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California Faculty Association at CSU San Marcos |
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Campus Police Review Board Another Victory for
Collective Action February 2005 Last semester, after winning the fight to bring Michael Moore to campus, faculty and student activists were inspired to take up a new struggle for justice. On October 20, sociology major and track star, Jason Williams, who is one of fewer than 200 African-American students at Cal State San Marcos, was pulled over by campus police after he allegedly rolled through a stop sign on campus. The officers involved claim they found a cooking knife with a five-inch blade and a capped bottle of rum in his car. They charged Williams with possession of a weapon on school grounds, possession of an open container of alcohol, and failure to stop at a stop sign. According to Williams, the officers searched his car illegally and abused him both physically and psychologically. He has stated that one officer squeezed his testicles hard enough to make him scream, and another kicked his legs out from under him, causing him to fall to the curb. A small group of faculty members called a town hall meeting on November 4 to discuss the Williams case as well as the larger issue of campus policing techniques. Almost 200 members of the community assembled to hear Williams speak for nearly an hour, detailing the stop, arrest, and his subsequent experiences. They were stunned to hear him describe how, when he was being transported in handcuffs to the Vista Jail, the officer driving the car turned, looked him directly in the eye, and said, “You don’t belong here.” When Williams finished his statement, Professor Sharon Elise asked members of the audience whether they had similar experiences to share. It was as though a dam had burst. For two hours, students, faculty, and staff told stories of being intimidated by campus police officers, often when they were alone at night. For many audience members, the town hall meeting was the first time they felt truly safe on campus. The silence had been broken and people were suddenly willing to talk about things they had kept to themselves, sometimes for years. A consistent pattern quickly became clear: over several years many women and people of color at Cal State San Marcos have experienced situations in which they felt certain that they were being intentionally harassed by campus police. At the end of the evening, the discussion turned to concrete demands, and the crowd agreed that: 1) the administration should drop all charges against Williams, 2) a full investigation of the incident should be conducted to find the officers responsible and hold them accountable, and 3) a community board should be established to evaluate and oversee the operations of the campus police department. One professor even suggested that community members should begin to police the police, following them with video cameras as they made their rounds. |The administration and the campus police responded to these events predictably. After agreeing to attend the town hall meeting, President Karen Haynes failed to appear. The campus police flatly denied any wrong-doing. And the campus public relations office issued a statement that claimed, without substantiation, that no racial profiling had occurred. Students and faculty were not deterred. On November 11, two dozen students marched to the President’s office to deliver a letter of protest and ask her to explain the University’s position. The next day, a second group marched to the campus police headquarters to deliver letters of complaint to Chief Tom Schulteis (who has since retired). A week later, a rally was held to declare an economic boycott of the campus until the case was resolved. Rally participants collectively “assumed the position,” kneeling in the posture of a hand-cuffed detainee. These actions made a crucial difference. The campus police scrambled to host two public forums in late November to explain their policies. Each was attended by close to 100 community members who peppered Schulteis with sharp questions. Many wanted to know whether arrest rates on campus had spiked because the police force had adopted new procedures when dorms opened at the beginning of last academic year. By the end of November, the administration had appointed a two-person internal review board to investigate police conduct during Williams’ arrest. But the community demanded more. In early December, the Associated Students, Incorporated (ASI) passed a resolution, which was endorsed by the CFA and the Academic Senate, calling on the administration to convene “a community review board made up of students, staff, faculty and community members to serve as a bridge between campus police and the campus community, to hear complaints and to make recommendations on policing practices....” That task force has now been appointed and its membership bodes well for real results. There are two student members, as well as representatives of the administration and the campus police. Most importantly, though, the board includes several faculty members from the Department of Sociology, all with relevant expertise: Edwardo Portillos specializes in race and police policy, Valerie Callanan focuses on juvenile justice, and Garry Rolison studies issues of race and ethnicity, specifically as they relate to the social status of African-Americans. Another result of public concern and action is that the felony charges against Williams were reduced to misdemeanors. He is currently scheduled for a pre-trial hearing in February and will likely go to trial in March. But even a misdemeanor conviction will be an injustice in a case involving such clear bias, and one that has so irreversibly opened our eyes to the patterns of racial and sexual discrimination that continue to undermine our community. |
