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On Monday night, Fox News decided to tackle the story of the students who were pepper sprayed while protesting corporate control of the country during an Occupy demonstration at the University of California, Davis.
Bill O'Reilly, host of the popular conservative television talk show The O'Reilly Factor, took up the issue with Fox News anchor and host of the channel's America Live, Megyn Kelly. The conversation unfolded as follows:
Bill O'Reilly: Pepper spray -- that just burns your eyes, right?
Megyn Kelly: Right. It's a derivative of actual pepper. It's a food product, essentially. A lot of experts are looking at that and asking -- is that the real deal? Has it been diluted because --
Bill O'Reilly: They should have more of a reaction than that.
A few minutes later, Kelly stated, "I don't know that the cops did anything wrong," suggesting that it made more sense to use pepper spray to scatter protesters than touch them. Her commentary continued as footage of Lieutenant John Pike spraying sitting students -- who appeared desperate to cover their faces without breaking the chain they had created with their bodies -- played on the screen.
Throughout the conversation, Kelly referred to police response as "reasonable use of force," despite conceding that several protesters ended up going to the hospital following exposure.
The segment failed to mention what UC Davis professor Nathan Brown reported in an open letter to UC Davis chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. The protesting students who were seated in a circle around their Occupy encampment on the university quad (for which the chancellor had granted permission earlier that week) linked arms to keep police from removing them.
"Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students," Brown writes. "Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked."
November 21, 2011, Davis, California: Hundreds of Occupy UCDavis protesters return for another day of demonstrations at the UC Davis quad. Protesters vow to continue their protest in the wake of last week's pepper spray. (Credit Image: © Sacramento Bee/ZUMAPRESS.com)
This is what Brown reports happened next (emphasis mine):
Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.
Let's take a look at this "food product." Megyn Kelly is correct that pepper spray is essentially a food product -- if by that she means that it's derived from capsaicins, the active components in various types of pepper.
According to a report on Gizmodo, footage of the incident suggests that police were packing MK-9 canisters of pepper spray (of the 0.7 percent carpaicinoid solution variety), one of the stronger available forms of this "less-than-lethal" weapon. Per their research:
It's much stronger than the 0.2 percent that's authorized for tactical deployment, making this a sizable hammer for this particular nail. And even if it were an appropriate dose, it was sprayed at near point-blank range [at UC Davis]. The recommended minimum distance? Six feet, and it remains effective at 18-20 feet.
At that high-level dosage, the burning, boiling eye sensation and difficulty breathing would obviously be amplified. Any form of pepper spray can be serious trouble -- even lethal -- for someone with asthma or a heart condition, and we're talking the stuff the Marines train with here.
This stuff just burns the eyes, right? Wrong. Since we're talking about "food products" here, let's put it in context with some other peppers to give you an idea of what kind of heat we're looking at. Fortunately for us, in 1912 a man by the name of Wilbur Scoville created a method for analyzing the strength of peppers' burn and a scale against which to measure them (to loosely quote Newton, "if we can see further, it's that we stand on the shoulders of giants").
"Hot peppers" via Shutterstock.
According to the scale, a jalapeño pepper packs a punch of between 3,500 and 8,000
