Letter to the Editor:

An open letter to the Columbia Police Department

By Jonathon Coulson, Graduate Student

Published Oct. 7, 2005

In the Sept. 30 issue of The Maneater, the newspaper vehemently proclaimed in its forum section that a statement by Dan Viets was radical or anti-law enforcement. "I can't believe they have the nerve to show their face after Steve Rios murdered Jesse Valencia," Viets said of Columbia police officers who patrol East Campus. Although his was not a wise choice of wording, the issue of which he speaks is one that officers should keep as top-of-mind as many students do.

The Columbia Police Department must come to terms with the fact that its officers are not our heroes. After the conviction of one of your own for killing a student with whom he has a homosexual relationship, we are reticent to trust you. For those of us who read the news, many of us are aware that some of you regularly drank beer on the roof of the police station with Steven Rios, including on the night of the brutal slashing of Jesse Valencia's throat. That no one came forward immediately befuddles me.

Our mistrust in you is especially exacerbated when arrests of students increases from 220 to 408 over the course of a year. Telling minors that they are now containers of alcohol is bogus, and whether you agree to that statement, let me assure you that most students see it as such.

Please stop arresting us. You sit on the roof of the police station and drink beer. When you were our age, many of you, or at least people your age, drank. They lived through it. I do not mean to insinuate your presence is unwanted: One of your posts cited that when fights break out you are the first ones to receive a call. I urge you to respond to those calls but to cut down on the arrests. We do want you to keep us safe and protect us. However, statistics do not suggest that your raids and arrests curtail drinking, and that's not a surprise. That college students are drinking, though it is illegal, is not a surprise or even necessarily a problem. That college students are getting alcohol poisoning, assaulting each other and getting into car wrecks, these are genuinely addressable and often arrestable offenses.

But you aren't patrolling for that sort of incident. Instead, you are sending plain-clothed officers to parties and catching kids on their first or second beer. Excuse me when I decry your tactic as bullshit! You have seemingly no interest in protecting or serving but rather with amassing and continuing a revenue stream.

So again, please stop arresting us for drinking. You're not discouraging us from drinking. Rather you are encouraging us to evade capture - by driving, by trying to consume alcohol more quickly in an attempt to ditch the evidence and by introducing a general level of paranoia often associated with a police state.

Police state: However fine and dandy that statement might sound to you, it horrifies me. It's the first step to fascism, and while you may deny that, you do seem to deny just about everything. You know, like when you initially denied any involvement in Valencia's death.

Maybe Viets' statement was radical, but your unwillingness to come forward voluntarily with information regarding the death of a student, your subsequent lack of an acceptable apology and your continual effort to enforce your slanted view of "protection" upon students seems just a little bit more absurd to me.