To "Jim", "nbsp", and "me":

Since there was no criminal behavior happening, the "the police are just doing their jobs" stuff is b.s.--since no crime was involved. We are left with "we're just following orders"-- and judging that, of course, depends on the quality of the orders.

In Iraq, some U.S. occupation troops are refusing to "follow orders" to avoid eventual war crimes prosecution (and perhaps some of them just don't want to commit war crimes, whether they're prosecuted or not). Locally, following illegal orders can result in lawsuits for which individual officers can be held personally accountable.

Just what was "the state's interest" in moving out the students, jim? "Good order" and "discipline" ? - sounds like a military view of a civilian institution: we're talking about the University not the Army.

nbsp, non-violent resistance to abusive authority can take many forms. A thousand+ students surrounded the squadcar that came to remove the Jack Weinberg Oct 1, 1964 from the UCB campus in the beginnings of the FSM [see article below].

Students then weren't interested in accepting fines and jail for upholding the Constitution then and Tent U students should be interested in it now.

The community should be demanding restitution for the Santa Cruz 19, abolition of the abusive un-Free Speech zones, and removal of those officials responsible for the misconduct.

nbsp: Police had no business being there in the first place. Even if you assume they had any legitimate reason, they could have begun by issuing citations rather than making arrests.

The absurd claim that Tent U was an "illegal assembly" was so substanceless, it was abandoned rather quickly (but still served as the pretext to torture people peacefully asserting basic rights).
They were obviously targeting people selectively (those seated in the Nome) rather than clearing the area generally.

The strength of the Tent U. resisters in PEACEFULLY standing up to that kind of abuse was an inspiration to everyone. Too bad the legal assembly didn't continue but was ultimately dispersed by the UCSC PD and UCB PD terror. Too bad students didn't spent more time considering occupation alternatives that were discussed but abandoned in the four-hour direct democracy that preceeded the terrifying police assault.

Perhaps the organizations seeking to uncover responsibility should seek an anti-terrorist grant.

I apologise for the length of this post but the following summary of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley is instructive, I think, and the parallels are worth noting:





[from www.diggers.org/cavallo_pt__2.htm]

The Free Speech Movement

In the early sixties, two unanticipated and very different forms of rebellion erupted among young people in the Bay Area. Their impact would ripple through the rest of the country during the remainder of the decade and to a great extent define for many Americans what the sixties youth culture represented: incessant political unrest among college students and a Dionysian hippie dance of abandon choreographed by hallucinogenic drugs and rock music.

Prior to 1964, most Americans viewed college students as a privileged class poised for a future of security, affluence and influence. One of the first public signs that some students viewed themselves in a different light—in fact thought of themselves as oppressed victims of an impersonal, repressive, boring society— appeared across the bay from San Francisco. In the fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.

The FSM was a response by Berkeley students to new restrictions on student political activity imposed that fall by the university's administration. The restrictions were pushed by conservative members of the university's Regents. As early as 1960 conservative Regents were upset by the involvement of Berkeley students in left-wing causes. Students from Berkeley had played a prominent role in the massive demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee that occurred in San Francisco in May 1960. In the early sixties, they were active as well in efforts to end both capital punishment in California and de facto racial segregation in the Bay Area.(30)

Since the beginning of the Cold War, political activity on campus had been generally prohibited. This was especially true of activism perceived by the university administration as "left wing," which in the repressive climate of the fifties meant almost any form of protest against the status quo. By the early sixties this included civil-rights activism. For instance, the new regulations prohibited students from engaging in off-campus acts of civil disobedience, a tactic regularly [p. 108] used in civil-rights protests.

Also, students were prohibited from proselytizing or passing out political literature on city-owned sidewalks at the main pedestrian entrance to the campus, the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way, where student political activity had traditionally been tolerated by the university.(31)

On October 1 the civil-rights activist Jack Weinberg and others defied the ban. Weinberg was arrested for distributing literature for the Congress of Racial Equality. When police placed him in the back seat of a squad car, hundreds of students surrounded it. In the first, and perhaps most memorable, act of massive student defiance toward campus authorities in the sixties, the squad car was prevented from moving for 32 hours. While Weinberg remained in the car, and the crowd surrounding it grew to a few thousand, dozens of students took turns standing on its roof, making speeches about the pros and cons of the ban on political activity. Most of the speakers removed their shoes to avoid damaging the squad car. And a few weeks later, FSM leaders voluntarily collected over $400 from students to pay for repairs to the vehicle.

The outrage created by the university's prohibition on student political activity, along with the arrests of Weinberg and others, created a semester-long uproar on the campus. The lies and duplicity of a feckless university administration, which portrayed the dissidents as little more than puerile adolescents engaged in a fraternity-style lark, made matters worse. From the students point of view, they were fighting to secure their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Acrimony and frustration mounted on both sides, and on December 2 Sproul Hall, the university's administration building, was occupied by nearly 1,000 student protesters who staged a sit-in.

Edward Meese, Berkeley's assistant county prosecutor (and later attorney general in President Ronald Reagan's administration) told Governor Pat Brown that the students were "busting up" Sproul Hall. Meese was being less than truthful. The occupation of the administration building obviously disrupted the campus. But the demonstrators, unlike many campus protesters later in the decade, carefully avoided abusing university officials or damaging property. They spent the day singing FSM-inspired folk songs ("Don't know if I'm subversive," went one, "just want to say what I please.") Some studied for final examinations, while others watched Charlie Chaplin movies. Jewish students organized a Chanukah service. The governor ordered the police to remove the students, which they did at 3 A.M. on December 3. Nearly 800 students were taken into custody in the largest mass arrest in California history. A campus-wide student strike ensued. Finally, on December 8 an overwhelming majority of the faculty voted to support the FSM's claim that the First Amendment guaranteed students' rights to freedom of speech and assembly [p. 109] on the campus. The administration caved in, lifting the prohibition on student political activity. The students had won a stunning, nationally publicized victory.(34)

On the surface, the Free Speech Movement was an ardent defense by students of their right to enjoy fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. For this reason, even politically conservative student groups, such as the Young Republicans, supported the FSM (most of whose spokespersons were liberal to left) and participated in its rallies. But as the crisis deepened during the fall, issues unrelated to free speech unexpectedly surfaced among some of the leftists involved in the movement. These students began to question the right of the university to restrict their behavior in any fashion, except when the well-being of others was clearly imperiled. In their view, the university's traditional power to act in loco parentis was illegitimate.

More significantly, these students started to see themselves as fodder for an educational system—and a society—determined to mold them into efficient and compliant components of what FSM leader Mario Savio amorphously but ominously referred to as "the machine" of American society.(35) White middle-class college students saw a contradiction between their expectations of becoming autonomous, independent adults and the ultimate purposes of their education as it was defined by the society. In a famous metaphor, the president of the University of California, the liberal Democrat Clark Kerr, called Berkeley a "knowledge factory." Berkeley and the country's other major research institutions were what he called "multiversities." They promoted diverse forms of knowledge that not only reflected "middle-class pluralism," but were also, according to Kerr, "instrument[s] of national purpose" as well.(36)

Some students took a dim view of Kerr's vision, and of the impersonal nature of the university's academic and administrative environments it tacitly sanctioned. They saw it as proof that they were perceived by society as "products" and "resources" whose destiny was to serve the needs of an undefined "national purpose" not of their choosing. Particularly those students involved in or sympathetic to causes for social justice saw a parallel, however inexact, between themselves and victims of racial discrimination and economic inequity. Their sense of being "oppressed" was rather vague and undefined, but it brought to the surface powerful undercurrents of resentment. "For the first time," FSM leader Michael Rossman said years later, "the question becomes, What about us? For the first time we took the conditions of our lives, the institutionally determined conditions of our own lives, not as a base from which to address others' problems but as the ground of our own oppression. When people began to make this sort of connection, the floodgates opened."(37)