Yolo DA won’t prosecute Occupy UC Davis protesters
Yolo County prosecutors will not pursue criminal charges against Occupy UC Davis protesters who were arrested during a Nov. 18 confrontation with campus police.
In a brief statement released Friday morning, District Attorney Jeff Reisig said there was “insufficient information contained within the police reports submitted by the UC Davis Police Department to justify the filing of criminal charges” against the 10 protesters — nine current students and one alumnus.
UCD police had asked the DA’s office to consider misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and camping without permission, but Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral said his office concluded that neither charge could be proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt.
Chancellor Linda Katehi’s public comments indicating she did not want the protesters to be prosecuted “factored into our decision,” Cabral added.
Said UCD spokesperson Claudia Morain, in an email message, “We welcome this development. It is an important step in helping our community heal following the regrettable events of November 18.”
The arrests preceded the infamous pepper-spraying of seated protesters on the UCD Quad, an incident that remains the subject of about a half a dozen ongoing investigations, including one by the District Attorney’s Office.
Two of the involved officers — Lt. John Pike and one other officer whose name has not been released — and UCD Police Chief Annette Spicuzza remain on administrative leave pending the outcome of those reviews.
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Posted by Lauren Keene
on Jan 20 2012.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 04:26:23 PM PDT
Filed under Crime, Fire + Courts, UC Davis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
If UCD considers the events of November 18th “regrettable”, what do they consider the events of January 19th at UC Riverside, where police in riot gear actually shot ‘non-lethal’ projectiles into a crowd of protesters who had disrupted a UC regents meeting? To me, an apology (assuming declaring something ‘regrettable’ is any sort of apology) means you understood your mistake and you do not repeat that mistake, much less escalate the same mistake. There is a slight chance UCD administration may have learned something, whether for the right or wrong reason. UC, as such, clearly has learned nothing from the events of November.
Even though the University of California is called one university, and the different branches are called campuses, really in a lot of ways the campuses are a federation of separate universities. They have separate admissions, separate hiring, and separate management. A lot of general policies are the same, but each campus makes its own decisions in specific situations.
In this case, the students who disrupted the meeting were students who had been invited inside to talk to the Regents. There wasn’t any confrontation between them and any police inside, who also didn’t display riot gear. Instead, when these students brought down the meeting, the Regents left the room and reconvened in another part of the building.
Outside, other protesters tried to enter the building and cut off the Regents’ exits. There was a confrontation at the rear loading dock when students passed forward a grill barrier toward the police. The police used air-gun pellets of some kind to confiscate the barrier and stand their ground. Whether these police were justified in their actions is something that can be investigated. What’s clear is that this scene was very different in a lot of ways from what happened at UC Davis. Here the police were guarding university officials in a surrounded building.
[...] All charges were dropped. So yet again they abuse their authority and arrest for specious reasons or how the district attorney put it: insufficient information contained within the police reports [...]