Wednesday, 08 February 2017
Police Defend Lack of Intervention in Violent Protest at UC Berkeley
Written by Raven Clabough

There has been much criticism surrounding the decision by campus police at the University of California, Berkeley not to intervene in the violent protests that successfully shut down a scheduled speech by right-wing gay provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. While eyewitnesses contend that the lack of police intervention allowed the protests to escalate, police are defending the decision to allow the protests to progress, stating that they believed officer intervention would only have served to inflame tensions.

As protesters broke windows, assaulted Trump and Yiannopoulos supporters, set a large fire outside of the building where Yiannopoulos was supposed to speak, and even hurled rocks at police officers, the campus police decided to employ a hands-off approach, though there were only about 150 protesters. Approximately $100,000 worth of damage was done, but only one person was arrested.

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Berkeley police Sgt. Sabrina Reich states that officers feared that their involvement would have provoked serious injuries and increased violence. Further, Reich told Fox News that if the police would have made more arrests, they would have had to give up crowd control duty to escort the arrestees to jail.

“It was a crowd-control situation,” she claimed. “We steered clear of individual action.”

Campus Police Chief Margo Bennett made similar assertions, indicating that having officers move in on the protesters would have caused "a lethal, horror situation.”

"We have to do exactly what we did last night: to show tremendous restraint," she said.

But John Bakhit, a lawyer for the union representing about 400 of the system’s police officers, contends that the opposite is true and that the decision to adopt a “hands-off” approach put both police and students in danger. He argues that officers should have been permitted the discretion to make arrests. "The frustrating thing for the police officers is that they weren't allowed to do their jobs," he added.
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Sadly, it seems that rather than protecting the free speech of non-violent speakers such as Yiannopoulos and his supporters, UC Berkeley is more concerned about the free speech of protesters, even those who resort to violence.
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Similarly, Police Chief Bennett said that the campus may need to reconsider allowing controversial speeches to take place at night.

So the violent rabble-rousers, by being louder and more intimidating than their conservative counterparts, win. It is a tactic right out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm — drowning out the opposition by loudly chanting leftist-approved talking points — “Two legs bad, four legs good!” In this case, it’s, “Conservatives bad, Marxists good,” I suppose.

But despite the totalitarian nature of using violence to shut down free speech, one of the groups taking credit for the protest, Refuse Facism, has deluded itself into believing that the protest was “righteous.” The communist group contends it was part of a “broad, meaningful protest” intent on supporting and defending “critical thought, the ability to pursue and debate what is actually true, science and scientific thinking, the space to dissent,” and to “oppose this whole fascist direction and reordering of the world.”

<b>The hypocrisy and irony of a group shutting down free speech to encourage debate and oppose fascism is clearly lost on them.</b>

https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/e...-at-uc-berkeley

Has it occurred to the administration and police at Berkley that is you reward a behavior you will get more of it.