When uppity protesters occupy a building, they’re basically signing up to get pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground. The NYT reports:

Scores of police officers wearing helmets and carrying riot gear stormed a New School building at 65 Fifth Avenue around 11 a.m. Friday, arresting 19 protesters who had occupied the building as part a determined protest aimed at the university’s president, Bob Kerrey. […]

Witnesses said that the protesters had sought to leave the building by a side door, but were pushed back and pepper sprayed. The witnesses said that several students pushed open a door that exited onto 14th Street, and that police officers stationed outside that door applied pepper spray onto the students in the corridor and slammed the door shut. […]

A videotape shot by a freelancer, Brandon Jordan, showed about half a dozen police officers standing near the door on 14th Street when it was pushed open from inside. The footage then shows officers shaking cans of pepper spray as they hold the door back, spraying inside the corridor, and then slamming the door shut.

Okay, that’s just too much. Blockading a door in an evacuation could kill people. That’s exactly what happened in Mexico City during a raid last June. And excessive force in London likely led to a man’s death at the recent G20 protests. Democracy is built on people willing to take the risk of arrest and jail for a cause the believe in. Let the protesters—even those with a strange cause—leave the building, then spray ’em, toss ’em to the ground, and arrest ’em. It’s only fair.

11 replies on “Comeupance”

  1. The description doesn’t really make full sense. Were the protesters trying to leave and were blocked by police? Or were the police breaking in to spray them. Where is this video!?

  3. Is this the protest that happened at Columbia University? Because those protesters weren’t willing to take the rist of arrest and jail for their cause. Their number one demand was that nobody involved get in trouble.

  4. rich white kids that need to be beaten. You don’t like the school president? Go to a different school. Maybe even a (gasp!)public school. Horrors!

  5. Read this cutesy bit by David Brewster about “police have finally figured out how to contain the anarchists and other street fighters who show up whenever there’s a big summit….The London police have discovered that the best way to neuter demonstrations is not to move everyone on, or disperse troublemakers, but hold them close, cordon them into a diminishing space for hours and hours, as a sort of arbitrary al fresco arrest”

    Makes me sick.

  6. Most cops are bored, and spend all day restraining themselves from fucking people up. Give them an excuse to pepper spray, beat, and/or shoot someone, they experience what you might call irrational exuberance.

    I don’t approve of it, but it’s a fact of life.

  7. $40K a year to go to the New School……must be tough being so oppressed. Then again, the New School is well known for those rich kids who didn’t have the grades for Columbia or NYU. So they’re rich and dumb. Bring out the mace boys.

  9. excuse me, but the nypd don’t exactly restrict themselves only to abusing rich white kids in nyc. perhaps you guys hadn’t noticed the long history (albeit recently much better than it was!) of the nypd being taken to task for unnecessary force. even rich white kids don’t deserve to be pepper sprayed for no reason. also its worth noting that even expensive schools take students on scholarship. That is how I got to attend an expensive school.

  11. So the police have basically set themselves up not as enforcers of the law, protectors of the peace, etc., but as punishers. If the kids were leaving the building they weren’t supposed to be in, what is the purpose of pepperspraying them? Or of shoving them back inside? How is this the function of a police force?

    Yes, yes, the spoiled white kids deserve it. Hilarious.

    Maybe not so hilarious when it’s YOU getting maced?

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