Dumb, entitled students at UC-Davis refuse to stop blocking a public use sidewalk on campus when the cops told them to, so naturally, and hilariously, the cops doused their faces with pepper spray....
The sympathetic media whined all weekend that the protesters were peaceful and unarmed, effectively accusing the cops of brutality, but "peaceful and unarmed" aren't the qualifications for law breaking. If you're intentionally blocking a public-use sidewalk and refuse to move when the cops tell you to move, you're breaking the law and you deserve to get pepper sprayed in the face. You deserve to get whacked upside the head with a telescopic baton in my opinion, so the cops showed amazing restraint here.
7 comments:
Which law were they violating? I've searched in vain to find any mention of a statute or ordinance that would apply.
They were blocking a public-use walkway. The protesters have a right to pursue happiness through the expression of free speech, even if that means blocking the sidewalk, right up until it prevents other pedestrians from pursuing happiness by using that sidewalk. (In other words, your right to extend your fist stops precisely where my nose begins.) When the cops tell you to move along, you need to move along or get pepper sprayed.
The law they broke was not obeying the cops when they told them to move along.
"What's really disgusting is the natural instinct of so many conservatives to stick up for the police. They don't like the Occupy protesters, so they willingly back brutality against them....
[T]his common, vulgar form of modern conservatism almost always sides with the state, even as it champions the empty words of limited government."
~libertarian, Steven Greenhut ("Conservatives Side With Pepper-Spraying Thugs")
P.S Before someone gets the mistaken notion to call Greenhut a hippie-lover:
"I disagree with most of what the Occupy protesters are saying, quite obviously, but when I see lines of riot-gear-clad officials standing in front of these unbathed wretches, my heart goes out to the wretches. They need a lesson in economics and politics. The policies they advocate – to the degree that many of them have any well-defined grievances – range from the silly to the disastrous. They are inconsistent, foolish and hypocritical. Many of them are lazy freeloaders. Such is life. They do create filth and chaos in public parks, but if one cannot protest in a public park, there are not many places to have a protest. It's in everyone's best interest for the authorities to provide as much latitude as possible for protesters of any political persuasion. We still do pretend to live in a free society, right?" ~ibid
Isaac, we live in a free society governed by rules that benefit all. One of those rules is to not infringe on the pursuit of happiness of others. The cops are there to encourage, with pepper spray if necessary, those who would trample on those rights to stop doing that.
There is a permit process for protests. The TEA parties always got permits, these vermin never do.
Civil disobedience only works so far and then you're infringing on somebody elses rights.
They had to be moved one way or another. I just wonder if the outrage would have been greater or smaller had the police just picked up the protesters and physically moved them?
You need a HAZMAT team if you plan on touching dirty, drug-addicted hippies these days. Pepper spraying them from a distance is the most prudent method of crowd control.
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