Editorial: A chance to come together
By: Staff Editorial
Posted on 28. Sep, 2009 in Opinions
Pitt witnessed mayhem on its streets Thursday night.
Demonstrators — most of whom were from out of town — and police — most of whom were from out of town — faced off for hours, using our campus as a battleground.
In the end, more than 10 businesses and other University properties were vandalized. Forty two people were arrested.
Friday night was a different atmosphere, but no less chaotic.
Trying to avoid a repeat of the night before, police deployed about 400 officers into Oakland. While there were no repeats of vandalism and fewer protesters in Oakland, 110 people were arrested, mostly for failure to disperse and disorderly conduct.
Robert Hill, Pitt’s vice chancellor of Public Affairs, said the University will send arrested and cited students to its Judicial Board, which is composed of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as other Pitt staff and faculty members.
Like it did after February’s Super Bowl riot, the board has the authority to suspend or expel students who violated Pitt’s Student Code of Conduct.
But Friday night was very different from both the Super Bowl riot and Thursday night’s demonstrations.
Many people found themselves surrounded by police forces Friday, hearing orders to disperse but having no idea where they can disperse to.
Someone studying in the Cathedral of Learning could, at one point Friday night, walk outside and find themselves behind police lines. Other students on the Towers patio, even if they were stepping out of their dorm room for a cigarette, were gassed and arrested. Others found themselves walking home from work or a friend’s house, blocks away from Schenley Plaza, but nonetheless in an area police deemed an “unlawful assembly.”
It’s certainly possible that some students were instigating violence — and the law will rightfully punish them for it — but many of the students arrested for failure to disperse weren’t arrested because they were standing up to police forces. Some just happened to be within an area, encompassing much of Central Oakland, that police didn’t want anybody to be in.
It’s too early to say that police were either right or wrong in their strategy — after all, there was a string of vandalism here the night before — but one thing is clear: The situation was unfair to students.
Pitt sent out an Emergency Notification Service alert advising students to stay near their residences, but it did not say that students would be arrested if they went outside. To be fair, there’s no way Pitt could have known, but that just shows how unsuspecting the Pitt community was of the intensity of Friday’s police action.
Pitt students, the neighborhood of Oakland and the University itself were all victims of Thursday’s conflict, and Friday’s heightened police actions were a result of that conflict. While it’s too early to know exactly how many of Friday’s arrests were students, many students likely encountered police force without knowing that they were part of the “unlawful assembly” that apparently encompassed more than few blocks, an area where thousands of students live.
What we do know is that Friday night was ridden by confusion and ambiguity. It is unreasonable to hold students to the standards of prescience to not find themselves behind erratic and fast-moving police lines and the ability to decipher the uncoordinated and contradictory orders of an aggregate police force.
As a result, The Pitt News calls for universal amnesty from Pitt’s Judicial Board for all students arrested in Oakland on Friday night. It is absolutely impossible for the Judicial Board to differentiate between students arrested for failure to disperse because they were defying authorities and those arrested for failure to disperse because they were walking home.
The Pitt community has been the victim of enough disruption at the hands of an ideological conflict that is not theirs. It would only be out of disregard and cold indifference to subject the community to further unrest.
3 Responses to “Editorial: A chance to come together”
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Hannah Arendt, writing in On Revolution, observed that “if it is indisputable that book learning and thinking in concepts, indeed of a very high caliber, erected the framework of the American republic, it is no less true that this interest in political thought and theory dried up almost immediately after the task had been achieved.” Arendt goes on to note that “the result of the American aversion from conceptual thought has been that the interpretation of American history…succumbed to theories whose roots of experience lay elsewhere.”
The consequences of this have been more than a little pernicious because, instead of seeing American history through the prism of great American thinkers such as Jefferson, Madison, Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr or Martin Luther King, Jr., it is instead seen through the lens of Europeans such as Tocqueville, Marx or Foucault. And, Arendt concludes, this causes “strange magnifications” and “distortions” because, once their theories crossed the Atlantic, they “lost their basis of reality and with it all limitations through common sense.” It is this sacrifice of common sense upon the altar of inappropriate theory that I find most disturbing.
The American experience resulted in the conviction that power resides in the people. The people can convey this power to the government, but it can be withdrawn if the government proves itself corrupt or incompetent.
Our current dysfunction began in the 1960s . One only has to consider, as Arendt puts it, “the extravagant lengths to which the commitment to nontruthfullness in politics went on at the highest level of government” during the Vietnam War era. But it did not end there. We saw repeats of this performance with the Iraq War and also the recent bailout of the finance industry, where many trillions of dollars, which will eventually have to be repaid by taxpayers, were lavished on a totally corrupt and incompetent financial sector. The multi-million dollar bonuses continue, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, while at the same time young people leaving university cannot find a job.
When a government loses legitimacy the people begin to withdraw their power from the rulers. In the United States we have mechanisms for this to occur peacefully. However, those mechanisms don’t always work. A ruling elite, faced with a loss of power and the subsequent loss of authority, will almost always try to compensate by substituting violence for power and authority. This is what we saw play out on the Pitt campus Friday night—“Shock and Awe” brought home to the American campus.
• Your assertion that most of the demonstrators were from out of town is therefore not only irrelevant, but merely seeks to evade profound underlying issues that very much need to be discussed.
• The “Shock and Awe” theory that informed the police action doesn’t work. It has never worked. As Winston Churchill said about the Blitzkrieg: “In our case, we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled, by the German air raids.” The display of overwhelming force didn’t work then, it didn’t work in Iraq, and it won’t work on the American campus.
• The police are asking us to believe they can’t tell the difference between this (see photo in column 5, row 3)
http://www.pittnews.com/node/20076
and this (see column 1, row 2)
http://www.pittnews.com/node/20118
• The strategy of arresting everybody, including reporters for Pitt News as well as the Post-Gazette, defies all common sense. As Arendt said: “Where all are guilty, no one is.”
•When you claim that the “Pitt community has been the victim of enough disruption at the hands of an ideological conflict that is not theirs” you are again distorting the facts and trying to bury your head in the sand. “What actually happens in such cases is something much more serious,” Arendt wrote in “On Violence” from Crises of the Republic: “the majority clearly refuses to use its power and overpower the disrupters; the academic processes break down because no one is willing to raise more than a voting finger for the status quo. What the universities are up against is the ‘immense negative unity’ of which Stephen Spender speaks in another context. All of which proves only that a minority can have a much greater potential power than one would expect by counting noses in public opinion polls. The merely onlooking majority, amused by the spectacle.., is in fact already the latent ally of the minority.”
I think you are missing the bigger picture here. The problem is not with the police. Those men in black weren’t Pittsburgh officers, but temporary employees that the Mayor employed in a hurry by declaring a STATE OF EMERGENCY.
The riot police had no reason to behave in a reasonable manner. They were here for a short period of time and then they knew they’d be gone. The use of them in Oakland flies in the face of community policing. No one in good conscience would allow these temporary riot police loose on Pitt’s campus.
The problem clearly is with the Mayor of Pittsburgh. The Mayor let this get out of hand. If the Mayor isn’t willing to make changes to see that this never happens again, it’s time to vote him out of office.
(continued)
So this “ideological conflict” you dismiss so cavalierly very much is theirs. It became theirs the moment the first shot was fired in the American Revolution. And in spite the fact the spirit of the American Revolution—public freedom, public happiness, public spirit—has all but been forgotten, obscured by a long succession of revolutionary disasters not theirs in France, Russia, China and elsewhere (Everybody knows a revolution must devour its children, no?), the revolutionary spirit still lives on in the hearts and minds of a handful of American heroes, a few of which can be found on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.