It is clear that the University of Oregon Police Department do not care what the students want.

Interim Police Chief Carolyn McDermed, Captain Pete Deshpande and Kelly McIver are putting on a series of sham forums in order to coo us into thinking our voices are heard.

Even Kelly McIver admitted to the lack of student input on Tuesday during the second public forum regarding the armament of UO police officers. An audience member, citing a Register Guard article, stated:

“In 2011, students voted against arming police in a campus referendum.”

Hearing this, McIver, the Communications Director, said “There wasn’t much advertising.”

Nobody in the room was able (or willing) to confirm whether there had been a campus referendum or not.

 

ASUO Vice President Nick McCain did not confirm this either. McCain sits on the advisory committee. Judging by his quote in the Ol’ Dirty, he is as committed to the issue as Gottfredson is: He won’t make one statement one way or the other. McCain:

“We’re going to look into it and I’m one of the members that sits on the advisory committee so if that is something the students are looking to do, its my job to represent students, we can put it on the ballot.”

Then, in a surprising bout of ignorance, Chief McDermed admitted to not having the seemingly pertinent information to answer a simple question: How has the termination of a joint-jurisdiction contract with Eugene Police Department statistically affected the crime on UO campus.

When an audience member asked this question, McDermed stated that the information of yearly crime statistics could be found online.

“But you don’t have that knowledge?” the audience member asked.

“No, I do not,” McDermed replied.

Now, I don’t have a photographic memory and I don’t expect that of Chief McDermed. However, UOPD and its PR devils are using this contract termination as a scare tactic. One would think that whether crime has increased or decreased with the absence of EPD would be a factor in deciding whither these guns are an effective deterrent on the UO campus.

After hearing these sham forums and before any student referedum happens, Gottfredson will make his recommendation to the State Board of Higher Education.

Former law enforcement employees have speckled these public forums in plain clothes, speaking up during the last 5 minutes to give the impression of some consensual resolution.

Meanwhile, the “raving liberals” (as one supporter of armament described them) are coming up with the craziest shit: “You guys are the University of Oregon Police Department. You have the chance to do something different, to do something out of the box. Perhaps you can provide a service and keep the campus safe through some creative means, rather than resorting to the status quo.”

And just as the Ol’ Dirty said, a pitiful 10 students showed up to this public forum.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013 at 20:09 by Nick Ekblad and is filed under Administration, Campus, Politics, University. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.