Editorial: California in 2010 is not Kent State in 1970 - Shame on You!

The Police Chief of University of California should resign immediately! Not because of the terrible lack of leadership,  Not because of the obvious sub-par training of her officers, but because she knowingly lied to the public while covering up the facts.

A University of California police officer drew his gun and pointed it at students protesting meeting of the UC regents yesterday morning, and the UC San Francisco police chief seems to be attempting to sell a complete distortion of reality.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, UCSF police chief Pamela Roskowski told a press conference yesterday that the officer drew his weapon after a protester took his baton and hit him on the head with it, but that claim appears to be contradicted by a video recording of the incident.

• The video footage shows that officer standing alone, apart from the crowd, letting the baton fall from his own hand as he draws his weapon.
  
• She says that a student beat the officer with that baton, But video footage of the five-second scuffle that preceded the officer's act shows no such beating.
  
• She says someone yelled "take the gun." But video footage shows nothing but confusion in the moments before the gun was drawn, confusion that turned to shock and fear as the weapon appeared.

And yet the chief of the University of San Francisco Police Department says the officer who drew his gun and pointed it at a group of rowdy but fundamentally non-violent student protesters showed "great restraint."

Forty years ago, in the spring of 1970, law enforcement agents twice opened fire at angry student demonstrators on American college campuses -- first at Kent State University in Ohio, and then, ten days later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Six students were killed. Twenty-one others were wounded by gunfire. One remains paralyzed to this day.

In the wake of those killings Richard Nixon appointed a presidential commission to study the crisis in the nation's universities, and when that commission published its report a few months later, it called the Kent State and Jackson State shootings "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable." A nation "driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth," the commission declared, "is a nation on the edge of chaos. A nation that has lost the allegiance of its youth is a nation that has lost part of its future."

Kent State Shooting 1970

Condensed and abused from Article @ Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angus-johnston/u-of-california-in-crisis_b_785392.html
And stuff from: http://studentactivism.net/2010/11/17/uc-gun/
And the Video: http://www.ktvu.com/video/25832839/index.html and http://www.ktvu.com/news/25827024/detail.html
Kent State Pic: http://www.uiowa.edu/~policult/assets/VietNam/KentState.jpg