amateur ramblings

UC Berkeley administrators are still dodging responsibility for police brutality on Berkeley’s campus during the occupation of Wheeler Hall on November 20. Measures that have been announced are meant to distract the campus community from the crucial fact that the problem is not necessarily with policing policy, but rather with policing as a policy.

Following the Wheeler Hall protests, the administration was forced to make a far-from-satisfactory statement following student and faculty outcry at the violence. Chancellor Birgeneau, and later Vice Chancellor Nathan Brostrom, announced that UCPD would be conducting its own internal investigations in addition to an investigation by the Campus Police Review Board.

Chancellor Birgeneau’s letter to the campus community of Nov 23 failed to take any personal responsibility for the acts of police violence on Nov 20. He meagerly asserted that “We urged the police to be as respectful as possible of our students,” implying that the administration did everything it could or should have done and that the failure was on the police’s part.

As he tries to swipe his responsibility under the rug, Birgeneau forgets to mention that his administration called the police in in the first place. Police action does not take place in an isolated vacuum — as Geo put it, “behind  the privatization of the UC, a riot squad of police.” The UCPD will “investigate” itself and the Campus Police Review Board (whose proceedings are not transparent, whose meetings are confidential, and whose “recommendations” are non-binding any way) will conduct its own review, but there is no commitment to abandon the policy of calling in police to suppress student protests, either at UC Berkeley or at any of the other UC schools where police force has been deployed the past few weeks. The Chancellor’s meretricious acts of reconciliation are an insult to the university community because they are insufficient to achieve even their limited stated goals, and are disingenuous as they don’t even address the militarization of student space in the first place.

The real issue is the policy of using police, not the policies that police use. Problems with Birgeneau’s administration and the use of police forces existed long before the current student protests, and have more than ideological costs. Between December 2006 and September 2008, under Birgeneau’s watch, UC Berkeley spent over $2.3 million policing the tree-sit protest at the now destroyed Oak Grove. UCPD officers were paid over $604,000 in over time to guard the tree sit day and night. The campus built a fence to close off the Oak Grove for $10,000 and three months later built another fence that cost $80,000 — neither of them “worked” in cutting protestors off from the grove or from the supplies necessary to survive. Yet barely a word was uttered to oppose this blatantly wasteful and unnecessary use of university funds.

Protestors took over the park after the campus announced its plans to tear it down to build a $126 million gymnasium for the Athletics department. However, protestors were not the primary reason that the plans could not go forward; the campus was waiting on litigation to be resolved. As soon as it received the legal green light, the campus called in police to dismantle the protests. The completely unnecessary expenditure of over $2.3 million policing people who were doing nothing but sitting in trees highlights not only the fiscal irresponsibility of hyper-policing, but also the absurdity of policing in the first place: what threat do people in a tree pose to their peers that requires the mobilization of force in such a way?

The superficial claim that “they were breaking the law” is not enough to justify such costs at a time when there is an alleged economic crisis at the university, and students are paying more to get less. That rings especially true for the lone student Fresh who took up perch in a tree facing Wheeler Hall. There, police erected barricades, put police on 24 hour watch, and attempted to forcefully remove him — even though he was not in anyone’s way!

I am not aware of the monetary costs of policing Wheeler Hall protests of November 20, or the cost of similar police deployments UC-wide, but they are likely embarrassingly large and unjustifiable. Birgeneau might be trying to convey his remorse at this time, but remorse is not enough when it is within his power not to inflict police on the student body.