The University of California has one year to put into place new systemwide policies for handling campus protests.

Lynn Tierney, associate vice president for communications in the UC Office of the President, said campuses will have six months to present their plans and their implementation must be OK’d in a year’s time.

“We’re starting the clock today,” Tierney said Thursday. “Many of the campuses are way ahead of the report. They’re doing an awful lot of things. My job is going to be to organize that activity in a way that we can be accountable for it.

“We’re just going to make sure that it’s going be done systemwide, then report on it and see how it’s working.”

UC President Mark Yudof named Tierney to the one-year post as part of the release of a final report on how campuses should respond to protests.

Released in draft form in May, the 158-page report by UC General Counsel Charles Robinson and Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, emphasizes the role of administrators in finding ways to avoid sending in police, as well as improved communication, training and more consistent policies among the 10 campuses.

The report’s 49 recommendations come in response to the widely publicized Occupy protests in November on the Berkeley campus, where police jabbed protesters with batons, and at UC Davis, where officers doused students with pepper spray.

The co-authors sought to clarify that their report is meant to prepare campuses for relatively rare protests in which civil disobedience may be used as a tactic, rather than protests generally.

Among the changes they note are that a chancellor or someone designated by the chancellor need not been on the scene, as called for in the draft, as long as they are in contact with an administrator on the scene. It still calls for chancellors to make the call on using force, except in rare circumstances.

The report also recommends that before using a weapon in a crowd control situation, officers should warn protesters who may have a medical condition — such as asthma in the case of pepper spray — and let them leave.

The co-authors also strengthened their call for creating more opportunities for students to share their concerns with the UC Board of Regents outside of public comment periods during regular meetings.

Tierney said perhaps the single most important task ahead “is to prove in a year that every campus has an organized management group that includes everyone from the chancellor to his executive officers to the police, and that they can address issues as they arise as quickly and efficiently and as peacefully as possible.”

It will be up to UC’s police chiefs to iron out a consistent policy on use of force.

Campus departments also will have to choose weapons and tools from one list that will continue to include pepper spray. A given campus may opt not to have certain weapons as an option — officers on some, but not all, campuses carry Tasers, for example — but anything selected must be from the list and officers must be trained to use that specific weapon.

At UCD, officers incorrectly used an unapproved pepper spray that they had not been trained to use, investigators found.

Tierney said the report emphasizes improving communication at all levels and better, more consistent training from chancellors to police officers, all with an aim of defusing problems before a situation where someone might get hurt.

It will be important to explain to students their First Amendment rights, she said, and that while they may participate in civil disobedience, “civil disobedience has consequences and could have law enforcement consequences. Publishing the rules of the road will be a really good move,” Tierney explained.

In a letter to Yudof, co-authors Robinson and Edley write that they received 84 public comments, some of which contained numerous concerns and recommendations.

Before coming to UC, Tierney worked as a communications and community liaison expert for agencies that included Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police, the New York City Fire Department and the Federal Aviation Administration. She also served as deputy fire commissioner for the city of New York.

Tierney said UCD is making good progress toward many of the recommendations. She noted that Chancellor Linda Katehi and other top administrators have taken part in new training, for instance, and that faculty and students have been included in new Chief Matt Carmichael’s interviews with officer applicants.

“I think Davis is way, way ahead at this point,” Tierney said.

To read the full report, see http://campusprotestreport.universityofcalifornia.edu. To read other reports on the pepper-spray incident or UCD’s campus action plan, see http://demonstrationreviews.ucdavis.edu.

— Reach Cory Golden at [email protected] or (530) 747-8046. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cory_golden

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