Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.

“When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them,” Kelly said. “Bodies don’t have handles on them.”

After reviewing the video, Kelly said he observed at least two cases of “active resistance” from protesters. In one instance, a woman pulls her arm back from an officer. In the second instance, a protester curls into a ball. Each of those actions could have warranted more force, including baton strikes and pressure-point techniques.

“What I’m looking at is fairly standard police procedure,” Kelly said.

Emphasis mine. So we can add “pulling your arm back from police” and “curling into a ball” to the list of violent activities that totally justify being attacked and beaten by the very police who are sworn to protect the citizens of this country from real, actual violence.

And how Orwellian is it to claim that they had to attack these students — children, really, the same age as my own children — with pepper spray at Davis so they wouldn’t hurt them.

Are you fucking kidding me right now? How can anyone defend this brutality?

According to the guy who wrote the manual, “Fairly standard police procedure” in the United States in 2011 is to attack peaceful, non-violent students who are exercising their constitutionally fucking protected right to freedom of speech and assembly to petition the government for a redress of grievances by spraying chemical weapons into their faces when they present no fucking threat at all because “they don’t have handles.”

These thugs who hide behind a badge should be fired immediately, lose their pensions, and stand trial for assault against their own fucking people.

Our president and our Congress have said that the United States supports the rights of citizens to peaceably assemble and protest in every fucking country in the world… except our own. Shame on them all.