Officials at the University of California, Davis should release the names of all the campus police officers involved in the pepper-spraying of student protesters in 2011, the California Supreme Court affirmed this week.
The court’s ruling dismisses an effort by a university police union to overturn a June 2013 ruling by a state appellate court, which said the state’s public records law allows the public to obtain the names of the officers involved in the incident, the Los Angeles Times reported. In a report commissioned by the university that criticized how campus police and administrators handled the incident, the officers’ identities had been redacted.
In response, The Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times filed a lawsuit in 2012 to receive access to the withheld names.
In 2011, about three dozen students took part in an Occupy protest where they remained on the lawn of the main quad of campus to display their displeasure with economic inequality in the area. When the protesters refused to move after police officers asked them to do so, officers pepper-sprayed the student protesters in the eyes.
When video footage of the interaction went viral, the information of the main police officer, Lt. John Pike, was released by activist hacker group Anonymous, according to the International Business Times.
While the Supreme Court did not hear the police union’s appeal, a full opinion issued Wednesday cites a similar case it ruled on earlier this year, where the court determined that police agencies must reveal the names of officers involved in on-duty shootings unless disclosure would pose a safety threat.
The news follows another incident of perceived police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, where Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. In that case, Wilson was named days after public outcry. Although some police departments do release officers’ names and details in use-of-force investigations, there is no consensus, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.