“Sometimes, when “all the facts are in,” it’s worse.” – Brad Hicks –
I came across this article while doing my research for the Daily Sausage, and wanted to do a full write-up, because it represents a textbook example of how disasters occur and what happens when they do.
I work in information security for a living, and a large part of that is preemptive risk management. What that means is that I have to anticipate problems before they happen, and do whatever I can to mitigate the damage those problems cause when they actually do happen. In my experience, whenever there is a disaster, three things have happened.
1) Every part of the chain of command was warned there was an issue and ignored those warnings.
2) There were safeguards in place to prevent the issue from happening, and they were utterly disregarded or overruled by every single person involved.
3) No matter how high up the screw-ups went, the inevitable shitstorm is always the worst for the guy on the bottom.
When I read the UC Davis report, it’s immediately obvious what happened. The University decided on a course of action contrary to the law, and no one made it crystal clear to them that what they were doing was illegal. From my own experience, I find that in these kinds of situations, absolutely nothing is ever written down. There is no paper trail; it’s all hearsay and innuendo and everyone covering their ass. When the campus police were issued an illegal order by the University Chancellor, no one in the chain of command, from the chief of police all the way down to the officer with the can of pepper spray, stopped and said “We can’t and shouldn’t be doing this.”. Finally, when all this is said and done, because literally every single person that might have stopped this madness before it happened utterly failed at doing their job, a police officer was put in a stressful situation, panicked, and is now probably going to lose his job. If there were justice in the world, every person involved in this situation would lose their job, starting with the Chancellor and the Chief of Police. However, the real world does not work that way. They will get an official reprimand from the university or something similar. It is unlikely that they will lose their jobs, because they will blame it on the person directly below them, and ultimately all that matters is that someone pays, and it’s always the guy that pulls the trigger that does.
With all that being said, the UC Davis incident speaks to a much deeper problem within our society, especially as it related to law enforcement. Since 9/11, police departments around the country, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, have been issued military grade weapons (like the Mark 9 pepper sprayer used by the unnamed officer in this case). The have been trained in military tactics. More importantly, they understand the relationship between the use of these weapons and tactics and the funding provided for them; if they don’t demonstrate that they’re needed, the funding for them will go somewhere else. We as a nation collectively lost our minds after 9/11, and I’m not sure we’re entirely sane yet. Benjamin Franklin, that esteemed Founding Father, once said that “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We are treated like criminals when we try and fly on a plane. Our police are armed and trained like paramilitary soldiers. We have given the federal government, which as we all know has never had issues with spying on American citizens (*cough* J. Edgar Hoover! J. Edgar Hoover! *cough*), unprecedented new powers to look through every aspect of our lives if they even believe we’re terrorists. We’ve capitulated to the idea of letting unmanned, armed airplanes flown from an office building in New Mexico fire rockets at some guy on the other side of the planet on the off chance he’s a terrorist.
We’ve given up our precious liberty, but in doing so have dramatically decreased our safety, both from within and from without. We can point to the UC Davis incident as some random disaster, but the truth is that everything that happened is systemic in nature: a desire to crush dissent, ignoring legal advice, acting in an illegal manner, and scapegoating the person that was forced to carry out an illegal act. Without acknowledging that there are a hundred UC Davis’ out there waiting to happen, we’re almost certain of reading a report like this again.
