THE ISSUE: Videos of UC Davis police pepper-spraying student demonstrators last week triggered a national uproar, coming after incidents at UC Berkeley and other places where police have clashed with demonstrators. What should authorities learn from this in balancing concerns of free speech, public safety and officer safety?

How should authorities respond to 'Occupiers' who refuse to budge?

Ben Boychuk: Next time, don’t be so naive

Showering a group of seated UC Davis student protesters with a potent pepper spray may have been excessive. It certainly looks that way on the edited videos that have gone viral on the Internet.

But I wonder what Linda Katehi expected when she authorized campus cops to "disperse the equipment" of students setting up their own Occupy Wall Street-style camp on the quad. Did she think the demonstrators would simply shrug their shoulders, pack up their tents, and go out for beers?

Katehi on Monday apologized and reiterated her "horror" at seeing footage of UC Police Lt. John Pike administering a lesson in what civil disobedience can taste like.

In keeping with the script that invariably follows bad press, the chancellor says she accepts "full responsibility" – a term devoid of meaning after endless recitations by politicians, philanderers and criminals seeking the mercy of the court.

I wonder, too, what the Davis demonstrators expected would happen after the cops gave the order to disperse. Best guess: Many of them got exactly what they wanted, and then some. At precisely the moment public opinion is turning against the Occupy lunacy, the movement has a new crop of martyrs to the cause.

Finally, I wonder what the police were thinking. Breaking up an unlawful assembly is dangerous business. Even with tensions running high and students outnumbering police, it's hard to believe Chief Annette Spicuzza's claim that her well-armed, well-armored officers felt especially endangered. It's a credit to their professionalism, and the calm of many protest leaders, that the situation didn't spiral into violence.

Students have a constitutional and moral right to protest peacefully just like anyone else. Obviously, they don't have an absolute right to protest wherever they like, whenever they wish. Civil disobedience has consequences.

Yet "police brutality" is another term rapidly draining of any weight. Pepper spray isn't pleasant. It can be quite painful – imagine biting down on 100 habaneros at once while rinsing out your eyes with Tabasco.

Disobeying a lawful order from police and then being denied kid-glove treatment when the cops remove you isn't "brutality."

You want police brutality? Become acquainted with the facts of the Kelly Thomas case in Fullerton, where two police officers stand accused of murdering a schizophrenic homeless man. Thomas begged for his life as the police shot him four times with a Taser and beat him into a coma. He died 10 days later.

Take a good look at the pictures of Thomas' swollen, disfigured head and face. That is brutality.

The political street theater at UC Davis last week doesn't even come close.

Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. (www.city-journal.org/california)

Pia Lopez: Try negotiation first

"This is not a protest. This is an occupation. Go home and get your tents."

That call by a speaker at the University of California, Davis, campus on Monday captures sticky First Amendment and civil disobedience issues.

Americans have an uneasy relationship with their First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceable assembly. We tend to like First Amendment protests that are polite and orderly.

When protests get noisy, protracted, inconvenient or disruptive of ordinary life, American history is replete with expressions of annoyance and even forcible removal (such as the 1932 rout of the Bonus Army by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Washington, D.C., on the orders of President Herbert Hoover).

UC Davis campus police were within their legal rights to take down tents. Camping is not allowed on the quad. Tents went up on Thursday and campus police ordered them taken down on Friday. Students took down most of the tents themselves, and police took down the rest without incident.

However, contrary to what Ben implies, what came next was neither normal police procedure nor acceptable on a university campus. As students sat peacefully on the ground, an officer pepper-sprayed protesters at point-blank range, treatment usually reserved for violent resisters.

Protesters sometimes choose deliberately to break laws they believe are unjust – such as segregated buses and lunch counters during the Civil Rights era. They accept the consequences – arrest, for example – in order to win public support for overturning the unjust laws and policies. University campuses are well aware of this tradition of civil disobedience.

But, as Ben suggests, protesters opting for civil disobedience also hope to provoke the authorities into overreaction. UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi and campus police certainly obliged last Friday.

Rather than negotiate with students about the small camp in the few days leading up to the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, when students leave campus, they chose to intervene as if they were putting down a riot. Restraint might have served them better.

At Monday's rally, speakers and signs raised issues that are real and call out for debate and solutions (not simply "lunacy," in Ben's words): the ongoing trend toward privatization of the University of California system, with ever-increasing student fees and reliance on philanthropy; aggressively courting corporate funding for research; a continuing run-up in executive compensation.

Protesters and campus administrators, by engaging in pitched battle over camping on the UC Davis quad, have succeeded in pushing attention away from the substantive issues the University of California faces. That's the downside of this episode of civil disobedience and overreaction.

Pia Lopez is an editorial writer at The Bee.

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