UCI Student Protesters Face More Aggressive Police Tactics

Irvine -- At UC Irvine, student and worker protests over labor conditions on campus seem to have reached a new threshold, with the arrest last Wednesday of an Vietnamese American student demonstrator at a peaceful if loud campus protest over the University's lack of progress in ending the subcontracting of the work of UCI groundskeepers.

On our Monday October 23 2006 edition of KUCI's Subversity show, we plan to talk with UCI Worker-Student Alliance activists Fernando Chirino and Dennis Lopez about what may be behind this more aggressive -- and disturbing -- turn in campus policing and what is behind adminstration's resistance to move more quickly to inhouse the groundskeepers, who now work as Commercial Landscaping Service. Inhousing is expected to improve working conditions for workers.

Observers at the scene say that UCI police challenged demonstrators to touch them and then arrested a student demonstrator who apparently took their advice. Two bigger cops then grabbed her, twisting her arms, and she was transported to the police station, where she was cited for battery on a police officer and released.

If charges are not tossed out by the District Attorney, she faces a $2,000 fine and/or six months in jail if convicted.

You can listen to an earlier show with UCI's WSA on Subversity in June 2006: .

The show airs Mondays from 9-10 am on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, and is webcast simultaneously via kuci.org.

Thanx for listening.

dan

Daniel C. Tsang
Host, Subversity "What's behind and beyond the Orange Curtain"
Mondays 9-10 a.m. on 88.9 fm, kuci.org
KUCI talk page: http://kuci.org/talk/
Subversity: 
http://kuci.org/~dtsang
E-mail: subversity@kuci.org
Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616, USA
Member, National Writers' Union, http://www.nwu.org
NWU is the nation's 
only labor union for freelancers
Member, UC-AFT Local 2226 at UC Irvine

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