The photos and video footage of Lt. John Pike of the University of California at Davis Police casually hosing down a group of unarmed, nonviolent protesters with pepper spray on Nov. 18 has been compared to the fire hoses and police dogs turned on civil rights protesters in Birmingham in the early 1960s.
That comparison is not far from the truth.
Undeterred by the cameras recording this act, Pike calmly walked up and down the line of about two dozen students, who are sitting on a sidewalk with their arms linked, and laid down a steady stream of pepper spray at point-blank range for about 30 seconds.
Two of the protesters were taken to the hospital, while 10 others were arrested. According to UC-Davis Campus Police Chief Annette Spicuzza, the officers used force because they were surrounded by students and feared for their safety.
The pictures and videos told a different story, and they sparked outrage around the world.
UC-Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi tried to defend her handling of the incident. Instead, she provided some of the most powerful imagery of the movement.
Upon leaving a news conference the following day, Katehi was greeted by hundreds of students lining the sidewalk to her car.
They sat with their arms linked, and they sat in deafeningly loud silence. The only sound on the video of this protest is her footsteps on the sidewalk as she walks past the silent students.
As James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote on his blog, “As a moral confrontation, this is a rout.”
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What happened at UC-Davis was just one of many examples of the militarization of policing, and the tendency of police to see protesters, no matter how peaceful, as threats to public order and stability.
This trend, like all bad trends in policing, started in Los Angeles, where future Police Chief Daryl Gates formed the first SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team in 1968 and introduced military weapons and strategies to policing.
Today, just about every major police force - even Brattleboro's - has a variation of a fatigues-clad, assault-rifle-toting unit reserved for difficult situations.
The trend accelerated after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, as the federal government began providing military equipment and training to police departments.
The tragic shooting by police of Robert Woodward in a Brattleboro church in December 2001 prompted a re-examination of the use of force. So-called “non-lethal” methods of subduing the unruly, such as pepper spray and stun guns, are touted as alternatives, but there is plenty of documentation to show that such technologies can be as deadly as a gun.
The active ingredient in pepper spray is oleoresin capsaicin. Milder forms of capsaicin can be found in chili peppers.
But the capsaicin in pepper spray is not, as Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly called it last week, “a food product, essentially.”
There is not a bottle of hot sauce you can buy anywhere that duplicates the heat of pepper spray.
Measured in Scoville units, the standard measure for hotness in peppers, jalapeños are about 3,500 Scovilles. The habeñero, the pepper that goes into the hottest of hot sauces, is about 300,000 Scovilles.
Oleoresin capsaicin, the main ingredient in the pepper spray used by most police departments, is about 5 million Scovilles.
When this spray hits your eyes, nose, throat, and skin, the effects range from temporary blindness, to an inability to breathe, to skin blistering. If you happen to have asthma or any other respiratory problem, it can kill you.
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice cited nearly 70 fatalities linked to pepper-spray use, following a 1995 report compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union of California. The ACLU report cited 26 suspicious deaths, and most involved pre-existing conditions such as asthma.
A police officer might be justified in using a Taser or pepper spray for self-defense. But using such weapons against peaceful, unarmed protesters is simply wrong and cannot be justified.
Unfortunately, the paramilitary mindset of many police departments encourages acts such as what happened at UC-Davis. There are times when a SWAT team is necessary, but for the most part, good policing is less about weapons and tactics than it is about patience, communication, diplomacy, and common sense.
More importantly, good policing happens when the police and the people they serve trust each other and work together as partners, not adversaries.
And when people come to see police not as allies and protectors of the common good, but as agents of the very systemic political corruption that is one of the underlying themes of the recent protests, that undermines the trust that is critical for police forces to do their jobs effectively and with good will.