SAN FRANCISCO – Campus police should not have pepper-sprayed student demonstrators at the University of California, Davis, in an incident that generated national outrage when video was posted online, investigators said Wednesday in a report that assigned blame to all levels of the school administration.

The decision by officers to douse a line of seated Occupy protesters with the eye-stinging chemical was “objectively unreasonable” and not authorized by campus policy, according to the report by a UC Davis task force created to investigate the incident.

“The pepper-spraying incident that took place on Nov. 18, 2011, should and could have been prevented,” the task force concluded in the long-awaited report.

The incident touched off campus protests and calls for the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after videos shot by witnesses went viral. Images of an officer casually spraying the orange chemical in the faces of nonviolent protesters became a rallying point for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The report also said the officer used a pepper-spray canister that was larger than the one campus police officers are authorized and trained to use.

John Bakhit, an attorney for the campus police officers union, said the pepper-spraying was justified after protesters disobeyed orders to disperse.

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