Cops & Courts

The traditional weather prediction for March is that if it comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb. This year the aphorism may also apply to April for the Bay Area medical cannabis community. 

UC Davis police officers dousing a line of seated Occupy protesters with pepper spray should and could have been prevented, according to a scathing 190-page report released Wednesday by a campus task force created to investigate the incident.

“Even a cursory reading of the report confirms what we have known from the start: Friday, Nov. 18 was a bad day for the UC Davis community and for the entire UC system,” UC President Mark Yudof said in a statement on the release of UC Davis pepper-spray report.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler has been a New York Times correspondent in Israel and Moscow. In his two most recent books, released earlier this year, he turns his attention to the erosion of civil liberties in the United States. In Rights at Risk and The Rights of the People, Shipler argues that both the War on Terror and the War on Crime have allowed the government to seep into Americans' personal lives in unconstitutional ways. Shipler discussed his new books with KALW's Criminal Justice Editor, Rina Palta.