A Message about Campus Policing: Grant ———

A Message about Campus Policing: Grant ———

Hello Bethel College Board Members,

My name is Grant ———, and I am a Senior Psychology major here at Bethel College. I am from Seminole, Oklahoma, and I played three years as a defensive end for the Bethel College Football Team before transitioning into the position I now occupy as a student-assistant coach. I am a second generation college student, with my mother obtaining her Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, but I am the first person in my family to attend Bethel. I have a strong and well built faith, and I believe without any doubt that Christ is my Lord and savior, thus I attempt to the very best of my ability to ensure that the way I conduct myself and the intentions behind my conduct glorify God and Christ from every angle (even in moments in life that I fall short, as we all do).

I am writing to you all because I am concerned about the recent upswing in the prevalence of North Newton police patrols at Bethel College. This increase in police presence around campus not only came abruptly this school year, but also came without any prior notification, heads-up, or warning to students new or returning.

These are armed officers of the law at the center of this conversation who, besides meeting with students in mass (that mass being freshmen and transfers this year, and not the entire student population and/or entire team populations as was done previously) to make their presence felt, and also taking the time to villainize the football team by telling young women to stay away from us and that we are “Hungry…” as was stated by the Chief of Police in the freshman/transfer orientation meetings this year, have made zero effort on a consistent or broad basis to build rapport with students on campus.

With this in mind, also consider that fact and the bragging point that is so often shown off in regards to how diverse Bethel is at this current moment; this institution is the most diverse it’s ever been. This fact also brings with it another unavoidable truth, with more diversity in regards to races/ethnicities enrolled comes more diversity in the perspectives of the students that attend this school as well as more differences to be seen in the experiences students have had with police, whether those experiences were in their lives before attending Bethel or if students have had ill-experiences with police since arriving here in North Newton.

As a Black man, I am all too aware of the way the abuse of police power feels. I’ve been stopped, searched, surrounded, and intimidated my entire life with the “presence of police”. I do not feel more comfortable with having police officers on campus who not only go against what I and others think police officers should be doing to make us comfortable, i.e. building rapport, but also seem to actively attempt to hide and sneak about campus in a way that only reinforces the feeling that I’m being watched for nothing and have suspicion around my conduct for nothing; and none of us as students should feel like this at the place we live.

With the strength of my opinions and perspectives in mind, and with the strength of others' feelings towards this subject being expressed around campus and in this same format as well, I do believe that there are other ways to make Bethel a safer and stronger community and environment for academic and human flourishing.

For example, before jumping directly to the employment and/or toleration of the presence of armed police, why not invest more heavily (as we should have for a long time now) into better campus security measures. There has long been discussion, especially from the female student population, about better lighting around campus, which has been especially spurred on by the fact that such requests have been more or less ignored, directly or not, by putting in more of the phone towers which, if you were to ask around campus, have little more reputation than being used for the occasional over-the-top prank or nothing at all. Instead of using these towers as phones, why don’t we convert and/or update their use to be camera towers which cover a broad area between the mods, Voth Hall, and the general campus.

Why, rather than having armed police patrol campus, don’t we initiate training programs for CAs/RAs on campus, so as to create a sense of in-house security on campus rather than a third party group watching over the shoulders of students; and accompany the aftermath of these trainings with scheduled student safety patrols on weekends.

There are a great number of solutions to make campus safer as a whole past using armed police patrols to regulate behavior at a place of supposed peace and learning. Overall, though, the largest and easiest solution to the way many students, including myself, feel about the current policing situation is to employ much better communication about risks and threats on campus and about the action that administration plans to take in response to them.

There needs to be more communication about the feelings of students from students to faculty in a direct way and more communication back to students about faculties courses of action; at the end of the day, students are who pays for this school and keeps it moving, and we deserve to know what's going on around us and/or what will be going on around us at any given time out of pure respect for our living, learning, and comfortability.

Thank you for taking the time to read my message, and thank you for considering my words in any capacity that you have considered them. I hope these words, despite their strength at times, have reached you respectfully and can be interpreted intellectually and seen as an aspiration for the greater good and equity between the voices and feelings of every student on campus.

Respectfully,

Grant ———