To Lt. John Pike and his Pepper Spray

Lt. John Pike has now become the occupy movement's face of evil. Students and faculty justifiably expressed outrage when they witnessed this man nonchalantly pepper-spraying peaceful protestors. This is pretty fucked up, it makes you wonder what kind of person would do such a thing?

But let's not forget, since the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, since the WTO protests in the 1990's, and since the Miami protests in the 2000's, our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let's not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics.

If we vilify Pike, we let these institutions off way too easy.

It's a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away. And while it's his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I'm sure that he's a man like me, and he didn't become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably.

Someone has to do it.