UC review backs use of pepper spray on protesters UC POLICE

A new review of police actions at UC Berkeley on Nov. 9 has some protesters calling it "a tactical handbook for warfare against students," while the author himself acknowledges his findings are controversial.

Notably, campus police should have been allowed to use pepper spray against student protesters, said Jeff Young, the UCLA assistant police chief who was asked to review UC Berkeley police actions that day.

"Some of these findings will be controversial," Young wrote in his 50-page report to Mitch Celaya, the UC Berkeley police chief. "This is unavoidable."

Young's report is the first of two public reviews of UC Berkeley police conduct at the Occupy Cal protest Nov. 9. YouTube viewers got a close-up view of police using batons to whack students who had linked arms to try to prevent the riot-geared officers from dismantling tents they had erected on campus.

Berkeley's Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, traveling in Asia that day, had prohibited the use of pepper spray. That ban proved prescient, as Birgeneau later noted, because UC Davis officers were captured on video weeks later using the chemical irritant to coat seated protesters, prompting outrage around the world. Reviews of UC Davis police actions are pending.

In the Berkeley report released Friday, Young said that police acted properly in every way: in removing the tents, in their preparedness, in their training. He had several recommendations, including that police prepare formations out of view of protesters, to better take them by surprise.

He lamented, however, that "force options" for police were limited on Nov. 9.

Referring to pepper spray, he wrote: "A few focused applications on the crowd that blocked the officers near the row of bushes would likely have cleared that area very quickly, with few additional baton strikes."

UC Berkeley police referred questions to campus spokeswoman Janet Gilmore, who said the report raises "important issues" for campus administrators, who will study it.

"Regarding pepper spray, there are different points of view regarding (its) use," she said. Birgeneau had not yet seen the report, she said.

Student protesters were far less forgiving.

"It's scary," said Josh Anderson, a graduate student in English who took baton strikes to his head and torso. "This isn't an analysis; it's propaganda. It sounds like a tactical handbook for warfare against students."