Although the WarnMe alert system drew some criticism in 2011 after many did not receive notification about a shooting at Haas School of Business, the campus’s multiple warning systems appear to have been utilized effectively during Monday’s power outage and explosion, campus officials said.

Campus police and officials used nearly all emergency systems in place to respond to the events — including WarnMe, the campus siren-and-PA system and the emergency phone line, which played a looped message with updates on the situation. Messages were also posted on the campus public affairs website, Facebook and Twitter pages, according to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore.

UCPD sent four messages via WarnMe, said UCPD spokesperson Lt. Eric Tejada.

After the explosion near California Hall about 6:40 p.m., a message went out at 6:50 p.m. telling recipients to evacuate campus immediately due to an emergency.

“We know that there will be situations where individuals maybe might get (WarnMe messages) late or not receive them,” Gilmore said. “We will be taking a close look at what worked and what needs to be improved.”

Gilmore encouraged students who did not receive text message alerts to update their information through the BearFacts website and choose text messaging as the preferred option for receiving emergency communication.

Senior Christophe Hansen-Estruch was studying at C.V. Starr East Asian Library when the campus initially lost power.

“There was this noise like a ‘bmf,’ and then all the lights went off,” he said.

After a few minutes of confusion, a library staff member went up each floor to inform students that there had been a power outage and that there was no immediate emergency, he said.

Hansen-Estruch also said he received an email from WarnMe, but because he did not sign up for text alerts, he received the warning much later.

UCPD used the campus PA system to send broadcasts instructing individuals to leave campus after the explosion occurred. Throughout the evening, police officers entered and checked campus buildings to ensure all individuals had been evacuated, Gilmore said.

The campus’s emergency systems effectively served their purpose, said UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode.

Although the residence halls did not need to be evacuated Monday night, the campus will work with city officials to find suitable areas for relocation in case the need arises in the future, said Amina Assefa, manager at the campus’s Office of Emergency Management.

“We would start looking for open spaces in the city of Berkeley and start directing people,” she said. “We would also use campus transportation services if we have to move people further away.”

Contact Jessie Lau at jlau@dailycal.org.

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Of the nine alcohol-related illnesses UCPD responded to over the course of this year’s residence hall move-in weekend, eight cases resulted in an underage individual being transported to the hospital.

Alcohol-related illness occurs when someone becomes ill or unresponsive due to alcohol intoxication or a combination of alcohol and drug use.

“I’ve never seen eight in one night,” said UCPD Lt. Eric Tejada of the Monday cases. “We get one to three on a weekend, usually, at least in the first few weeks. To see eight in one night is pretty troubling.”

According to UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode, at least six of the eight cases Monday took place in residence halls, including Clark Kerr Campus, Unit 1, Unit 2 and Unit 3.

The case that did not result in the hospitalization of someone underage involved a person of legal drinking age who became combative with paramedics while being treated for alcohol-related illness. According to Tejada, the individual subsequently was arrested and taken to jail.

The last several years have seen an uptick in alcohol-related illness during and after residence hall move-in weekend. In 2010, UCPD responded to seven alcohol-related illness calls between move-in weekend and Labor Day. During the same time period in the following year, the number of calls doubled. In 2012, UCPD responded to five reports of alcohol-related illness during move-in weekend alone, Tejada said.

UC policy prohibits student drinking that impairs “work performance, scholarly activities, or student life.” Yet incidents such as these are “pretty common,” according to Marty Takimoto, spokesperson for the campus’s Residential and Student Service Programs.

“You have a group of 16- to 18-year-olds living without their parents’ supervision for the first time,” Takimoto said. “College is about becoming a responsible, independent adult, and some new students will be irresponsible in experimenting with alcohol.”

UC Berkeley freshman Reaa Puri and her peers attended a presentation on alcohol use led by a resident director at Clark Kerr Campus on Sunday.

“(The presentation) made me realize there are real consequences and that I should be careful in my actions,” Puri said. “I’m sure it scared people into not drinking or drinking responsibly. But it was Sunday, and that’s when most of the parents left.”

Contact Nico Correia at ncorreia@dailycal.org.

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The victim has been identified as Alberto Santana-Silva, a 21-year-old male from Fremont who is not affiliated with UC Berkeley, according to UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode.

UCPD officers responded around 5:38 a.m. to calls regarding shots fired near signpost 16, DeCoulode said.

Upon arriving at the scene, UCPD officers found the victim with gunshot wounds. He was next to his car, which was several yards away from where the shooting occurred. He was pronounced deceased at the scene by Berkeley Fire Department.

DeCoulode said a number of people were in the area when a disagreement or argument occurred, and Santana-Silva intervened and stopped the disagreement. A few people left, but within roughly 20 minutes, an unidentified person came back, walked up to Santana-Silva’s car and shot him multiple times.

According to DeCoulode, the investigation is ongoing.

Daphne Chen is the lead city government reporter. Contact her at daphnechen@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @dchen_dc.

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The protesters have not yet decided upon a future course of action in the aftermath of the detainments. Seven student and 11 nonstudent protesters were told that “camping and lodging on campus is against university policy and state law” and left peacefully after being detained and identified by the police, according to UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode. None were cited or arrested, he said.

Eleven of the protesters were given a stay-away order for seven days, and 10 of the encampment’s 13 tents are currently in police custody, according to Claire Holmes, campus associate vice chancellor for public affairs.

According to DeCoulode, campus administrators ordered the police action after Occupy protesters did not respond to UCPD’s daily warnings that they would be cited if they did not leave. The protesters originally began the encampment Feb. 9 on the steps outside of Sproul Hall and subsequently moved to the steps outside of Doe Library Tuesday.

“The reason we protest in the form of an encampment is because it provides a safe space where dialogue and the marriage of ideas can occur,” said UC Berkeley senior Navid Shaghagi.

Occupy Cal protesters met on the steps outside of Sproul Hall at 2 p.m. Friday to regroup and discuss their course of action moving forward. While continued encampment was discussed, a decision was not reached, said UC Berkeley senior Frank Luna.

According to Holmes, while the campus administration’s approach to responding to campus protests has evolved, there is no policy in place that explicitly dictates how to manage them. Since the Nov. 9 protest events, two encampments at UC Berkeley — the encampment that dispersed Friday morning and one that took place inside the Anthropology Library — have not involved arrests.

“No two protests are alike, so we are always looking to respond to context specific protests or demonstrations and work to respond in a way that is appropriate to the seriousness of the disruption,” Holmes said in an email.

She added that administrators led by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer and Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance John Wilton have been brought together to form a protest management group, which has met on an ad hoc basis since early January.

Staff writer Christopher Yee contributed to this report.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that 17 protesters were detained. In fact, 18 were detained.

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According to the complaint — filed Oct. 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California — the plaintiffs seek damages for violations they alleged to have occurred during the “Open University” demonstration in Wheeler Hall, which occurred from Dec. 7 to Dec. 11, 2009.

The four campus officials — Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande, UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya and UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode — were served with the complaint Monday afternoon, said Kevin Brunner, an attorney with Siegel and Yee, the law firm representing the individuals filing the lawsuit.

The complaint seeks to stop the officials from continuing what it alleges is a policy of sending nonviolent detainees taken into custody during campus protests to the Alameda County Jail rather than citing and releasing them.

“The policy of jailing non-violent protestors is punitive and a violation of the protestors’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly,” the complaint states.

According to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore, the lawsuit is still being reviewed by campus counsel.

“We can’t comment on the details of the lawsuit at this time because it is still being reviewed by counsel,” she said. “Nevertheless, we are confident that the university’s actions were legally justified.”

In December 2009, campus activists staged the demonstration, which, according to the complaint, aimed to “draw attention to … recent budget cuts and tuition hikes as well as the misplaced priorities of the UC administration.” After four days of demonstrations in Wheeler Hall beginning Dec. 7, 2009, UCPD officers arrested 66 individuals in the early morning of Friday, Dec. 11, 2009.

At the time, campus officials maintained the decision to conduct arrests was made after occupiers appeared to be proceeding with plans for a concert that might disrupt the beginning of finals that were slated to be held in the hall early Saturday morning.

According to the complaint, the arrests occurred without warning, despite the fact that the campus administration had agreed to allow the event to occur. The complaint states that the students believed they had permission to remain in Wheeler Hall until Saturday morning and that the retraction of permission to remain was not communicated to students.

The individuals who were arrested and jailed suffered emotional distress, embarrassment and humiliation, as well as damage to their reputations and future job prospects as a result of actions by the defendants, the complaint states.

“It was a terrible experience for us all, and there were many people for whom it was incredibly frightening,” said Callie Maidhof, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and a campus graduate student. “Clearly, it was a punishment, and it is one of the different ways that the campus has been issuing punitive measures against protesters.”

She added that the lawsuit is not just for the students who were arrested and jailed but for the larger student body.

“We will fight these policies, these institutions and even these individuals,” she said. “These are individuals who made individual choices that hurt people, that have hurt us, and so we’re going to use whatever means are available to us to fight against that.”

According to Thomas Frampton, a student at the UC Berkeley School of Law and member of the Campus Rights Project, a group that worked with Siegel and Yee to bring about the lawsuit, one of the goals of filing the lawsuit is to ensure accountability.

“The main point is to ensure that there’s accountability when University officials violate the constitutional rights of their students and community members,” he said in an email. “It seems increasingly clear that the University will only respond to litigation. It’s disheartening, but that’s where we’re at.”

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Jill Wong/Staff

Amid racially charged protests Tuesday, UCPD sent out its annual campus safety report — which shows more than three times as many hate crimes occurring in the campus community in 2010 than in the previous year.

According to the report, UCPD received intelligence of 22 hate crimes in 2010 versus six incidents in 2009. In all, the 2010 statistics show two gender-based hate crimes, eight ethnic- or race-based hate crimes, two hate crimes related to sexual orientation and 10 crimes based on religion.

These statistics cover hate crimes occurring inside the campus, campus-owned buildings, public property in or adjacent to and accessible from the campus, fraternities, sororities, cooperatives, residence halls or university-owned housing — University Village Albany and the UC Office of the President and UC Berkeley extension campuses.

UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode attributed the increase more to a difference in reporting practices than occurrence. He said the shift might be the effect of increased university outreach that emphasizes the importance of reporting hate crimes, an effort made between 2009 to 2010 to make police officers more aware of the definition of hate crimes and a 2008 policy change that made it so hateful vandalism is included in the hate crime category of the statistics.

But statistics from other universities indicate that rates of hate crime on the UC Berkeley campus are substantially higher than at other campuses. Stanford University and UCLA reported two hate crimes each in 2010, and at UC San Diego the total hate crimes amounted to five. UC Berkeley hate crimes in 2010 totaled 22, more than 10 times the number at Stanford and UCLA. UC Berkeley was also the only one of the four schools to report hate crimes based on gender. Its 10 religious hate crimes compare to a complete lack of them at Stanford and UC San Diego, while UCLA saw one religious hate crime.

DeCoulode said 11 of the 2010 UC Berkeley hate crimes were vandalism and three were instances of battery: one that was anti-African American, one that was anti-Hispanic and one that was anti-homosexual.

According to Matthew White, a 2011 UC Berkeley alumnus and formerly an active member of the campus Jewish community, religion-based hatred is not uncommon on campus either.

“When I was in school here, it was just one long blur of instances of hateful things toward Jews and toward supporters of Israel,” he said.

White said that during his time at UC Berkeley, he was aware of Jewish students being called “kike” and receiving strange looks for wearing traditional Jewish skullcaps. He blamed the negative atmosphere in part on an ASUC bill from spring 2010 that urged the campus to divest from two companies that allegedly supplied the Israeli military with materials used in war crimes.

Zienab Abdelgany, president of the campus Muslim Student Association, said Muslim students also face hate-related difficulties on campus.

“Even though Berkeley is a liberal bastion, it is not exempt from larger movements of discrimination and misunderstandings,” she said.

She added that the association has received offensive comments such as “why don’t you just go blow something up” when expressing its political views on Sproul Plaza.

Abdelgany said Muslim women are constantly answering questions about the hijab, the traditional headpiece, and she added that “there are insinuations that I have been forced into submission to wear the hijab, which I wear proudly.”

According to Jack Glaser, an associate professor of public policy at UC Berkeley who specializes in the subject, hate crimes are not foreign to college campuses.

“This is a significant increase by any standard, but it is hard to read anything into a few events, and it’s better not to jump the gun and form general conclusions,” he said. “It is premature to draw the conclusion that the campus is moving towards a climate of hate.”

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Correction(s):
An earlier version of this article incorrectly quoted Larry Everest as saying “There is nothing funny about the years of oppression faced by African-American slaves.” In fact, he said “There is nothing funny about the years of oppression faced by African-American people.”

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The men, Drew Phillips, 25, and Richard Clemons, 30, were arrested on Thursday night. Neither are UC Berkeley students.

Phillips allegedly assaulted an officer with a shield he was carrying, said UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode. The officer was injured and sought her own treatment, and Phillips was arrested at 7:58 p.m. for wearing a mask for an unlawful purpose, felony battery and obstruction.

While DeCoulode said he has not heard of any student or bystander injuries, seven police officers were injured.

At around 9 p.m., when Tolman Hall closed, tensions heightened as protesters began to attempt to leave the building.

“We had never told people they had to leave, because they seemed to be doing so naturally,” DeCoulode said.

UC Berkeley freshman Stephanie Benitez said she witnessed four police officers attacking a man — likely Clemons, although she did not specify the man’s name — because he tried to exit the building.

“I told the police to just take a second to listen to him scream,” said Benitez. “This isn’t even an issue about tuition anymore. It’s about morality. How can you go to sleep at night knowing you did this to an innocent kid?”

DeCoulode said there was a scuffle at the door at about 9:04 p.m., and Clemons, who appeared to be leaving the building, allegedly assaulted an officer from behind and pushed him. During Clemons’s arrest, police used physical force and batons to take him into custody, for their own protection and because he was resisting arrest, DeCoulode said. He was booked for felony battery and obstruction.

“He may have had some minor injuries, but I am not sure,” DeCoulode said.

This incident escalated the action, according to DeCoulode. Right after the struggle, protesters outside threw a chair, pieces of concrete and a large base of a traffic cone at police officers, he said. A window was broken, and one officer was hit in the head with an object and sustained a concussion.

“There was a short period of time when we didn’t let some people leave because that’s when the objects were being thrown at the officers, and we didn’t think it was safe for (the protesters) to leave,” said DeCoulode.

Phillips is being held at the Berkeley Police Department Jail Facility with bail set at $60,000. Clemons was sent to Santa Rita Jail with bail set at $15,000, according to Alameda County Jail records. Their arraignment is set for 2 p.m. Monday at Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse in Oakland.

After the noon rally in Sproul Plaza — where students, organizers and community members gathered to protest proposed student fee increases — approximately 150 protesters marched to Tolman Hall, arriving at about 1:20 p.m. According to DeCoulode, a smaller group of about 80 protestors then entered the building, clashing with police — who used pepper spray against the demonstrators — as they entered.

“The police followed protesters to Tolman because we always monitor protests,” DeCoulode said. “We do it to ensure that they are able to do things safely for their safety and to ensure that they don’t block pathways or passageways.”

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Anna Vignet/Senior Staff

Police used pepper spray against protesters at Thursday’s protest outside of Tolman Hall. UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode said during the course of an entrance attempt at the hall, a number of protesters tried to pin officers, and one protester grabbed a magazine clip off of an officer’s gun belt, leading two officers to use the spray.

He could not say exactly how many protesters were sprayed but estimated it was “a couple.”Michelle Ty, a UC Berkeley graduate student who was at the protest, said at least three protesters were pepper-sprayed. According to Ty, the spray was used in two instances not far from one another outside the hall. She estimated the sprayings occurred two to three minutes apart.

(Watch a five-video series of UC Berkeley’s day of action)

A protester standing outside Tolman — who refused to give his name out of fear of criminal allegations if his name appeared in print — said he was pepper-sprayed and that many of the protesters in the crowd where the sprayings occurred felt the impact of the pepper mist even if officers did not spray them individually.

“It still burns,” he said, approximately three hours after the spraying occurred.

DeCoulode said the size of the crowd prevented police from taking any protesters into custody and that, to his knowledge, officers did not use any other forms of force beyond the pepper spray.

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