Police Sued Over Use of Pepper Spray on Protesters

Courts: Videotapes show officers putting liquid in demonstrators' eyes
during Headwaters Forest sitin.

Protesters defied warnings and had protected themselves against being
separated.

SAN FRANCISCOArmed with videotapes of law enforcement officers
methodically swabbing liquid pepper spray into the eyes of nonviolent
protesters, attorneys sued the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department and the
Eureka Police Department on Thursday for violating the civil rights of
environmental demonstrators.

The 90 minutes of videotapestriking for an overall sense of calm, not
dramapaint a picture of polite police officers carrying out a
wellplanned strategy against protesters posing no obvious threat of
physical harm during two separate sitins.

"Law enforcement has a continuum of force," attorney Mark Harris said after
filing the federal lawsuit here on behalf of nine protesters. "They may not
use pepper spray to force someone to do something when they are not
resisting."

To the women and men who had the paininducing liquid applied to their
unprotected eyes this fall while protesting the harvest of ancient redwoods
along the North Coast, the police action was nothing short of torture, they
said.

To law enforcement experts, the incident is far less cut and dried.

Because the liquid form of oleoresin capsicum has only recently come on the
market, there is no legal precedent for its use by law enforcement.

"Pepper spray is usually viewed as a lesser form of force than something
that might be more physical," said Hubert Williams, director of the
nonprofit Police Foundation in Washington. "What it means to put the spray
in the eye in liquid form I don't know."

Humboldt County Sheriff Dennis Lewis referred all calls to county counsel
Tamara Falor, who refused to comment because her office had not been served
with the suit.

Eureka Police Chief Arnold Milsap did not return repeated telephone calls
seeking comment. Capt. Bill Honsal, in charge of field operations, would
only say that pepper spray is approved for use by department policy.

"We believe that our directives and our policies provide for the selection
of a number of force options, including the use of OC spray or Mace to
assist us in making lawful arrests and intervening in situations that could
or may become worse," Honsal said. "You had to be there to understand why
we selected that."

But the American Civil Liberties Union, which has spent several years
studying and fighting police use of pepper spray, argues that most law
enforcement policies nationwide allow employing the spray only if officers
face a serious physical threat.

In the two videotaped incidentsand a third for which attorneys had no
videotapethe protesters are alleged to have used no force in resisting
efforts by large numbers of officers to arrest them.

"This was not one or two rogue cops in a tense situation going too far,"
said John Crew, an attorney with the ACLU in San Francisco. "This was a set
of officers . . . carrying out a plan in a clearly intentional manner.
Their clear intent was to use this excruciating and serious weapon to
extract the degree of compliance that they desired."

The backdrop for the protests is the Headwaters Forest, believed to contain
the largest stands of redwoods in the nation not under government protection.

Much of this forest is owned by Pacific Lumber Co. When Charles Hurwitz
took over the firm 11 years ago, he revealed plans to speed the removal of
the biggest and oldest trees for lumber.

After nearly a decade of protest and negotiations, federal officials are
moving to acquire 7,500 acres of oldgrowth redwoods near Eureka from
Pacific Lumber.

Environmentalists have long argued that the whole forest should be protected.

In one of the incidents in question, a protest Sept. 15 at Pacific Lumber's
Scotia headquarters, seven demonstrators staged a sitin in the company's
lobby.

The seated men and women linked arms through metal tubes called "black
bears," which keep officers from applying pressure and pain to separate
them. Deputies told the demonstrators to disband.

When they would not, the deputies warned them that pepper spray would be
used. Officers warned them at five, three and twominute intervals that
if they disbanded, pepper spray would not be used.

When the time was up, they gave them another chance to leave and then
swabbed the liquid pepper spray into the eyes of a male protester.

"Let go and we put water in your eyes and give you medical treatment," one
deputy said.

When the protesters did not, officers proceeded to swab the burning liquid
into the eyes of three others.

"When you first get it applied, it's so painful," said Vernell "Spring"
Lundberg, 17, one of the protesters at Pacific Lumber. "You think about the
burning and your face being eaten by this acid."

When asked why she did not leave when ordered to by police, Lundberg said
that "if I unlocked my arms I would have been granting them the knowledge
that this tactic worked."

The second taped protest was a sitin by four women in the Eureka office of
Rep. Frank Riggs (RWindsor). In this instance, two women had the liquid
swabbed in their eyes while a third was sprayed in the eyes at close range.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the protesters on whom officers applied
the pepper spray and the Headwaters Defense Fund, an antilogging
organization.

The group is asking the courts to declare that the use of pepper spray
liquid on peaceful demonstrators violates the U.S. Constitution and
requests that the court permanently enjoin officers from administering
pepper spray during such protests.

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