Amherst College Students Angry After Campus Police Unmark Their Vehicles
“All ACPD Cars Are Now Unmarked. Do You Feel Safe Yet?”
I have a feeling there would be no decision regarding the campus police that would satisfy these students.
The College Fix reports:
Amherst College students upset that campus police unmarked their vehicles
Amherst College students aren’t happy about the campus police department “entirely unmarking” its fleet of five vehicles.
According to The Amherst Student (which provides a “content warning” about police violence in its report), Police Chief John Carter said the unmarking actually is part of an effort to “reduce police presence and help students feel more comfortable.”
Carter added “there is less of a focus on preventive patrol” in which marked cars and uniformed police typically engage.
But last week a poster reading “All ACPD Cars Are Now Unmarked. Do You Feel Safe Yet?” was hung in a campus dining hall. This caught the attention of the Amherst student government.
Several students who spoke with The Student expressed misgivings with the ACPD’s decision.
“[Marked cars] would make us feel safer as we would be able to clearly tell when a police car is near us,” said Nii-Ayi Aryeetey. Student Edmund Kennedy added that unmarked cars make him “feel uncomfortable” and he doesn’t “like the idea of people hiding in plain sight in order to provide ‘protection.’”
One ACPD detective claims several ACPD officers did not agree with the decision to unmark the vehicles.
Cara Sullivan said “[W]e didn’t really like that decision. We didn’t really have much say.” She added she worried students would feel the ACPD is “spying” on them by being not being easily identifiable.
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Comments
I once was at a meeting where a cop was telling us how to set up a neighborhood watch. This was in a meeting room that was in the same building as a convenience store.
The cop looked out the window and saw a motorcycle drive up with two people on it, neither of them wearing helmets. So the cop went out to his car, got his ticket pad and wrote them up. They were livid, with the male yelling that it wasn’t fair that the car was unmarked and, anyway, he wasn’t even going a mile so what did he need a helmet for!
The guy was a well-known jerk and troublemaker long before this incident. And that’s the pattern I see. The people who have the biggest problem with police and with unmarked police cars, are the ones who MAKE the most trouble.
Are they unmarked for surveillance reasons? Or revenue generation?
“Sorry. They defunded our ‘mark our cars’ budget.”
Wasn’t the prior libby flavor of the week that police presence was traumatizing?
Can’t have it both ways unless you want lawlessness and you really don’t want that whether you are too dumb to realize it now.