The chancellor of the University of California, Davis, said Monday that its police chief had been placed on administrative leave, three days after two campus police officers sprayed seated protesters with pepper spray during a demonstration aligned with Occupy Wall Street.
The university’s chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, indicated that she was trying to calm the campus community amid widespread outrage at the police tactics. Referring to the temporary removal of the police chief, Annette Spicuzza, Ms. Katehi said in a statement Monday, “It has become clear to me that this is a necessary step toward restoring trust on our campus.”
She named Matt Carmichael as interim police chief. Ms. Katehi also sped up an internal probe into the incident and asked the district attorney’s office to conduct an investigation into her police department’s use of force on the protesters.
On Sunday, the university said that two police officers had been placed on administrative leave with pay pending an investigation into Friday’s incident. In videos that were widely distributed over the Internet, two police officers in riot gear were seen dousing about a dozen protesters with pepper spray as they sat on a sidewalk with their arms entwined.
The announcement about Ms. Spicuzza came hours before a rally by students affiliated with the Occupy U.C. Davis movement.
At the rally, which commenced at noon local time, students who said they had been injured by the police on Friday took turns speaking on stage. A live video stream from the rally showed a large crowd gathered on the campus quad. Ms. Katehi was expected to address the gathering later in the day.
Over the weekend, a Facebook page for the future protests urged attendees to call for Ms. Katehi’s resignation and to “show solidarity and support to the students who were beaten and sprayed by U.C. Davis police in riot gear.”
The use of pepper spray came after students and other protesters set up tents on campus in a show of support for the Occupy movement and in solidarity with earlier protests at the University of California, Berkeley.
The reactions to it — cries of police brutality and pledges to reconvene protesters on a larger scale — seemed to mirror the reactions in New York, Seattle and elsewhere when the police quelled recent protests with force.
As police officers moved to take down the tents at Davis on Friday afternoon, some protesters on a sidewalk on the campus quad linked arms and refused to stand.
In one of the many YouTube videos of the episode, bystanders chant, “Don’t shoot students” before an officer shakes a pepper spray canister and walks before a line of seated protesters, spraying them. The protesters’ faces and clothes are quickly covered in the orange-tinted spray.
Some protesters are heard screaming and crying as they are arrested. One bystander is heard shouting: “These are children! These are children!”
Eleven protesters were treated at the scene after being sprayed, and two of them were then sent to the hospital. Ten protesters were arrested on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and failure to disperse and were later released, according to the university.
After the episode, Ms. Spicussa told The Sacramento Bee that the students had surrounded the police, “cutting the officers off from their support.” The videos, however, show no evidence of threats from the protesters.
The university said Sunday that it had been flooded with comments, including some from alumni who pledged to stop donating.
“We’ve been inundated with people sending messages,” said Mitchel Benson, the associate vice chancellor for university communications. “It literally brought down our servers.”
In her statement on Sunday, Ms. Katehi said: “I spoke with students this weekend, and I feel their outrage. I have also heard from an overwhelming number of students, faculty, staff and alumni from around the country. I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident. However, I pledge to take the actions needed to ensure that this does not happen again.”
The president of the University of California system, Mark G. Yudof, did much the same on Sunday, saying in a statement that he was appalled by the images and that he would convene the system’s 10 chancellors to discuss “how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to nonviolent protest.”
“The time has come to take strong action to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest,” he said.
In the capital, Sacramento, protesters marched to a home owned by Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday to denounce what they called violence perpetrated by the police.
Elsewhere Saturday, 13 members of an Occupy group in Washington were arrested after occupying an abandoned school building, according to local reports.
On Sunday, the police in Oakland, Calif., where tear gas was fired at protesters last month, evicted protesters at an encampment that had been set up a day earlier in a vacant lot. The protesters were given time to move their tents.
Saying public safety remained her first priority, Mayor Jean Quan said in a statement, “We will not tolerate lodging on public property, whether in parks or open space; it is illegal.”
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