The flagging Occupy movement is gleefully—yes, gleefully—exploiting the University of California pepper spray incident for all it’s worth, which is fine. This is the game demonstrators play, and when their objective is, say, to overthrow a brutal dictatorship, the time-tested tactic of provoking authorities into apparent abuse is a wonderful way to attract support to a worthy cause. When the objective is to, uh, like say things aren’t as good as they might be and argue that the people working hard to make a living on Wall Street have too much and need to give more to the ones who spend all day drumming in parks, there lingers a legitimate question of whether the end justifies the means.

But I digress.

The police who pepper sprayed the passive squatters at UC Davis have been placed on leave, and you can bet that they will be defended to the hilt by the police union, which will try to show that they were following the book. “Heh! Heh! Gotcha!” chuckle the Occupiers. It’s a good gotcha, to be sure.
The police over-reacted, regardless of what you are hearing from some experts. No doubt: it is a delicate situation, and no doubt (in my mind, at least), the protesters almost certainly were going to make the police do something that would look bad on TV, even when it was justified. But this wasn’t. Continue reading →