Back to the Salt Mines
The Infamous Brad distills the independent report of the UC Davis pepper-spray affair.
The independent report, which I confess I myself have not yet read, sounds quite a bit like a summary plan for how to do basically everything wrong in a crisis situation. It quite frankly astonishes me, the number of people in the chain of command who were operating under “the impression” that someone else said this or that. Being somewhat familiar with the triplespeak that one occasionally hears in higher educational facilities, I can absolutely see how this comes about.
If Brad’s summary is even remotely accurate, there are several people who should be fired, including the entire legal department, the Chancellor, the UC Davis police chief, and Officer Nameless, just to name a few.
It’s the Milgram Experiment, or (ironically enough) the Stanford Prison thing. You talk to the people who actually did the horrible things, and it turns out that they’d abdicated their moral responsibility; just pass the buck up to the next level and blame everything on the boss. “Did your boss actually say that you should shoot them with pepper spray right in the face?” “Well, no, but the boss said I should use pepper spray on people if necessary to control the situation, and that was how I felt the situation could best be controlled. I mean, presumably he’d thought about what pepper spray could do and concluded that it was okay for me to use it. Really, I was just the mechanism by which he delievered pepper spray.”Report
Something of that, to be sure.
What’s really annoying is that in this case, the boss said, “Don’t use pepper spray”, and the guy said, “We’re going to be carrying pepper spray” and the boss said, “Don’t carry it” and the guy said, “We’re carrying it.” and they both walked out of that conversation thinking two different things happened.
Now, this stuff happens. There’s a whole library of books written on clear communication and how to get your point across and remove ambiguity and all that sort of thing. And, generally, I find that people on the line don’t read those books or have training in that sort of thing and to an extent, this is somewhat normal because they’re not supposed to be decision-makers, they’re supposed to be decision-implementers.
But the Legal department? The Chancellor? The Chief of the campus police? These are supposed to be people who know what to get in writing and why.Report
Except the results of the actual Milgram experiment say that when the authority figure actually issues orders to use pepper spray on innocent people, the subjects refused to comply. Its only when people are allowed to “do the right thing” on their own initiative, that they do really unconscionable things.Report
That’s a pretty stunning takedown. I kept waiting for it to get a little better. Until I got to the part about the military grade pepper spray that is illegal in CA for police to have or use. Then I stopped waiting for it to get better.Report
You must see incipient stuff like this all the time.
“Oh, God, they’re going to explode if they don’t change this policy…”Report
There is a pretty good rule of thumb that generally works – though it will irritate League libertarians:
The larger and more public an organization is, the less likely that these things will happen – even if they will be more visible.
This certainly appears to be the exception that makes the rule. We’ll never know, but I find myself wondering how much of the “I was sure I made it clear” was actually ever said.Report
Having been a part of several institutions of learning over the last 30 years, in various roles, I can say that it is not uncommon for nobody to make anything clear.
If you make something clear, you’ve just put yourself out there in a way that you can be determined, in the future, to be wrong. And since (typically) educational institutions don’t have profit/loss statements and layoffs are rare, the one way to get your ass handed to you is to say, “You will do *this* when *that* happens, and here it is in writing”… and what that happens, you get flamed in the face.
Getting people to commit to anything in an accountable way is difficult.Report
What makes you believe that profit and loss statements help?Report
“The larger and more public an organization is, the less likely that these things will happen – even if they will be more visible.”
Not sure why it should irritate libertarian; most are really big on transparency (particularly in actual public institutions)Report
I’m guessing that everything is assumed to irritate us libertarians, but especially any use of the word public.” 😉
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Especially when tied to restrooms, outcries, offerings, and displays of affection.Report
“displays of affection.”
The Folsom Street Fair is (not my thing, but) a rather libertarian event.Report
Reading this out of context, all I could think of was Larry Craig.
This is why libertarians never use public restrooms.Report
I was discussing libraries with David Friedman once (on Usenet) and he objected to my calling them “public libraries”.. He preferred the term “government-run”, because the privately owned ones he would like to see would also be open to the public.Report
To be fair, when anti-smoking people talk about banning it in “public places” they’re more-or-less using his logic as they are not referring to government-owned or government-run places.Report
And the “public accommodations” described by the ADA and civil rights bills are also privately owned, as are most public restrooms (and in the UK, public schools and public houses.)Report
The comments on the post clarify the “illegal in CA” a bit. It’s more appropriately described as “not on the approved equipment list for UC Davis campus police”. You can still buy one and have it (you don’t even need to be involved with law enforcement, in fact.)
Again, it’s not something that they were supposed to use (or have) on that day, but it’s not like they were committing an actual felony crime by having it.
(And the instructions on it are pretty clear that it’s not supposed to be used on anything closer than six feet.)Report
Anything for which they are not explicitly trained in its use is illegal.
What constitutes “training” is an entirely other matter.Report
Black bile rising…
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And you didn’t entrust a child to these miscreants.Report