UC Davis / Four Perspectives

UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident, Four Perspectives by Andy Baio

UC Davis

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professional relations

"People who have an official, professional relation to other men’s sufferings, for instance, judges, police officers, doctors—in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this formal, soulless attitude to human personality the judge needs but one thing—time—in order to deprive an innocent man of all rights of property, and to condemn him to penal servitude. Only the time spent on performing certain formalities for which the judge is paid his salary, and then—it is all over. Then you may look in vain for justice and protection in this dirty, wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles from a railway station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of justice when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a rational and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy—for instance, a verdict of acquittal—calls forth a perfect outburst of dissatisfied and revengeful feeling?"

- Anton Chekhov, from “Ward No 6," as cited in Was King Hammurabi a Commie? by Charles Simic

"There's a suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair. Is that true?"

0:00 - 0:09 -- a shot of a wheelchair, static
0:09 -- camera whip pans left. a blur of yellow police jacket appears just to the left of the disabled protester, just out of what was previously the frame.
0:10 -- whip pan right, capturing another police officer running toward the wheelchair (and thus the first officer)
0:12 -- camera pans left again, following a woman's shout
0:16 -- next to the cameraman, a male voice says "over there, pushing forward"; the camera pans back right and searches for the frame to capture the action
0:19 -- the camera finds a view to the protester in a wheelchair, who is in the same location as 10 seconds previously, at this point being dragged out of the chair and pushed to the ground by 2 police officers. shouts of protest from the crowd.
0:22 -- police officer in riot gear stops a protester from intervening.
0:24 -- police officer in yellow jacket drags the disabled protester along the pavement by his arms.
0:28 -- disabled protester pushed to the ground by the same officer.
0:30 -- the man who was assisting the wheelchair tries to pull him back up into the chair. the police officer -- the same one who dragged him previously -- this time drags the disabled protester all the way to the curb, throwing him down at the end, twisting his body in order get full leverage on the throw.
0:39 -- other protesters begin to confront this officer.
0:44 -- confrontation begins to escalate verbally.
0:48 -- the other police officer involved in pushing the protester to the ground, as well as the officer dressed in riot gear, physically pull at the first officer to separate him from the protesters. he looks back at the crowd from which he's being pulled.


***


"Now these pictures APPEAR to show Jody McIntyre, 20-year-old fiscal activist and blogger, who suffers from cerebral palsy, being pulled out of his wheelchair and dragged across the road to the pavement."
[Emphasis as originally spoken by BBC presenter Ben Brown]






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