As Oregon State Pushes New Police Force, Students Revolt
It has been a full two months since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Since then, questions around policing in America have hit the mainstream media, with a large debate over defunding police departments around the nation, and several major cities implementing major cutbacks in response national wide mass protests.
In response, students formed a group called “Disarm OSU” which seeks to force OSU to disarm its police officers.
In this mist of all this controversy, Oregon State was planning on moving forward with implementing their new police department despite push back. That resulted in a series of public information and comment sessions.
Calling those information sessions a “joke” is an understatement. Basically, they turned off comments in Zoom and proceeded to be very selective in the questions they took. Isabel Nunez-Perez, The President of The Associated Students of Oregon State University and the only student representative during the panel was not given a chance to speak for the entire hour.
In the most recent “community conversation” gave students included in the zoom call about a collective five minutes, and the majority of the time went to Dr. Dwaine Plaza, Sociology Professor, President of the Faculty Senate, and someone I used to deeply respect, who recently called Disarm organizers “conspiracy theorists” in a leaked email.
When reporting for the Daily Barometer about allegations made by Disarm OSU, I sent questions to Kevin Dougherty, who promptly ignored me. That was the catalyst honestly for saying “fuck it” and participating in Disarm myself, and gave up trying to report on it for The Baro (Continuing to report on it would create a conflict of interest).
The biggest question that is on everyone’s mind is “Where do we go from here?” It is obvious that the administration is hellbent on completely ignoring the existence of Disarm OSU, I see one option, and thats to force the administration to listen to them.
I’m not an expert on protests or civil resistance however, so I can’t really put forward a strategy.
I will leave with this. In 2018, Portland State University Police shot and murdered Jason Washington, who was trying to break up a bar fight outside a bar just off campus. His murders Shawn McKenzie and James Dewey, were never punished for their crimes, the norm with murderous police officers, with McKenzie resigning and being hired by another law enforcement agency, and Dewey, as far as I’m aware, still being an officer with the Portland State University Police Department.
The question I’m asking, and I’m sure everyone else is asking is, “How long until The Oregon State University Campus Police Murder Someone?” because, it is only matter of time, no matter how much “diversity training” you give.
