What Work (?): Casually pepper spray everything cop

Sociology 167

Harald Smedal Stamsoe

Assignment on memes

Casually pepper spray anything cop

On November 18^th, 2011, a group of students were arranging a protest on the campus of UC Davis as part of the larger nationwide Occupy protests. The police tried to break up the protests. The students, sitting down with their arms linked together, refused to leave. One of the police officers, Lieutenant John Pike, started to pepper spray the students in an effort to break up the protest.. Unfortunately for Lt Pike, this was 2011, meaning that everyone and their brother had easy access to recording equipment. The footage of the police officer pepper spraying the seemingly peaceful protesters quickly found its way to both the internet and traditional media. Much of the public was outraged by this apparent police brutality. The most famous picture of Lt Pike pepper spraying students was uploaded to the social news site Reddit on November 19^th. On November 20^th two edited versions of the picture appeared on Reddit. In the first one, Lt Pike was replaced by a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio strutting happily along the students. The second picture depicted Lt Pike pepper spraying the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. This quickly caught on, and images of Lt Pike peppery spraying anything and everything showed up online. Searching through forums and social media sites, on can find pictures of Lt Pike pepper spraying the Tiananmen Square protester, the self-immolating Buddhist monk, Jesus, New York City construction workers and native Americans just to mention a few. These pictures quickly spread throughout the Internet, spurred on by extensive news coverage of the incident and widespread sharing and reposting on various social websites. The popularity of this meme is arguably due to the seemingly casual way the police officer pepper sprays the students, as if it was a daily routine.

On November 21^st, Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly of Fox News discussed the event on air. As was to be expected, Fox’s people immediately defended the police officer, citing the fact that pepper spray is “a food product, essentially”. This statement by Megyn Kelly spawned a meme of Kelly’s face superimposed over a statement downplaying the seriousness of various things like war, torture and rape.