On Tuesday, April 1 UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison e-mailed the UC student body to explain how the University police force is dealing with the tree sitters. (Click here to read the full letter). April Fools joke? Hardly.
Harrison's 1,200-word expose was unexpected. She claims that an unsolicited student e-mail inspired her to share her thoughts on University policing policies. Her reply was thorough, eloquent, savvy, and downright impressive.
While I'm not wholly convinced that the University would be as responsive to a negative court order as the police chief contends, I respect her forthrightness. In a time when University police forces are being challenged for operating in secrecy, I commend Ms. Harrison for making this public statement.
What are your thoughts? (Police Chief Harrison will be reading this discussion thread, so take 5 seconds to share your ideas for improvement, your well-wishes, criticisms, or support for her policy).
Comments
Thank you for saying something about this! I was pretty amazed at the letter, out of the blue. I am very gratified that this campus' security personnel are speaking out in such a thoughtful and intelligent way about something so in-your-face and hard to parse. I mean, tree occupation as free speech?
I would really like to thank the Police Chief for the letter. I was also very surprised and very happy to hear the other side of the story.
At the same time, I don't fully agree with what has happened. I read and heard about Fresh before happening to walk by one day. I was shocked that all that fuss was about one person climbed on top of one small tree. After days of news articles about Fresh, only about 10 people gathered around shouting at each other, with two policemen watching and several metal barriers. I have difficulty seeing how such a small movement poses a threat to the campus community.
Likewise, I lived by the tree sitters on Gayley Rd. all of last year (I lived at I-house!). While they were annoying - they used the public I-House bathrooms - I don't think they posed a threat to anyone. Again, the movement seemed unlikely to grow beyond a handful of people.
From a policy perspective, both situations pose clear trade-offs: order that comes with "heavy hand" (by Berkeley standards) or free speech that comes with some disorder (in public health and safety terms- with the protesters particularly at risk of hurting themselves).
Personally, coming from countries with experience in dictatorship and real disorder, I trust Berkeley protestors to know where to draw the line and, with some regret, believe 99% of students are too busy, too immersed in their work for any protest movement to pose a real threat to order. But I can't quantify this - its just relative to where I am coming from - so maybe, from a policy perspective, its an easily discreditable opinion. Maybe, from a pubic citizen perspective, I'll have to protest that!
http://youtube.com/user/Oaks4Peace
Dozens of assaults on disabled and/or poor non-violent protesters.
Over a dozen false arrests.