Gun Control is a frequent topic of discussion these days it seems. The recent shooting in Connecticut and the readiness of politicians and lobbyists to seize upon these events as impetus for their own agendas all but guarantees that it will be thrust upon us, and we, being the creatures of the media that we are, cannot help but discuss it.
I am not a politician. Making policies is not my job, neither is enforcing them. I dislike getting involved in political debates, mostly because most people who debate politics are not speaking original thoughts, or even thoughts at all. That which passes for debate these days is generally little more than repetition of party slogans. Party slogans are, by their very nature, divisive, polarizing, and unamenable to compromise or an understanding of the opponent's views. Human debate cannot be reduced to sound bites and it seems most Americans cannot think in anything but sound bites.
The gun control debate seems to me to be divided between a small minority of vocal activists on extreme ends of the spectrum. On the extreme liberal end is the rhetoric of fear, exemplified by articles such as this one. These are people who do not understand guns, do not know how to use them, know nothing about them except what they have seen in movies, and are unwilling to learn. On the extreme conservative end are the gun manufacturers, sellers, and to a lesser extent, the enthusiasts who do not want any government control on weapons whatsoever. If they want to own machineguns and cannons, well, that's their constitutional right!
As for myself, being the libertarian that I am, I tend (tend mind you, not reside) towards the more conservative side. I believe in minimal government and minimal governmental control of day to day life, and so it is no surprise that I resent the government telling me what kinds of guns I can and can't own. I think of the fact that this country was settled from one end to the other by grown men and women who carried their own weapons, enforced their own laws, built their own homes, earned their own living by the sweat of their brows, defended themselves against marauders by their own wits and courage, and did not rely on the government to do anything for them that they could do for themselves. It sort of rubs me the wrong way to see that we Americans have, to some extent, chosen to relinquish our responsibilities as citizens, and chosen instead to be subjects, and this extends far beyond the gun control debate. The welfare state falls prey to the same criticism on an even greater level, as does socialized healthcare.
That being said, I do not ignore the benefits that come from having a strong government. Even the fact that I can drive from Puyallup to Lacey in 35 minutes, a distance of nearly 30 miles, would be impossible without a government that levied taxes and built roads. I am also acutely aware that the reason the drivers going from Lacey to Puyallup are doing so in their lane and not in mine is that a government has standardized driving and enforces the rules of the road. Whenever I drive my car out of my driveway I am interacting with other citizens, with potentially life shattering consequences, and those interactions are (rightly) coordinated by the government. If the government didn't do it, (as is common in Asia) the citizens would find a way to do it themselves with greater or lesser degrees of messiness.
I like to consider myself a liberally educated conservative. I can appreciate benefits of the status quo, while maintaining the ability to examine it critically and independently. I can drive on the right side of the road and at the speed limit as long as things are the way they normally are, but in an emergency I can scrap those conventions and drive off road, or as fast as I need to in order to survive. This, I think is the mentality we need in regard to guns.
Since the whole debate is too large to go into here, I am going to limit my discussion to the issue of concealed weapon carry only. For an explanation of the "Assault Weapons" ban issue that rips that concept into shreds far more effectively than I ever could, go here.
In America we have a legal concept called the "Concealed Carry Permit." It is a piece of paper issued by the state of residence licensing the holder to carry a pistol in such a manner as to be concealed from view. Each state determines its own requirements as far as what training (if any) is mandatory, where a pistol can be carried (federal offices are always off limits) and when and where and how it can be used. Some states hand out permits like candy. All you have to do is apply and as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record you will get it in 4-6 weeks. Other states allow "open carry" (carrying a pistol in plain view) without a license. Some states (including my home state of NY) do not allow anyone even to own a pistol without a permit, and permits are routinely difficult to acquire, especially for men. In most states it is illegal to carry in schools, banks, places of worship, or any establishment that serves alcohol. Most shootings in America, not surprisingly, take place in schools, banks, and places of worship. Why? Because from the point of view of a bad guy, these places offer a target rich environment with almost zero chance of meeting armed resistance.
Leaving aside the question of whether or not the government has any constitutional right to issue these licenses (it's not an issue I am qualified to comment on) I want to examine the idea of concealed carry from the point of view of personal responsibility, rather than from the point of view of Governmental policy, mostly because I have no influence on government policy, but I can influence individuals in the exercise of their own personal responsibility.
I carry. When I am outside the house in civilian clothes I am 90% likely to have a gun. I carry a gun for the same reason I carry an emergency medical kit behind the passenger seat of my truck. I have been trained in the use of both of these things. I have the power to save lives in an emergency, and therefore, as far as I am concerned I have a responsibility to do so, and to take reasonable steps to ensure that I am able to do so. I am also not your average joe. I have dedicated my adult life to such training, albeit with a different focus. What about the typical citizen who does not have any such training? Should he be allowed to carry a pistol?
This is why personal responsibility is so important. I have no problem with any person carrying a pistol, so long as they are willing to accept the responsibility that entails. If you want to own a gun you should, at a minimum, know how to load it and fire it safely and accurately, and then clear it and store it safely. You should know the three rules of gun safety backwards and forwards and upside down. This goes for any gun, from an AR-15 to Grandpappy's old hunting rifle.
If you want to carry a pistol around other people, with the intent of using it for self-defense, then you need to go beyond that. You need to increase your range time and learn some basic tactical shooting. In short you need to have a realistic assessment of your ability to engage a target accurately under stress with possible non-hostiles all around. Can I get my breathing under control? Can I make rational decisions under stress? Can I hit my target reliably at five feet when I am shaking and sweating bullets? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Twenty? Twenty five? What if there are innocent people nearby? How close to them can I safely shoot? Can I remember to check what is behind my target?
Guns kill. Sometimes they kill animals, and sometimes people. That is what they are designed to do, and ignoring that fact does no one any good. Can I take a human life? Can I make moral decisions about whether it is right to kill someone? Can I tell when violence is justified and when it isn't? Am I carrying in order to protect, or in order to give myself a false sense of security or power? (You see, carrying a gun is not a physical or tactical matter only. It is even more deeply a moral matter, concerning the health of your very soul.)
These are questions you need to face before you start carrying a gun on the street. They are not questions the government can ask for you. They are not covered in any CCP course. You, and you alone, bear the responsibility for your answers, and any actions you may take with a gun. This is why, from my perspective, Governmental regulation is superfluous, and only complicates things. My own personal training program and moral and ethical reasoning is much more in depth and responsive than any law or regulation could ever be.
This is personal responsibility.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Monday, January 14, 2013
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
HHS Health Reform Strategy: Two Scenarios
There has been a huge hue and cry in the Catholic blogosphere recently in reference to the White House’s recent statement that there will be no broadening of the conscience clause in the Health Care reform bill. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and many other religious organizations in America have been lobbying for this broadening since the bill was passed, and this month, three days before the National March for life in Washington, the White House stated that “This group (Faith based institutions) will ultimately have to offer female employees cost-free contraception, just like others across the country.”
This was not at all what those faith based institutions were hoping for. In a somewhat insulting nod to these organizations, the White House is allowing them an additional year to comply. This is not an acknowledgement of the conscience issue, but to allow more time for administrative changes that will need to be made. “We know that a lot of these organizations may be large organizations, there are approval processes that require the approval of boards,” an administration official told reporters on a call this afternoon. “The transitional period responds to those concerns.”
Unfortunately, these were never actually concerns. This is not a question of “an approval process” as if the implication were that “boards” just need enough time to argue about it before finally bowing to the mandate of Washington.
The uproar has been considerable, though not as widespread as the response to the SOPA bill. Catholic bloggers and bishops, not-for-profit organizations and media personalities have been firing back. I cannot say anything that they have not already said.
I am interested, though, in the Administration’s point of view. What is the end game here? It was a bold strategy, not only the decision to ignore the principles of the largest religious body on the planet, but to drop the ultimatum three days before the largest gathering of Catholics in one place in America. Coincidence? I’ll just say, competent strategists don’t allow coincidences like that. If the timing was not taken into account it was sheer incompetence. If it was, then what on earth was the strategy?
You see, only an idiot goes into battle without knowing his enemy. While there are varying levels of competence in Washington, I’m not ready to believe that the architects of this bill are idiots. They went into battle, and they had to know how the Catholics were going to react. This isn’t an administrative policy we are talking about here, this is a matter of moral principle. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception is a matter of history, and She has been before now the single voice in the world condemning the contraceptive culture. We made it through the 60’s without changing that for crying out loud. There is no excuse for ignorance about the Church’s position on this topic. Therefore, there is no possibility of compromise. We literally cannot give in to this law. It would be like forcing Jewish businesses to sell Kosher Bacon.
So I have no choice but to believe that at the very least the Administration knew that there was going to be an uproar. Perhaps they underestimated how rapid and loud it would be, but they took it into account in the decision making process. What part did it play?
I can think of two possible strategies that account for this blatant aggression. The first, and I think the most likely, is ideological. Perhaps the President and his advisors really believe that contraception and abortion are so obviously mainstream healthcare, that anyone who does not provide them shouldn’t be in healthcare anyway. An analogy would be someone who did not believe in prescribing antibiotics and refused to do so on moral grounds. Such a person has a right to believe that, but no hospital in America would hire them. They would not be allowed to practice as a physician, and rightly so. I think it is possible that Obama and his cronies are so in love with the idea of contraception that they have deluded themselves into thinking that contraceptives are on the same level as antibiotics and other routine, life-saving interventions. The rhetoric of “reproductive rights” might well have tricked its authors.
If this is the case then the move to engage in open warfare, as it were, was seen as a calculated risk. They think they are right to force people to take care of their employee’s health and welfare (their view), and they are counting on popular support and even more popular apathy to wear down religious resistance over time. In this scenario they expect to hunker down, weather the storm and keep up an endless stream of propaganda. It will blow over eventually and they will get their way.
The second scenario is more sinister, and I think less likely. In this scenario the motives are not ideological but pragmatic. They don’t give a damn about reproductive rights or contraception or any of that. What they do want is power. The Catholic Church, by Her nature, is always a possible threat to the power of the State, because She claims divine authority to resist laws it deems unjust. In this view the goal is to hamper the freedoms of this institution, consolidating power for the State. What you need for that is to do two things, simultaneously: First, you need to isolate and weaken the institution’s base of support among the population. Second, you need to create the opportunity to take action against that institution in such a way that it will be perceived as legitimate. To accomplish these you need an issue which will be at the same time odious to the institution in question and widely popular among the rest of the population.
So in this scenario this particular issue is not the issue. Instead it is simply a weapon. The goal is to draw intense, outspoken, and hopefully hot-headed or even inflammatory response from the Church, which can then be construed as backward, selfish and intolerant. The Church is forcing her beliefs on employees who do not even share the same beliefs! The hope then is that when the inevitable confrontation occurs, whether the Catholic institutions try to continue operating in defiance of the law, or close their doors, any government action can be presented as preventing the Church from imposing Her ideas on other people. No one will come to our aid in any effective way.
I don’t think this is the scenario, because it means that the Administration thinks the Church is weak enough that they can get away with it. You don’t deliberately provoke an all-out power struggle until you are certain you have the tactical advantage. I don’t think we are at that stage yet. In fact, if anything can bring out a little fight in us, this is it. But in the short term, motives matter very little. In either scenario the crux of the matter remains the same. The side that sways the people will win, and if Obama has proved adept at anything, it is influencing the people. People will point to his crashing polls, but the mystery is not that they have crashed so far, but that they have not bottomed out. The man can spin a yarn, and people listen. This is the most dangerous quality he possesses and we must not underestimate it.
In any revolution or counter-revolution, the propaganda war is the real war. The human terrain is the only terrain that matters.
This was not at all what those faith based institutions were hoping for. In a somewhat insulting nod to these organizations, the White House is allowing them an additional year to comply. This is not an acknowledgement of the conscience issue, but to allow more time for administrative changes that will need to be made. “We know that a lot of these organizations may be large organizations, there are approval processes that require the approval of boards,” an administration official told reporters on a call this afternoon. “The transitional period responds to those concerns.”
Unfortunately, these were never actually concerns. This is not a question of “an approval process” as if the implication were that “boards” just need enough time to argue about it before finally bowing to the mandate of Washington.
The uproar has been considerable, though not as widespread as the response to the SOPA bill. Catholic bloggers and bishops, not-for-profit organizations and media personalities have been firing back. I cannot say anything that they have not already said.
I am interested, though, in the Administration’s point of view. What is the end game here? It was a bold strategy, not only the decision to ignore the principles of the largest religious body on the planet, but to drop the ultimatum three days before the largest gathering of Catholics in one place in America. Coincidence? I’ll just say, competent strategists don’t allow coincidences like that. If the timing was not taken into account it was sheer incompetence. If it was, then what on earth was the strategy?
You see, only an idiot goes into battle without knowing his enemy. While there are varying levels of competence in Washington, I’m not ready to believe that the architects of this bill are idiots. They went into battle, and they had to know how the Catholics were going to react. This isn’t an administrative policy we are talking about here, this is a matter of moral principle. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception is a matter of history, and She has been before now the single voice in the world condemning the contraceptive culture. We made it through the 60’s without changing that for crying out loud. There is no excuse for ignorance about the Church’s position on this topic. Therefore, there is no possibility of compromise. We literally cannot give in to this law. It would be like forcing Jewish businesses to sell Kosher Bacon.
So I have no choice but to believe that at the very least the Administration knew that there was going to be an uproar. Perhaps they underestimated how rapid and loud it would be, but they took it into account in the decision making process. What part did it play?
I can think of two possible strategies that account for this blatant aggression. The first, and I think the most likely, is ideological. Perhaps the President and his advisors really believe that contraception and abortion are so obviously mainstream healthcare, that anyone who does not provide them shouldn’t be in healthcare anyway. An analogy would be someone who did not believe in prescribing antibiotics and refused to do so on moral grounds. Such a person has a right to believe that, but no hospital in America would hire them. They would not be allowed to practice as a physician, and rightly so. I think it is possible that Obama and his cronies are so in love with the idea of contraception that they have deluded themselves into thinking that contraceptives are on the same level as antibiotics and other routine, life-saving interventions. The rhetoric of “reproductive rights” might well have tricked its authors.
If this is the case then the move to engage in open warfare, as it were, was seen as a calculated risk. They think they are right to force people to take care of their employee’s health and welfare (their view), and they are counting on popular support and even more popular apathy to wear down religious resistance over time. In this scenario they expect to hunker down, weather the storm and keep up an endless stream of propaganda. It will blow over eventually and they will get their way.
The second scenario is more sinister, and I think less likely. In this scenario the motives are not ideological but pragmatic. They don’t give a damn about reproductive rights or contraception or any of that. What they do want is power. The Catholic Church, by Her nature, is always a possible threat to the power of the State, because She claims divine authority to resist laws it deems unjust. In this view the goal is to hamper the freedoms of this institution, consolidating power for the State. What you need for that is to do two things, simultaneously: First, you need to isolate and weaken the institution’s base of support among the population. Second, you need to create the opportunity to take action against that institution in such a way that it will be perceived as legitimate. To accomplish these you need an issue which will be at the same time odious to the institution in question and widely popular among the rest of the population.
So in this scenario this particular issue is not the issue. Instead it is simply a weapon. The goal is to draw intense, outspoken, and hopefully hot-headed or even inflammatory response from the Church, which can then be construed as backward, selfish and intolerant. The Church is forcing her beliefs on employees who do not even share the same beliefs! The hope then is that when the inevitable confrontation occurs, whether the Catholic institutions try to continue operating in defiance of the law, or close their doors, any government action can be presented as preventing the Church from imposing Her ideas on other people. No one will come to our aid in any effective way.
I don’t think this is the scenario, because it means that the Administration thinks the Church is weak enough that they can get away with it. You don’t deliberately provoke an all-out power struggle until you are certain you have the tactical advantage. I don’t think we are at that stage yet. In fact, if anything can bring out a little fight in us, this is it. But in the short term, motives matter very little. In either scenario the crux of the matter remains the same. The side that sways the people will win, and if Obama has proved adept at anything, it is influencing the people. People will point to his crashing polls, but the mystery is not that they have crashed so far, but that they have not bottomed out. The man can spin a yarn, and people listen. This is the most dangerous quality he possesses and we must not underestimate it.
In any revolution or counter-revolution, the propaganda war is the real war. The human terrain is the only terrain that matters.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
UC Davis Incident: A Technical Critique
I suppose everyone has seen this video by now.
I’ll start off by saying that from a big picture point of view, I don’t know much about this incident. I don’t know much about Occupy Wall Street, I don’t know what (if any) goals they have. I don’t know what these students were trying to accomplish, or whether they knew what they were trying to accomplish, or how legal their protest was. I also don’t know much about the overall decisions from the cops’ point of view. Whether it was necessary to move the protestors or not, whether it was necessary to intervene at all, I can’t say. My issue with this is from a much more technical point of view. That’s not how you run a revolution, and it’s not how you deal with one. Both sides seemed amateurish to me.
First, from the cops point of view: Let’s bypass the question of the legality of breaking up the protest, and the decision to make the arrests and skip straight to how that decision was executed. Cops on UC Davis campus: automatically in hostile territory. They can start by knowing that 1: they are not welcome; 2: they are already assumed guilty until proven innocent; 3: they are surrounded by cameras, which is essentially a hostile PR campaign already under weigh. Thanks to this attitude, combined with the ubiquity of I-Phones and youtube, police ought to know that even before they get on the ground they are already the target of choice for a decentralized mechanism of propaganda gathering and distribution.
This situation is the truth on the ground. Lack of situational awareness of this strategic concern is the root issue behind the mistakes made.
If you watch the video carefully you’ll notice that the only voices you can hear are the voices of protesters. They are not especially unified, not especially controlled, but they have one advantage: they are loud. By contrast the cops are absolutely silent. They aren’t yelling and screaming, only a few of them are doing the talking and they appear to be the command and control (C&C) element for the riot control unit. This is good unit discipline, but bad PR. It means that the only point of view that is going to be heard is the protesters. Anything the cops say afterwards is automatically damage control at best, which leads me to my first critique: where was the megaphone? If you are a riot control unit, your megaphone is your primary weapon. If you don’t have one, you’re wrong. You can’t shout down the protestors, but you can at the least make sure that you are providing a step by step narration of what you are doing, which is then an intrinsic part of any audio record of the event.
Next step, the decision to arrest was made. Already their actions are crippled because they don’t have the shouting power to issue clear instructions or ultimatums. All we see is one muttered contact in the first ten seconds, and then two minutes of the cops standing around, silent and indecisive. I know what they are doing. They are pulling security, while the C&C element makes up their minds what to do. Bravo on maintaining good discipline, but in the long run it makes them look like idiots. At 2:12 you can see one officer make one half-hearted attempt to pull one of the protesters out of their formation. Everyone knows what’s coming, but the cops are not visibly trying to resolve the situation without escalating to the use of chemicals. So I have to ask, what is their protocol? Given a decision to arrest, it might be argued that it’s safer to break up the formation with pepper spray than with batons. I would whole heartedly agree with that. However, there has to be an escalation of force protocol. Warnings (mostly inaudible apparently) notwithstanding, I would question the wisdom of going directly from verbal warning to pepper spray. There has to be an intermediate level of force.
Starting at 2:05 you can hear a female voice yelling “Protect yourselves, cover your eyes.” Why shouldn’t that warning have come from the cops? Nothing enhances your image like visibly and obviously seeking to limit damage to your opponents.
The actual spraying, from 2:25 on is obviously visually disturbing to civilians. It looks so wanton, so cold-blooded, so cruel. He’s spraying it right in their faces and they aren’t violent, aren’t visibly resisting. It screams “Police Brutality.” From a tactical point of view I can understand it, though. Once the decision is made to move them, and the tool chosen is pepper spray, it makes no sense to delay or be half-hearted about it. Either do it or don’t do it, but don’t half do it. It does no one any favors to draw it out. One quick pass across their faces is not going to damage them seriously, and from then on out, it’s all business. Break up the formation, pair up on the protestors, cuff them and move them out. I would have had my paddy wagon closer, but other than that it was tactically pretty good. They don’t lose security either. The perimeter gets pretty thin at one point, but by 4:30 all the moving pieces are resolved. The perimeter is full and solid, and it needs to be. They are surrounded by a crowd, and maybe the crowd was initially spectators, but now they are clearly shifting into protester mode. Anyone who was not involved before is involved now. A solid perimeter is a must.
Say what you will, from the point of view of the cops it is a tactical success. They moved into a hostile crowd, arrested the focal point of that crowd and moved out in less than ten minutes with no injuries on either side. No one broke ranks, no one went crazy, the objective was met and the withdrawal was planned and disciplined. The problem is, no one is ever going to see it from their point of view except those who already know it.
Now, let’s move to the protestor side of the house: Overall I am left with an impression of simple, mass hysteria. They did a lot of things right. There were clearly movers and shakers within the crowd who were periodically able to start a mass chant, aided by the fact that it’s friendly territory for them. Those most involved have at least passive support of everyone around them, and moral support from a majority of potential youtube viewers. They can move with ease, their risk is minimal due to the cops’ rules of engagement, and their payoff is potentially high. The big questions I have really come down to, What’s it all about? Who organized the protest? Who decided to occupy that particular piece of ground, and why? Was pepper spray anticipated? Apparently not, but an intelligent organizer might have anticipated it, and planned a ready-made PR campaign for it. Overall, though, my impression is of hot-headed, young, amateurish disorganization. I would bet most of the people there could not have told you why they were protesting or what their goals were in any coherent form that would hold water for more than a minute. They didn’t need to. Whoever organized it doesn’t need intelligent disciples to provide rational argument on a popular level. He needs bodies to fill space, and vocal cords to fill the air with noise.
The exploitation of the incident was ad hoc, and hot-headed. At 8:56 you can see that the crowd is getting riled up, and is starting to press the cop’s withdrawal. A cop flashes a tear gas canister and a student yells “They’re spraying again.” The crowd backs off a little and at 9:05 you hear a voice start rising out of the chaos. Again, it is not the cops, it is a protestor. He essentially leads the crowd in proclaiming that they are going to give them a moment of peace so that the cops can leave. By 9:33 they are cheering and shouting as if they drove out the invader, when that is simply not what happened. It was a spur of the moment thing, and it was hot-headed. Taunting edgy, adrenalized cops in a situation like that is far from a smart move, tactically. Strategically it makes all the sense in the world because any reaction on their part is more fuel for your fire later on, but the fact remains that it was only the fact that those police officers were disciplined and did not rise to the taunts that saved those kids from a serious hurting. Their restraint was the protestors’ only guarantee of safety. The taunting was a juvenile attempt to appear in control of the situation, when that was far from the truth, but once again, the truth matters very little to America. The cops won the battle, but they lost the war.
The protestors were a little lacking in follow-up, though. This is a golden opportunity to get the message out but there seems to be an issue: There is no message. There are only pity-parties, such as this first class example of incident exploitation. No manifestos. No pithy statements of objectives. There aren’t even any demands. I still have no idea what they were protesting. There should be a website with clearly defined problems to be addressed and solutions to those problems proposed. But I haven’t seen it. Nothing.
This leads me to my biggest issue with the protestors. In the Army we have a saying: “If you don’t have a solution, don’t point out the problem.” Apparently these kids see a problem. Whether it is a legitimate problem or not I don’t know, but all they are doing is criticizing. As far as I can tell there is no effort to come up with a solution. That’s the government’s job, apparently. There is no coordination, no planning, no foresight. They seem to be flying on the seat of their pants, letting an agenda emerge haphazardly as they go along. As someone with some degree of specialized knowledge on this subject, that’s no way to run a revolution, unless your goal is simply mass hysteria. I can think of several scenarios that would fit that picture.
I do not take sides on this issue. I neither condone the use of tear gas, nor do I agree with the protestor’s allegations of police misconduct. If I have put a little more time into showing what I perceive to be the cops’ point of view it is because no one else seems to. I am trying to avoid Monday morning quarterbacking. Instead I am trying to provide an honest and objective assessment of both sides. I have no illusions that either side will read it, but it might just help a few spectators find a more balanced and hopefully charitable view.
I’ll start off by saying that from a big picture point of view, I don’t know much about this incident. I don’t know much about Occupy Wall Street, I don’t know what (if any) goals they have. I don’t know what these students were trying to accomplish, or whether they knew what they were trying to accomplish, or how legal their protest was. I also don’t know much about the overall decisions from the cops’ point of view. Whether it was necessary to move the protestors or not, whether it was necessary to intervene at all, I can’t say. My issue with this is from a much more technical point of view. That’s not how you run a revolution, and it’s not how you deal with one. Both sides seemed amateurish to me.
First, from the cops point of view: Let’s bypass the question of the legality of breaking up the protest, and the decision to make the arrests and skip straight to how that decision was executed. Cops on UC Davis campus: automatically in hostile territory. They can start by knowing that 1: they are not welcome; 2: they are already assumed guilty until proven innocent; 3: they are surrounded by cameras, which is essentially a hostile PR campaign already under weigh. Thanks to this attitude, combined with the ubiquity of I-Phones and youtube, police ought to know that even before they get on the ground they are already the target of choice for a decentralized mechanism of propaganda gathering and distribution.
This situation is the truth on the ground. Lack of situational awareness of this strategic concern is the root issue behind the mistakes made.
If you watch the video carefully you’ll notice that the only voices you can hear are the voices of protesters. They are not especially unified, not especially controlled, but they have one advantage: they are loud. By contrast the cops are absolutely silent. They aren’t yelling and screaming, only a few of them are doing the talking and they appear to be the command and control (C&C) element for the riot control unit. This is good unit discipline, but bad PR. It means that the only point of view that is going to be heard is the protesters. Anything the cops say afterwards is automatically damage control at best, which leads me to my first critique: where was the megaphone? If you are a riot control unit, your megaphone is your primary weapon. If you don’t have one, you’re wrong. You can’t shout down the protestors, but you can at the least make sure that you are providing a step by step narration of what you are doing, which is then an intrinsic part of any audio record of the event.
Next step, the decision to arrest was made. Already their actions are crippled because they don’t have the shouting power to issue clear instructions or ultimatums. All we see is one muttered contact in the first ten seconds, and then two minutes of the cops standing around, silent and indecisive. I know what they are doing. They are pulling security, while the C&C element makes up their minds what to do. Bravo on maintaining good discipline, but in the long run it makes them look like idiots. At 2:12 you can see one officer make one half-hearted attempt to pull one of the protesters out of their formation. Everyone knows what’s coming, but the cops are not visibly trying to resolve the situation without escalating to the use of chemicals. So I have to ask, what is their protocol? Given a decision to arrest, it might be argued that it’s safer to break up the formation with pepper spray than with batons. I would whole heartedly agree with that. However, there has to be an escalation of force protocol. Warnings (mostly inaudible apparently) notwithstanding, I would question the wisdom of going directly from verbal warning to pepper spray. There has to be an intermediate level of force.
Starting at 2:05 you can hear a female voice yelling “Protect yourselves, cover your eyes.” Why shouldn’t that warning have come from the cops? Nothing enhances your image like visibly and obviously seeking to limit damage to your opponents.
The actual spraying, from 2:25 on is obviously visually disturbing to civilians. It looks so wanton, so cold-blooded, so cruel. He’s spraying it right in their faces and they aren’t violent, aren’t visibly resisting. It screams “Police Brutality.” From a tactical point of view I can understand it, though. Once the decision is made to move them, and the tool chosen is pepper spray, it makes no sense to delay or be half-hearted about it. Either do it or don’t do it, but don’t half do it. It does no one any favors to draw it out. One quick pass across their faces is not going to damage them seriously, and from then on out, it’s all business. Break up the formation, pair up on the protestors, cuff them and move them out. I would have had my paddy wagon closer, but other than that it was tactically pretty good. They don’t lose security either. The perimeter gets pretty thin at one point, but by 4:30 all the moving pieces are resolved. The perimeter is full and solid, and it needs to be. They are surrounded by a crowd, and maybe the crowd was initially spectators, but now they are clearly shifting into protester mode. Anyone who was not involved before is involved now. A solid perimeter is a must.
Say what you will, from the point of view of the cops it is a tactical success. They moved into a hostile crowd, arrested the focal point of that crowd and moved out in less than ten minutes with no injuries on either side. No one broke ranks, no one went crazy, the objective was met and the withdrawal was planned and disciplined. The problem is, no one is ever going to see it from their point of view except those who already know it.
Now, let’s move to the protestor side of the house: Overall I am left with an impression of simple, mass hysteria. They did a lot of things right. There were clearly movers and shakers within the crowd who were periodically able to start a mass chant, aided by the fact that it’s friendly territory for them. Those most involved have at least passive support of everyone around them, and moral support from a majority of potential youtube viewers. They can move with ease, their risk is minimal due to the cops’ rules of engagement, and their payoff is potentially high. The big questions I have really come down to, What’s it all about? Who organized the protest? Who decided to occupy that particular piece of ground, and why? Was pepper spray anticipated? Apparently not, but an intelligent organizer might have anticipated it, and planned a ready-made PR campaign for it. Overall, though, my impression is of hot-headed, young, amateurish disorganization. I would bet most of the people there could not have told you why they were protesting or what their goals were in any coherent form that would hold water for more than a minute. They didn’t need to. Whoever organized it doesn’t need intelligent disciples to provide rational argument on a popular level. He needs bodies to fill space, and vocal cords to fill the air with noise.
The exploitation of the incident was ad hoc, and hot-headed. At 8:56 you can see that the crowd is getting riled up, and is starting to press the cop’s withdrawal. A cop flashes a tear gas canister and a student yells “They’re spraying again.” The crowd backs off a little and at 9:05 you hear a voice start rising out of the chaos. Again, it is not the cops, it is a protestor. He essentially leads the crowd in proclaiming that they are going to give them a moment of peace so that the cops can leave. By 9:33 they are cheering and shouting as if they drove out the invader, when that is simply not what happened. It was a spur of the moment thing, and it was hot-headed. Taunting edgy, adrenalized cops in a situation like that is far from a smart move, tactically. Strategically it makes all the sense in the world because any reaction on their part is more fuel for your fire later on, but the fact remains that it was only the fact that those police officers were disciplined and did not rise to the taunts that saved those kids from a serious hurting. Their restraint was the protestors’ only guarantee of safety. The taunting was a juvenile attempt to appear in control of the situation, when that was far from the truth, but once again, the truth matters very little to America. The cops won the battle, but they lost the war.
The protestors were a little lacking in follow-up, though. This is a golden opportunity to get the message out but there seems to be an issue: There is no message. There are only pity-parties, such as this first class example of incident exploitation. No manifestos. No pithy statements of objectives. There aren’t even any demands. I still have no idea what they were protesting. There should be a website with clearly defined problems to be addressed and solutions to those problems proposed. But I haven’t seen it. Nothing.
This leads me to my biggest issue with the protestors. In the Army we have a saying: “If you don’t have a solution, don’t point out the problem.” Apparently these kids see a problem. Whether it is a legitimate problem or not I don’t know, but all they are doing is criticizing. As far as I can tell there is no effort to come up with a solution. That’s the government’s job, apparently. There is no coordination, no planning, no foresight. They seem to be flying on the seat of their pants, letting an agenda emerge haphazardly as they go along. As someone with some degree of specialized knowledge on this subject, that’s no way to run a revolution, unless your goal is simply mass hysteria. I can think of several scenarios that would fit that picture.
I do not take sides on this issue. I neither condone the use of tear gas, nor do I agree with the protestor’s allegations of police misconduct. If I have put a little more time into showing what I perceive to be the cops’ point of view it is because no one else seems to. I am trying to avoid Monday morning quarterbacking. Instead I am trying to provide an honest and objective assessment of both sides. I have no illusions that either side will read it, but it might just help a few spectators find a more balanced and hopefully charitable view.
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