By now, you probably have heard about the University of Florida Taser incident. If not, don’t be alarmed: It likely means you spend less time glued to news outlets than I do and, therefore, have an actual life. Nonetheless, it is a somewhat important incident to us, especially considering the requests by our local Department of Public Safety to be armed with Tasers of their own.
On Sept. 17, Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry found himself speaking to a crowd of college students at the University of Florida. An undergraduate student-journalist named Andrew Meyer began drilling Kerry with questions regarding his early concession in the 2004 race and the subsequent allegations of voter fraud in key states. Meyer went on for a while and didn’t yield for Kerry to answer, but other than that wasn’t really creating any havoc. Nonetheless, event organizers asked for him to be removed, his microphone was cut off, and, eventually, he was Tasered by University Police officers. The whole event is documented on YouTube, of course, along with virtually every other overzealous Tasering. It’s pretty disappointing (if not horrifying) to say the least.
Less than a year ago, a similar incident occurred when university police brutally Tasered a student named Mostafa Tabatabainejad at UCLA, for failing to produce student identification while using the library, and subsequently resisting requests for him to leave. Two investigations were launched following the incident: one performed by an independent investigator, another by the police themselves. The independent investigation apparently found a number of errors in the police handling of the matter. The internal investigation, however, cleared the officers of wrongdoing. While police violence is nothing new, these incidents might suggest something more irritating even than brutality in university police forces around the country: incompetence.
If anything good could have possibly come out of the tragic Virginia Tech massacre last fall, it may well have been the appreciation for competent policework by University public safety officers. Unfortunately, this appreciation never seemed to enter the public consciousness. From reading the Virginia Tech Review Panel’s report, it became clear to me that while better policing of this incident would probably not have had a significant impact on its outcome, it would certainly be nice to have better policing on campuses.
Students often complain about the degree to which DPS appears to be a presence “intended to bust, not to protect,” and the new director of DPS, Kevin Williams, has talked about “building trust” in an Emerald interview. DPS should be primarily a public safety organization, not a law enforcement one. We have a local police force for the purpose of law enforcement, and while their reputation in recent years is, let’s say, sketchy, we do not need a second. DPS should exist to protect students from assaults and acts of crime on campus first and foremost. And so I become somewhat irritated whenever I read that DPS citation counts of drinking and pot smoking on campus has gone up.
Williams is interested in seeing DPS equipped with Tasers, as he believes they will make it easier for them to do their jobs. This is likely true, but we must make sure the “jobs” they do are in fact the right jobs. If DPS approaches its role from a hard line enforcement point of view rather than one of student protection, we might as well leave the Tasering to the normal police. If we can somehow establish, however, that Tasers may only be used as a last resort, to restrain violent (not question-asking or identification-lacking) criminals, then there might be some credence to the DPS Taser request. As of right this minute, I personally am not confident of this being the case.