and focused expression when we talked to her in the basement of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
The sergeant’s voice nonetheless shifted as she told us, “In the entire history of the campus, what happened is unprecedented. We didn’t expect something like this.”
By “unprecedented” the sergeant meant Molotov cocktails, damaged property, and masked perpetrators who were either right-wing extremists, paid agitators, or anarchists out of control. In the blink of an eye Berkeley had turned into a war zone; dozens of civilians took to the streets and engaged in full-on armed conflict.
What was most alarming was that the violence seemed to emerge out of nowhere. The police were taken so completely by surprise that they simply stood by and watched. The shockwaves from the day’s events reached all the way to the White House, escalating tensions between the federal government and the State of California.
And no one saw it coming. Wednesday, February 1, 2017, started out as a glorious Bay Area day. Over the previous month, after years of severe drought, California had finally been getting the drenching it so desperately needed. This week offered a respite from the rain. As temperatures rose in the afternoon, UC Berkeley students basked in glimpses of sunshine as they lounged on the steps of Sproul Hall.
Unlike the manicured, palm-lined drives of Stanford, its archrival an hour to the south, Cal has a decidedly gritty feel to it. It’s an urban campus where you’re as likely to run across a drum circle as you are to be caught up in a political debate. The guy in front of you in line for coffee could be a hippie, or he could be a Nobel laureate (Cal has reserved parking spots for Nobel Prize recipients)—or he could be both.
While the tech start-ups and venture capitalists may get more attention, it’s impossible to understand Silicon Valley without understanding what’s happening at Berkeley.
We often think of the transformational innovation coming from San Jose, Cupertino, and Mountain View, all home to the massive tech companies. Likewise, in Menlo Park and Palo Alto venture capital funds deploy billions of dollars. But Berkeley is the epicenter of social imagination—the place where the conscience of Silicon Valley originates.
It was on the Sproul Hall steps that Mario Savio stood to lead the free speech movement, and he walked through the administration building’s doors for the very first sit-ins just forty years ago. This is where protest movements from civil right to animal rights were launched.
Berkeley is no stranger to diversity of speech, and the campus is no stranger to controversial voices. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, for instance, Professor Peter Duesberg gave a talk claiming that HIV wasn’t caused by a virus but was instead the product of drugs and a party lifestyle. Protesters objected to the presentation, predicting that it would impact HIV policy— and indeed, South Africa went on to base its policies on Dues-berg’s theories.
For decades the campus has prided itself on being accepting of an eclectic cast of characters, from religious protesters to antinuclear activists to proud nudists. So tolerant are the campus and community of a variety of speech that local businesses sometimes sponsor protesters, paying them to display ads on the backs of their picket signs. When outspoken conservative activist Milo Yiannopoulos announced that Berkeley would be his final stop on the year-long tour he had dubbed an “all-out war on social justice,” while you couldn’t have expected the student body to be thrilled, you wouldn’t have expected an actual war.
At one university on the tour, his appearance led to the resignation of the chancellor; at another appearance the protests grew so tense that a bystander was shot in the abdomen. Fearing similar outcomes, other universities preemptively canceled Yiannopoulos’s appearances.
On the day of his appearance at Berkeley, tensions were running high. Student anxiety over Yiannopoulos’s speech wasn’t necessarily about the views he might express. Various campus groups worried that he might do something like call out undocumented students, as rumors to that effect had been swirling on social media—and were validated by an open letter sent to Berkeley students on February 1 by the university’s Office of Student Affairs.
University officials feared violent clashes among protesters. The University of California Police Department stepped in, requiring the Berkeley College Republicans to raise $10,000 to cover the costs of security—which initially seemed to pay off, as the evening started with a peaceful protest and dance party against the rainbow-illuminated backdrop of the administration building.
Here’s where things took a turn.
According to one version of events, reported by national media and believed by those in our nation’s capital inclined to think the worst of Berkeley, at 5:39 p.m. student protesters began moving to block the venue entrance, and twenty-one minutes later Milo was evacuated. At 6:03 p.m. students shot fireworks at the building, and over the next ten minutes the protesters broke fences and windows. In response, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. Things only escalated from there, as protesters broke the windows of the student building and threw Molotov cocktails erupting in flames that lit up Sproul Plaza.
The next day the White House escalated the situation further with a thinly veiled threat: if Berkeley couldn’t keep student violence from erupting over speech, perhaps the university wasn’t deserving of federal funds.
Politics aside, you can see the origin of the concern: how could a campus that prides itself on tolerance condone vandalism and violent behavior by its students? Indeed, playing Monday-morning quarterback, you might think that the university should have exerted more control, hiring more police officers and vetting student groups to prevent the chaos that ensued.
But something didn’t add up. When we dug a little deeper, we found that the administration, the media, and virtually everyone else following the story had gotten it completely wrong.
The problem with the students-are-to-blame version of events is that the student organizers of the protest were residents of a co-op that abided by nonviolent ideologies.
Think about that for a moment. These are students with majors like development studies and environmental science who toss around phrases like “community spirit” and “global consciousness.” Sure, they might be guilty of smoking pot, but they aren’t the Molotov-cocktail-throwing type.
In fact, knowing that the protests might create tensions, the organizers actually went to great effort to underscore their nonviolent intentions. “We are not here to engage in physical confrontation,” they wrote on the flyer they distributed to draw a crowd. “We will protect each other,” they continued, “to ensure our democratic right to protest and our safety.”
The event invitation even included safety tips for attendees, a number to dial in case of medical emergency, and instructions on how to spot the trained legal observers who would be present to document potential provocateurs and any incidents that might occur.
The student body was organized and ready to carry out its peaceful protest, as had so many others outside Sproul Hall over the decades.
But somehow everything went wrong. The violence intensified so rapidly that no one saw it coming. And no one knew exactly who or what was behind it. Even Sergeant Reich couldn’t explain it.
People who have been to battle know that the most dangerous attacks don’t announce their arrival. The most lethal attack is the one that catches us by surprise.
The military describes such blindness to impending attack as the “fog of war”: the myriad things you may not know about your adversary—their location, numbers, capabilities, and goals.
