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Bill O’Reilly does’t want to Monday morning quarterback, but even even Megyn Kelly says that Lt John Pike didn’t exactly look “surrounded and threatened” before he started dousing protesters in pepper spray. She did, however, call pepper spray “a derivative of actual pepper … a food product, essentially.” Or as they put it at Grist, ” after all the cop just lightly seasoned these students with a delicious food mist.”

Or as one wag of a commenter at Gawker noted,

• Megyn Kelly on fire hoses: “It’s a sports beverage, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on police dogs: “It’s a family pet, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on tasers: “It’s static cling, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on rubber bullets: “It’s a pencil eraser, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on hand grenades: “It’s a Fourth of July firework, essentially! God bless America.”

via In The Alternate American Universe, Pepper Spray Joins Pizza as a Vegetable : TreeHugger.

The Photo That Will Start A Real Revolution didn’t take long to turn into a meme, nor did it take long for the outrage at the event to spread around the world. But perhaps the best article I [Lloyd Alter on Treehugger] have read is Alexis Madrigal’s Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike. Madrigal notes that Pike is representative of changes in policing since 1999′s battle of Seattle, a militarizing of policing (these were not even municipal police, but campus cops!). This new brutal form of policing coincides with the change in coverage of these events, as video cameras in phones become omnipresent. Ten years ago the cops might have pepper-sprayed kids and said they felt threatened and might get away with it. A hundred videos make that impossible today.

via Outrage Spreads After UC Davis Pepper Spraying : TreeHugger.

At the University of California at Davis yesterday afternoon, police tore down down the tents of students inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and arrested those who stood in their way. Others peacefully demanded that police release the arrested.

UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike walks down a line of people seated quietly on the ground in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, and spray them all with pepper spray at very close range. He is clearing a path for fellow officers to walk through and arrest more students, but it’s as if he’s dousing a row of bugs with insecticide.

via Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis – Boing Boing.