered, creating danger wear none existed before. The administration created the unsafe, adversarial situation. You blame those who were previously peaceful because of what you consider a threatening chant. I do not consider it wrong to challenge those who created the adversarial situation and those who enforced it. It is one thing to ask a riot to disperse, it is another to ask peaceful campers to disperse. I consider standing up to such absurdity to be an act of courage. I would agree that failure to disperse would require action by police were there a pre-existing danger. The danger was caused by the deployment itself.

>Not until after the pepper spraying did the protesters say “you can go”.

True. The didn’t say “You can go”. They demanded it, and drove the police off the Quad. The police did do one thing right: they didn’t fire pellets at those driving them off the Quad, and I do appreciate that restraint.

>Sorry, it’s all on video, you can’t change what was said.

True.

>There’s no anger in my blogs, it’s just the facts Jack, and letting you protester lovers

(no anger there . . . )

>change what actually happened I refuse to let happen.

Good luck with that refusing. We view the world differently. You may disagree but you cannot refuse.

I attended several Occupy General Assemblies and found that I disagree with some of the issues and many of the tactics. My love is not of protesters, it is of the right to protest peacefully and for the administration to respond in a reasonable and measured way.

I do not condone protestors elsewhere that have turned to violence. Often these are a small minority, but get all the press. There is a political cartoon that has made rounds of a giant mass of peaceful protestors and one guy throwing a brick through a window, and all the press cameras on the one guy and ignoring the masses. This is a historical problem with all non-violent movements, and Occupy has, in my opinion and in many cases, allowed this to happen due to their own group-think that they must be all-inclusive. It has been their undoing.

>Lastly, don’t tell me how I would react because you don’t know jack about me.

(no anger there . . . ) We do not know jack about you, because you are anonymous.

Anonymity is cowardice.

The important element here is that the police march on the Quad in riot gear against a peaceful protest was the antagonistic catalyst that escalated bad behavior in general. The police and the administration that deployed them had the advantage of planning their strategy in advance, and botched the day in UCDs most colossal public relations cluster-F in its history.

The students had no advantage of planning, only an attitude of non-violence. That some started chanting confrontational/obnoxious slogans is of no significance, as the non-violent majority quickly steered the crowd, as happened at numerous events in the 60’s as well. You cannot have a monolitihic attitude in a crowd reacting to an aggressive advance and students who just witnessed their friends yanked, pushed, thrown to the ground and arrested–for camping and not disbursing. Considering the circumstances and that it was all in reaction and in-the-moment, the protestors reactions were amazingly calm, which is why the event caught the eye of the world.

The anger in each of your emails belies that you would be incapable of any such self discipline. Of course you will say you would never be there in the first place and if you were you would obey all police orders. I believe you.

And, I did check out the Youtube. I always do my homework.

And “the students behaved remarkably well”… (I misplaced the quotation marks the first time. Yep, that’s right. Because for one thing there should have been no order to evacuate that Friday afternoon to begin with.

The weather forecast for Saturday was cold and rainy. The following week was Thanksgiving. It was not wise (as I think all parties would now attest) to do an unnecessary show of force on that Friday afternoon to “rid the quad of safety issues” or whatever the excuse was. University reps should have gone out there with cookies and hot chocolate and said, “Yep, we agree that tuition inflation is a real bummer….. how about some refreshments here and have a nice week-end.”.

That would have been much cheaper than a $100,000 PR consult….