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Qarc protest berkeley12/26/2023 ![]() “We were required to clear the room, and we had to arrest a few people when they tried to jump over the rope. In the case of the Napolitano incident, Roderick said, the Regents declared an unlawful assembly after demonstrators upended the meeting. But we also had a lot of demonstrations on student fee issues and the Occupy movement. “Actually, the past couple of years have been fairly tumultuous. “It’s not as bad as it used to be, but we still have our moments,” Roderick said. Though media coverage has declined since the Vietnam War era (ho-hum, another Berkeley protest), demonstrations are still very much part of Berkeley culture-and an enforcement issue for the UCPD. “We try to walk that line between respecting individual rights-including the right to protest-with upholding the law and protecting the rights of people who are not protesting.” “It’s a matter of balance,” said Roderick. The advisories haven’t changed all that much over the years, and are hence somewhat predictable: Obey the orders of officers, expect force to be used if you attempt to cross police lines or barricades, do not vandalize property or police equipment, and if you choose to be arrested, follow police instructions. Printed as four-color flyers, you can pick them up at 1 Sproul Hall or access the information online. It turns out the department publishes a set of guidelines on protests. Still, the protest and subsequent arrests got us wondering: Have campus police guidelines on demonstrations changed much since the antic Sixties? And where do protests-and arresting protestors-fit into the UC Police Department’s quotidian duties? We talked to UCPD Captain Stephen Roderick for details. ![]() She observed she supported the DREAM Act-which extends conditional permanent residency to undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors and graduated from high school-and that the education of all students, regardless of documentation or the lack thereof, is the bedrock business of UC. Napolitano, for her part, quickly expressed a certain solidarity with the protesters, who were mostly undocumented immigrant students. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano as the next President of the UC system may have brought a nostalgic tear or two to the rheumy eyes of aging Berkeley radicals, but it wasn’t the most auspicious start to her tenure. Yesterday’s brouhaha at a special meeting of the University of California Regents confirming U.S. “The legal remedies haven’t been exhausted,” he said, noting that his group had asked a court of appeal to halt construction Wednesday morning.For a brief period, it seemed like the UC Berkeley of popular imagination-protesters reviling a university appointment, with the incident escalating and ultimately culminating in the arrest of four students. Harvey Smith, president of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group, said he was happy work had stopped but that officials never should have tried to commence it in the first place. University officials, who rushed to begin work just hours after a judge issued a ruling allowing it, said they would “assess the situation in order to determine how best to proceed” with construction of a project that would provide housing for students and homeless people. It was unclear what would happen next or when. In a statement, officials said safety is the university’s highest priority and that construction workers and law enforcement had been “withdrawn from the site,” which has long been a symbol of 1960s counterculture and which many view as hallowed community ground. The move was a victory for protesters, who had raced to the park soon after UC officials erected a fence around it early Wednesday morning. Following hours of angry and tense protests, UC Berkeley officials abruptly announced Wednesday afternoon that they would pause work on transforming historic People’s Park into housing “due to the destruction of construction materials, unlawful protest activities and violence on the part of some.”
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