Headline change

I am the original author of this article and I think Brian McNeil was right to change its title. In retrospect, my original title was a bit vague as "Police officers put on leave after pepper spraying protesters" gives you no information about where the incident took place, or that students were being pepper sprayed. "California campus pepper spray police suspended" is a better title because it includes the two things I forgot to put in and it makes a pretty neat use of alliteration. So thank you for the improved title, Brian.

Viriditas, I totally disagree with all of your allegations. The headline change has not distorted the information at all. If anything, it has actually made the information more precise.

Then I must take serious exception to your uncritical repeating of two false claims in the report without so much as a single rebuttal, which virtually every reliable secondary sources has criticized as unfounded and absurd. First, you repeated a claim from Charles J. Kelly who called the pepper spraying "fairly standard police procedure". In point of fact, there is no evidence that this is standard police procedure, and The San Jose Mercury News as well as many other sources have made this point many times. Strangely, except for this Kelly character, there is almost no defense of the actions of the officer at all in reliable publications, so it appears that you were repeating a fringe claim without any justification. Research shows that police officers do not pepper spray non-violent demonstrators as standard practice.

Second, you repeated Spicuzza's claim that the students had surrounded the officers and the officers were unable to leave. Virtually every independent, reliable secondary source has disputed that claim and found it to be unfounded.