We were deeply disturbed by the case of police brutality that occurred several weeks ago. We urge Wesleyan students to consider the role of policing on campus:

In any situation when your instinct is to call Public Safety or police, consider what it is that they can do that you can’t. Unless you specifically need services that only they can provide, try to find other solutions to the problem.

We ask that students exhaust other options before calling the police or public safety with a noise complaint. If a situation can be solved by talking to somebody, approach them rather than relying on public safety or police as mediators. If you’re nervous about doing this, ask a friend, an RA or another peer to do this with/for you. If somebody approaches you with a reasonable request, please respond respectfully. If there is a disagreement, ask for the help of a peer to mediate discussion.

We encourage students to know their neighbors and have reasonable community standards.

We ask that students examine and question Public Safety’s request that they identify ‘suspicious persons’ at parties. Who looks suspicious, and why?

As events on campus have shown, not everyone is accorded the same treatment when the police are involved. They reinforce patterns of violence, social control, and oppression. This is a structural problem, far bigger than individual police officers, who are often drawn from the same communities targeted by the criminal justice system. We should not rely on any type of police force to act as a mediator, when this is neither their specialty nor their purpose. We construct walls between groups on this campus, as well as between the campus and the Middletown community, and rely on police to negotiate these barriers rather than breaking them down ourselves.

We were disturbed to read in the Argus (Wespeak by Richart, Taveras, Chandler, and Beckman, 4/17/07), that students on campus found this event humorous, even while it was happening. We ask that students consider their own relation to the police, and whether police presence on campus truly makes them feel safe. Consider this in terms of social and historical positioning. Remember that whether or not we were present for the incident, we are all implicated in it.

Many of us on this campus police each other everyday, condemning others as guilty with body language and glances. We must be aware of the effects of these tiny actions. Policing—both the ways we all police each other, police race and gender, and the state-sanctioned uniformed policing whose violence was experienced on campus this past weekend—stems from not knowing, from suspecting unknown individuals of crime. We are not saying that harm is unheard of on this campus, but given the Middletown Police Department’s repeated racial profiling, intimidation (dogs and pepper spray), and excessive use of force, we do not feel any safer when MPD is on campus.

We would also caution students to consider the broader implications of these actions. While it is certainly disturbing and unacceptable that this racial profiling and excessive use of force occurred on campus, it happens all the time in greater Connecticut and across the country, and even as we take steps to see that students are not marked criminals because of their race, we must remember our privileges as Wesleyan students is what enables us to engage in discussions with police. Our privileged position as students has fueled (but does not excuse) police frustration toward students, as expressed in the officer’s reported comments that he’d use “no more discretion,” and that Middletown police “give [students] a hundred breaks a year and you piss all over us.” Although we recognize the harshness of these statements, it is important to recognize the sense of entitlement that prevents Wesleyan students from holding ourselves accountable to Middletown community standards.

We are just beginning to think about alternatives to policing. We encourage students to think of other solutions and sustain a dialogue about these complicated issues.

Keep an eye out for more information about an upcoming Know Your Rights workshop, scheduled for Friday, May 11, co-sponsored by WesPREP, Writers’ Bloc, Invisible Men, Ujamaa, and Nosotras. The workshop will be held at Traverse Square and open to members of the Middletown community.