Professor Marty Kaplan published an op-ed in the Huffington Post on Nov. 21 titled: "Students: Cockroaches or Dirty Hippies?" Kaplan's article says that the police treated UC Davis students like cockroaches when they broke up their nonviolent protest with cans of pepper spray. "To those cops, there wasn't a shred of humanity in those kids. They were disgusting bugs who deserved what they got," wrote Kaplan, also director of USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center. He compared the pepper spray incident to Newt Gingrich's attack on Occupy Wall Street protestors: "What the pepper-spraying cops and the contempt-spewing candidate have in common is how easily they demonize American kids who want only to exercise their right to free assembly..." "But what troubles me the most is that apparently 24 percent of the registered voters in one of our two political parties like to feel how it feels when you hold a can of poison in your hand," Kaplan wrote. Read "Students: Cockroaches or Dirty Hippies?"