To protect the snowflakes at Brooklyn College in New York, school officials are asking members of the NYPD to stay out of sight because apparently the mere sight of the police officers could offend the students.
On November 2, students watched a propaganda film on the police department’s surveillance of Muslim students that aggravated the students’ existing distrust of police. The film is called Watched and is told from the perspective of an NYPD informant who surveilled Muslim students for New York City’s counterterrorism initiatives. The officer in the video is the same who helped to find two Queens women — Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui — who are currently awaiting trial after they were caught stockpiling tanks of propane gas for an ISIS-inspired attack on New York, according to the New York Post.
As students exited the screening for the film, they were asked their opinions on having members of the NYPD on school grounds, to which many responded that they felt uncomfortable. “I know students from every background and across every major. They don’t feel comfortable around cops. They just don’t. It makes safe spaces feel not so safe,” one student said.
In an absurd effort to placate the students, Brooklyn College’s Director of Public Safety, Donald Wenz, told the NYPD that he would “prefer” if the officers would use restrooms on the West End of the building and not walk “across either quad” to access the bathrooms, noted the Brooklyn College Excelsior on November 15.
For one student in particular, Wenz’s advisory is not enough. He stated that he intends to petition the campus to remove police from the grounds altogether. He stated that he will ask Brooklyn College president Michelle Anderson to issue a statement “that we do not want the NYPD on campus in any respect even if it’s just to take breaks and use bathrooms.”
It’s quite possible that the student’s petition is unnecessary. During research into the story, the New York Post discovered that the bathroom to which Wenz directed the police officers did not even have a working stall. “The bathroom is horrendous. You can only wash your hands in one of the sinks because the other two are broken,” a student told the Post.
If Wenz knew that the bathroom did not work, then his message is loud and clear.
Meanwhile, NYPD officers are angered by the students’ offense at their presence.
Speaking to the paper, NYPD sergeants-union chief Ed Mullins suggested, “Maybe it’s time these students, who fail to recognize the value of those protecting them, go take classes abroad — where they can have their bathrooms all to themselves.”
During a promotional ceremony at NYPD headquarters on November 21, Commissioner James P. O’Neill had this to say regarding the controversy: “Now is not the time to push cops away. A lot of things going on around the world and we have to make sure we have the ability and access to keep everybody safe.”
Another NYPD officer interviewed by the Post said that the students who prompted Wenz’s advisory are “insane,” adding that the “protester culture is warping their … minds.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just the protester culture but also the students’ professors who are influencing the students to view the police as a threat.
Last year, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans called the police on a student because the student himself was a police officer who showed up to the Law and Morality class in full uniform, which included his firearm. When police arrived, they informed the professor that the student was “perfectly within the law.”
The student/officer said it was not the first time he felt ostracized at Loyola University, which, ironically, was founded as a Jesuit college. “You know, as a white male conservative, I have put up with a lot of prejudicial and biased comments directed towards me while attending Loyola University New Orleans,” he said. “But today made me sad for the youth and the college I have attended for eight years.”
Student discontent with police has become quite pervasive on college campuses, and has created a situation in which police are feeling that their ability to police has been hampered because of how it is perceived by the public — in this case, students.
In May, for example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison student government passed legislation that demanded “community control” of campus police to combat the “implicit bias” within the department. Examples cited by the resolution as discrimination were simply instances of the police officers doing their job. For instance, one discrimination incident cited by the legislation was the in-class arrest of a black student who had caused $4,000 in property damage by spray painting “F— the police” and “Death to pigs” on campus buildings. Another illustration of alleged discrimination cited by the legislation was the department’s release of two photos of black men who had been suspected of theft in February.
