Occupy and the Right to Protest

http://www.thenation.com/article/167390/occupy-and-right-protest

On the morning of November 17th, UC Davis students participating in a peaceful protest of rising tuition costs, in solidarity with the Occupy movement, were informed that they were to remove their tents from the quad on which they had been camping. The protesters had spent only one night there, but the University said the encampment was a health and safety violation. The students’ first instinct was to engage in a dialogue with the university; students requested that the administration cite the standards they were violating, but by that afternoon no details had been provided to them, so the students decided to continue to “occupy the quad.”

That occupation, however, did not last long. At around 3 pm, police in riot gear arrived on campus, threatening to “shoot” students who refused to leave. As students were pulled up from the ground at random, their hands violently tied behind them, 25 students remained peacefully seated in the center of the quad. A crowd of onlookers began to accumulate. In a scene that would go viral, thanks to cell phone videos, officers stepped within a few feet of the seated protestors, shook cans of pepper spray—“like cans of aerosol paint,” according to the students’ complaint—and doused the protestors. UC Davis student David Buscho described the experience as “absurdly painful…we were in a state of collective shock.”

Now that the shock has worn off, 19 of these students, supported by the ACLU of Northern California, are fighting back with a lawsuit filed against UC Davis administration and officials that alleges that its actions violated the students’ First Amendment rights. An attorney for the plaintiffs, Mark Merin, believes that the police had no right to get involved in the protest, asserting that the “right of general assembly is enshrined in the constitution and should not be interfered with by police.”

While the nineteen plaintiffs in this case are seeking compensatory and putative damages, the suit also asks for a statement from the Court that the First Amendment rights of the protestors were violated, and that there be a serious effort to reform the campus practices that led to that violation. Merin believes campus policies should be revised to grant students an opportunity to appeal the decision if the university moves to quash protest.