The image of UC Davis officer John Pike holding high the can and giving peaceful Occupy Davis protesters a mouthful of orange pepper spray has, like so many other images, become part of the growing Occupy iconography surrounding police brutality. These attacks are surely disproportionate and appalling; that people peacefully occupying space should incur such violence is incredibly disconcerting.

At the same time, the fact that these responses have become a sort of cause célèbre for occupy is also worrying. Whether the assessment is that police intervention proves the success of occupy actions, or that it has somehow disrupted the current symbolic order in some manner, the focus on direct actions that take aim at police raises the critical question: what does provoking police actually accomplish towards the ends of Occupy?

What I want to do here is approach the question at hand through a number of specific cases of policing organizations and institutions, particularly that of Egypt (specifically in Cairo) and Wisconsin’s own 2011 February–March occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol.