UC Berkeley Pledges to Investigate Police Response to Occupy Cal Protest

Video shows officers dragging a professor and a student to the ground by their hair
By: Jennifer Gollan

A video showing police at the University of California, Berkeley, dragging two protesters, including a professor, to the ground by their hair during an Occupy protest earlier this week has stoked outrage among some faculty and legal experts.

The video, posted on YouTube, shows a police officer yanking the hair of Celeste Langan, an English professor at Berkeley, and shoving her toward a clutch of waiting officers who then force her to the ground. Langan and six other protesters were arrested Wednesday for resisting and delaying officers. They were among hundreds of activists who were trying to prevent police from removing a fledgling Occupy encampment from Sproul Plaza.

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Langan, who was released late Wednesday after roughly five hours in police custody, intends to file a complaint with the University of California Police Department on Monday accusing authorities of using excessive force. She says as officers approached, she stuck out her wrist and said, “Arrest me.” Instead, they grabbed her by the hair.

“I was scared, it was unexpectedly violent,” Langan said in a telephone interview Friday. “I thought they would arrest me for refusing to disperse — not yank my hair. I thought we were engaged in civil disobedience.”

Langan says her scalp still hurts from the encounter. She also sustained a scrape on her right hand and a swollen upper lip during the arrest.

Calls to the UCPD requesting comment Friday were not returned. The department was closed for the Veterans Day holiday.

The video also shows police pulling a student, Timothy Fisken, by the hair and throwing him to the ground.

“They absolutely overreacted,” said Fisken, who is earning his doctorate in political science at Berkeley. “We never put the police in danger or provoked them. It sends a message that Berkeley is not a place where you can exercise free speech unless you can do it in a limited way that the university has decided it can permit.”

Asked to review the video on Friday, Claire Holmes, a spokeswoman for UC Berkeley, promised a thorough investigation.

“The images are extremely disturbing,” Holmes said. “Obviously we will be looking into the incident and appropriate measures will be taken. We will have to go through an investigation.”

Holmes said she was unsure when the investigation would begin or whether the officers involved would be placed on administrative leave.

After reviewing the video at the request of The Bay Citizen, Craig Futterman, a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago, said the officers should be fired for using gratuitous force.

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“I was appalled by what I saw in the video,” said Futterman, who directs the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project of the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. “Not just as a law professor, but as a human being.

Futterman said the video showed “a clear excessive use of force and a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment,” which protects people against unreasonable and excessive use of force by police.

If Langan decided to file a lawsuit against Berkeley for violating her civil rights, Futterman said she would have “a very strong case because there is video evidence."

Before the video surfaced, campus administrators sent a letter to faculty and students on Thursday defending officers' behavior.

"We call on the protesters to observe campus policy, or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly non-violent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions," Robert J. Birgeneau, UC Berkeley's chancellor, wrote.

Michael Risher, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said dragging people down by their hair would rarely be acceptable in a protest like Wednesday's. Other videos have surfaced from the protest showing officers in riot gear from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and the UCPD forcefully jabbing and striking protesters with their batons.

The ACLU and the National Lawyers’ Guild on Thursday sent a letter to the UCPD and Berkeley’s chancellor calling for an independent review of police conduct and requesting copies of the university’s policies on crowd control and the use of force.

“It is a good development that we now have as an objective picture as possible about what is going on,” Risher said. “The record seems to show a disturbing pattern of the use of excessive force against peaceful demonstrators.”

Brian Barsky, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, who was also at the protest on Wednesday, said he and other faculty members are upset about the administration’s treatment of protesters.

"Peaceful protests should be responded to by gentler means, beginning with verbal engagement and dialogue," Barsky said. "The level of physical force that was brought to bear by the police on students and faculty was unjustified and inappropriate for the circumstances.  Our campus is telegraphing to the world a message of insensitivity and inhumanity."