UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said yesterday that she specifically instructed campus police not to use force against students.

As the tent city on the University of California, Davis, tripled in size, Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi insisted Tuesday that the school’s police department defied her orders when it used force against students in last week’s pepper-spray fiasco.

“We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment,” Katehi said in an interview with The Bee in her office inside the administration building, which remains locked down to the public.

“We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it. And then we told them we also do not want to have another Berkeley.”

In her most expansive comments since Friday’s attempt to remove the tents spiraled into the pepper-spraying of students, Katehi said she still does not know who decided to use pepper spray and was stunned when she first saw video clips of it Friday night.

“It looked horrible, horrific, I would say … , ” Katehi said. “I can tell you that I woke up Saturday really early in the morning, like 3 a.m., and I felt like it was a disaster on our hands.”

If the police really violated her direct orders by pepper spraying non-violent students, why didn’t she immediately say so after it happened? This does not pass the smell test.