Students at UC Riverside Face Violence During Protest Against UC Regents Meeting

RIVERSIDE, CA.— A massive student protest erupted at UC Riverside Thursday after hundreds of demonstrators gathered to protest rising tuition costs.

Students from as far away as Berkeley and San Diego came to join in the demonstrations.

The students were protesting the ongoing tuition hikes as well as other budgetary related measures, such as the steady increase in the Regents salary despite budget cuts.

The students were also asking the Regents to extend the very limited public comment section of meeting a mere 20 minutes so that concerned students could effectively convey their demands.

At which point, the students successfully disrupted the Regents meeting by staging a sit-in protest.

The students made the following statement while linking arms, “We the students, ask that the regents open their meeting to a public forum.”

The group of demonstrators then began to list their concerns and invited the regents to join in the people’s assembly.

UC officials left the meeting room within minutes.The Regents switched their meeting to another room in the building.

Once the demonstrators left the Regents returned to the room to resume the meeting, this time with no public access.

Later in the day, nearly 100 officers from the Riverside Police Department and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department joined 100 UC campus officers already outside the Regents meeting.

At one point during the protest, police begun to fire pepper sprays bullets and rubber bullets at the demonstrators.

Several individuals were hit with the bullets, a number of other students claim to have been hit by batons during the confrontation.

One student, Anthony Lascano was struck by the pepper spray balls. He told the Press-Enterprise, “I saw another woman protester getting touched by officers, so we moved one of the barricades we were using over to defend ourselves against the police. They started pulling the barricade away, and one of them opened fire with the paint gun.”

Press-Enterprise has a video of the clash that shows one protester being dragged away by police around the 1:40 minute mark.

UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White told several media outlets that he blamed the sit-ins and arrests on a handful of overly aggressive students.