By BRIAN STELTER
The University of California, Davis, said Sunday that two police officers had been placed on administrative leave after using pepper spray on seated protesters at the campus on Friday during a demonstration aligned with Occupy Wall Street.
Videos of the encounter, widely distributed over the Internet, showed two police officers in riot gear dousing the protesters with pepper spray as they sat on a sidewalk with their arms entwined.
Reflecting widespread anger over the police behavior, the university chancellor, Linda P. B. Katehi, said on Sunday that she would insist that an investigation of the matter be completed within 30 days. On Saturday, she said it would take 90 days.
Meanwhile, students and others affiliated with the Occupy U. C. Davis movement scheduled new protests for Monday and Tuesday.
A Facebook page for the protests asked attendees to call for Ms. Katehi’s resignation and to “show solidarity and support to the students who were beaten and sprayed by U. C. Davis police in riot gear.”
The Facebook page also suggested a way for sympathizers to donate tents and pizza for the protests. Another Internet site, an Amazon.com page that was established to solicit donations, indicated that about 100 tents had been given by Sunday evening.
The use of pepper spray came after students and other protesters set up tents on campus in a show of support for the Occupy movement and in solidarity with earlier protests at the University of California, Berkeley.
The reactions to it — cries of police brutality and pledges to reconvene protesters on a larger scale — seemed to mirror the reactions in New York, Seattle and elsewhere when the police quelled recent protests with force.
As police officers moved to take down the tents at Davis on Friday afternoon, some protesters on a sidewalk on the campus quad linked arms and refused to stand.
[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I] bystanders chant, “Don’t shoot students” before an officer shakes a pepper spray canister and walks before a line of seated protesters, spraying them. The protesters’ faces and clothes are quickly covered in the orange-tinted spray.
Some protesters are heard screaming and crying as they are arrested. One bystander is heard shouting: “These are children! These are children!”
Eleven protesters were treated at the scene [youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I], and two of them were then sent to the hospital. Ten protesters were arrested on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and failure to disperse and were later released, according to the university.
After the episode, a police official suggested that the officers felt threatened and encircled by the protesters. The videos, however, show no evidence of threats from the protesters.
The university said Sunday that it had been flooded with comments, including some from alumni who pledged to stop donating.
“We’ve been inundated with people sending messages,” said Mitchel Benson, the associate vice chancellor for university communications. “It literally brought down our servers.”
In her statement on Sunday, Ms. Katehi said: “I spoke with students this weekend, and I feel their outrage. I have also heard from an overwhelming number of students, faculty, staff and alumni from around the country. I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident. However, I pledge to take the actions needed to ensure that this does not happen again.”
The president of the University of California system, Mark G. Yudof, did much the same on Sunday, saying in a statement that he was appalled by the images and that he would convene the system’s 10 chancellors to discuss “how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to nonviolent protest.”
“The time has come to take strong action to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest,” he said.
In the capital, Sacramento, protesters marched to a home owned by Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday to denounce what they called violence perpetrated by the police.
Elsewhere Saturday, 13 members of an Occupy group in Washington were arrested after occupying an abandoned school building, according to local reports.
On Sunday, the police in Oakland, Calif., where tear gas was fired at protesters last month, evicted protesters at an encampment that had been set up a day earlier in a vacant lot. The protesters were given time to move their tents.
Saying public safety remained her first priority, Mayor Jean Quan said in a statement, “We will not tolerate lodging on public property, whether in parks or open space; it is illegal.”
