I've been trying to understand what has motivated the crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protests. Its clear what occurred in Tennessee - right wing agitators had been publicly demanding that the government act for weeks. The motivations were entirely partisan, and ultimately declared unconstitutional, as they should have been. But what about Oakland? UC Davis?

Is it really a sanitization concern? You'd think that these OWS people would have that sorted out - you'd think that park cleaning could have been negotiated. I just don't get the necessity of marching in with batons and beating these people down. Why the fuck would you do that?

In some cities like Washington, DC, there has been no beat down. Its really just a non-issue. If its a non-issue in Washington, why isn't it a non-issue in New York?

I partially feel that the motivation in New York is similar to the motivation in Nashville. Its annoying to have people there expressing a point of view that we disagree with. We don't like it. We want them to go away. I want to be able to go sit in that park and have smoke and I can't now because of all of these damn hippies.

In other words, the American people fundamentally do not respect eachother's right to freedom of speech and assembly. The "right" to go into the park and have a smoke is more important than the right to freedom of speech and assembly. We gotta march an army in there to defend that right to sit in the park and have a smoke.

Does that really add up?

This rant and some of the things it links points to another explanation. Our country's domestic law enforcement is more militarized than it used to be. These demonstrations of excessive force are the only way that our local governments know how to deal with things anymore. Our default reaction is to minor annoyances is to bring excessive force to bear on the situation.

This is what the OWS protestors have demonstrated - not just our country's intolerance for the exercise of its own values, but its increasing domestic militarization. We are exactly what they accuse us of being, and the proof is the way that we've reacted to them.

What we have seen in the last two weeks around the country, and now at Davis, is a radical departure from the way police have handled protest in this country for half a century. Two days ago an 84-year-old woman was sprayed with a chemical assault agent in Seattle in the same manner our students at Davis were maced. A Hispanic New York City Councilman was brutally thrown to the ground, arrested, and held cuffed in a police van for two hours for no reason at all, and was never even told why he was arrested. And I am sure you all know about former Marine Lance Cpl. Scott Olsen, who suffered a fractured skull after police hit him with a tear gas canister, then rolled a flash bomb into the group of citizens trying to give him emergency medical care.

Last week, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper published an essay arguing that the current epidemic of police brutality is a reflection of the militarization (his word, not mine) of our urban police forces, the result of years of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror. Stamper was chief of police during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, and is not a voice that can be easily dismissed.

Yesterday, the militarization of policing in the U.S. arrived on my own campus.

These issues go to the core of what democracy means. We have a major economic crisis in this country that was brought on by the greedy and irresponsible behavior of big banks. No banker has been arrested, and certainly none have been pepper sprayed. Arrests and chemical assault is for those trying to defend their homes, their jobs, and their schools.

Bob Ostertag: Militarization Of Campus Police