April 16, 2012

Seth Newmeyer is a student at UCLA and a participant in Occupy UCLA among a group of activists who describe themselves as anarcho-syndicalists. He was at the SMC protest to show his support and was pepper-sprayed along with the other demonstrators. He talked to Katrina Kaiser about what happened at the protest and his ideas about the future of student activism in the Los Angeles area.

More than 100 people had gathered for the protest as the Board of Trustees (BoT) for the two-year community college met to discuss a controversial new pricing plan that would increase fees for high-demand courses.

Police attacked an April 3 campus protest at Santa Monica College (SMC) without warning, emptying a full canister of pepper spray at demonstrators and catching some in the face at point-blank range. At least half a dozen students required medical attention--among those hit by the pepper spray was a 4-year-old girl.

WHAT WAS the protest at Santa Monica College about, and what were activists' expectations of the protest that day?

THERE WAS a protest at SMC because their Board of Trustees was trying to implement a new budget plan. The school is getting underfunded by the state--but not enough to stop them increasing their own ridiculous salaries and creating new construction projects or paying multi-millions on marketing. So they thought it would be useful to re-create segregation in our schools, except along class rather than (just) race lines.

Classes at SMC are usually three to five units, and because of overcrowding and class-cutting, it's taking students three to five years, rather than the expected two, to get out of there. The classes--which are supposed to be tuition-free as per the California Master Plan for Higher Education--now cost $36 per unit, and prices have been increasing steadily over the past few years.

The BoT's new plan was to continue to offer classes at that price to their own students, but then once all of the most in-demand classes filled up, they would offer spots to students willing to pay $180 per unit.

Protesters at Santa Monica College are attacked with pepper spray outside a Board of Trustees meeting

In addition to the obvious segregation by class lines going on here, it's terrible in other ways. The classes that cost $180 per unit would be completely private. This is not simply semi-privatizing a public commodity to take the funding "burden" off a classist state, but rather gives free reign to a whole new slew of issues.

The boards of each community college are autonomous from one another, but they are all facing the same budget issues. Usually, they use one campus as a testing ground for unpopular solutions to see if they are effective, before they get applied to other campuses. So though this protest was only at SMC, it was to keep all community colleges in California public and de-segregated (there's still de facto segregation in other ways, but this would be overt segregation in ways we haven't seen since Jim Crow).

We were expecting the protest that day to be good, but not as great as it was. SMC students had had trouble organizing their campus earlier, only getting around 15 to 30 people to their events and meetings before this. Activists were also being harassed and intimidated by the cops and misrepresented by their student newspaper while the building effort for this event was going on.

They managed to galvanize a lot more of their campus to come out that day, which was great, but it was also partly thanks to the SCEOC (Southern California Education Organizing Coalition) that as many people (between 100 and 200) from different public colleges and universities in the area turned out.

We were in no way expecting the police beat-down, or for the BoT to flee the building. Rather, we--or at least the people I knew and spoke to--were only expecting an airing of discontent during the public comment period, and then a demonstration afterwards, when we were to be ignored.

WHY DO you think that the police reacted the way that they did? There haven't exactly been large student demonstrations at that campus before.

YES, DEMONSTRATIONS at that campus were around 15-30 people, and from my understanding they were more like meetings, flyerings or rallies, rather than hardcore protests.

The police have always made sure to bully them. For instance, one of them slowly motorcycled over the grass right next to their first meeting and stopped five feet away to rev his engine repeatedly. Still, I never thought that they'd be stupid enough to go the way of UC Davis and UC Berkeley campus police in response to this wave of activism.

The buildup to the police response happened as follows: The BoT knew this was a very important meeting, where they were deciding the funding future of SMC and, indirectly, all California community colleges (by precedent) in atrociously extreme ways. However, they purposefully met in a room that could only accommodate 17 members of the public. That is hardly a public meeting.

From the outside, we asked that the meeting be changed to a bigger room. We were grouped around the door of the meeting, which was guarded by police, in the main hallway of the business building. The response we got was an unqualified "no" that refused to even consider our proposition.

Now, I have a problem dealing with administrators at all. Everything that they do, including holding "open" public meetings and allowing public comment (that they unilaterally ignore), is used to give their offices the illusion of democracy--even though these are unelected positions with total control over public institutions.

However, that's a viewpoint I've come to over a series of similar protests against the University of California Regents and California State University Trustees. I understand that SMC activists may not initially have been as radical in that regard, until they realize that the administrators are actually their anti-democratic enemies.

Nonetheless, the request was reasonable even by those standards of superficial democracy the BoT abides by, and the board chose to reject it without even covering up its disregard for student interests.

The police then said that they would let in the 17 people who had tickets into the supposedly public meeting, and those 17 made it to the front. The police let around five past their barrier, but then freaked out after the rest of the students had slowly moved forward until we were all around the police.

We were resolutely not pushing or advancing threateningly or anything, but they pushed the people at the front who had tickets, and yelled to everyone else to get back. It's a little bit hard to get back when there's a block of people all around you, and pushing one way on a crowd will obviously have the natural reaction of springing back in the original direction as people in the back push the people in the front off of them. Consequently, the police then started shoving us even more resolutely.

They eventually unleashed an entire canister of pepper spray without warning us at all. I only got a little bit in my mouth, but I was behind around three rows of people. I've been in a lot of situations involving pepper spray, but this was the most saturated air by far that I've ever felt. Maybe it was also partially because this event was inside. I could see a cloud hanging above us as we lost our ability to see and tried to find out what was going on, and then tried to find a way out. It made my whole face burn as if my face had been actually hit, rather than just exposed to the air around where it had been sprayed.

Most of the demonstrators ran out screaming. One person to the side of the door began to have what looked like a seizure. We called for a medic, while one officer put a woman in a chokehold with his baton. Another woman started yelling at him, and so he let the first one go to hit the second on her head, which threw her to the ground. She ended up needing medical assistance when the ambulances came.

As I'm sure you've heard, a 4-year-old girl was also hit and required medical attention. People outside were vomiting, and others were pouring milk over their faces to sooth the burns and clear the eyes.

The cops retreated inside to the BoT meeting, and we followed them. Once we entered, we saw the retreating heels of the BoT fleeing out an emergency exit as the cops guarded us from following, and a fire alarm went off. We eventually had to evacuate that space to a rally others were having outside to decide what to do next.

HOW WOULD you and the activists you work with interpret the aftermath of the SMC protests and pepper-spraying?

THE PROTESTS were great for SMC because they politicized the whole campus, and radicalized many who were there that night.

After our rally, the crowd grew to around 200 people, and we were angry and brave enough to take action. We marched through campus, loudly chanting and encouraging our comrades in classes to walk out. We marched into the library, still chanting, despite the security officer and cop who tried (unsuccessfully) to stop us.

We mic-checked what happened with respect to both Contract Ed (the apartheid plan for paying for classes), the anti-democratic meeting, and the ensuing police brutality to everyone in the library. Afterwards, we marched through and encouraged people to join us, then marched back to where we heard the BoT was reconvening.

It's things like that--acting in ways that disrupt the unconscionable status quo, without regard for legality or social mores or cowardice--that are the most empowering moments to me as an activist. You lose yourself in the democratic rage and the will of the crowd. It reminded me of marching with Occupy Oakland and others to shut down the ports in December.

The problem is that it takes police brutality to radicalize and galvanize students in this way, and I see police brutality as incidental and miniscule compared to the atrocities carried out against our material wealth and rights to democratic participation by fascistic bodies like the BoT.

However, now people are talking about Contract Ed in ways they weren't before. They're more radical, louder, and more hopeful, though more angry.

Students mobilized well enough at SMC to make this truly their own thing, and they required no assistance from other campuses in the following days, though many of us showed up anyway, to help out. Now, Contract Ed has been tabled. It's a small and temporary success--I'm sure either SMC or some other campus will try either it or a similarly atrocious plan again soon--but it's a definite step in the right direction.

The only problem I have with the aftermath of the protests is that some have presented a narrative of the police as our enemy and the BoT as our (relative) friends.

After the pepper-spray incident, when we returned, many activists played right into their bureaucratic hands. They offered us a separate room from them, so we could watch their meeting on a projector and give our public comment over some electronic device into their room.

We were walled off from them and given a chance to vent our discontents in an unproductive setting. They never, ever listen to public comment, and they don't even have to take it into account when they vote. I was disappointed that we had stooped to that when we could've easily done something real and radical. But it ended up working anyway in the long run.

Though it's unfortunate that it often takes police brutality to mobilize people on a mass scale, usually, those mobilized then get an "in" to radical politics in general. Realizing the police are not your friends is the first step towards questioning the inherent body and structure of law and order that makes up our system.