Months after first meeting with campus police, members of Syracuse University’s Student of Color Advisory Committee want to be more than listened to.

Members are calling for the Department of Public Safety and Chancellor Kent Syverud to allow the committee greater oversight of DPS protocol instead of operating solely as a liaison between students of color and DPS.

Syverud nominated students for the advisory committee last March to gather recommendations and feedback on DPS actions relating to students of color. The committee formed in response to criticism of DPS’ transparency following an assault of three students of color in February on Ackerman Avenue.

After a series of hate crimes and bias-related incidents on and near SU’s campus last semester, members said they continue to be frustrated with DPS’ protocols for transparency.

More than a dozen students serve on the committee alongside DPS Chief Bobby Maldonado, Dean of Students Marianne Thomson and Chief Diversity Officer Keith Alford, among others. The committee holds no power over DPS policy.

“There’s a level of power you can’t reach when you’re talking to the DPS chief,” said Beruk Teshome, a member of the committee and a junior drama major. “He’s saying he will take something back to DPS or he’s been working on this. We kind of had to take his word for it.  They were as involved as they led us to believe they were.”

Meetings became a way to praise DPS’ actions when the department did something to improve the safety of students of color, members said. It was not a forum to hold DPS accountable when it did something harmful, they said.

Kate Abogado, co-chair of the committee, said committee members found that they accomplished more attending the #NotAgainSU sit-in than meetings with DPS. Tommy Wu | Contributing Photographer

Kate Abogado, co-chair of the committee and a senior policy studies and information management and technology major, said Maldonado’s friendly presence made it difficult to evaluate when the committee was not receiving a positive return on its goals.

Conversations the committee had with DPS earlier in the semester mostly faded in November, Abogado said.

That month, the N-word was written on a mirror, garbage cans and part of a ceiling light on the sixth floor of Day Hall. A racial slur against Asian people was also written on a bulletin board on Day Hall’s fourth floor.

DPS informed the broader campus community about the racist graffiti four days after the department was notified of the incidents. Members of the advisory committee said DPS did not inform them about the incidents, and they found out about the graffiti when the rest of the student body did.

Maldonado did not clarify when the committee was made aware of the incidents in an interview with The Daily Orange.

“At some point in time we met with the committee after the incident happened,” Maldonado said.

DPS held emergency meetings with the committee shortly after the Day Hall incidents. Members didn’t have an opportunity to discuss DPS’s handling of the graffiti, they said.

“We were saying, ‘We need to increase transparency. We want to feel safer,’” said Natalia Rice, a committee member and senior sociology and English dual major. “Increasing police presence usually hasn’t been the best solution for populations of people of color. What can we do to make students feel like they are in a hospitable space?”

Committee members said they wanted to know why DPS waited to issue an official statement addressing the hate crimes in Day Hall and why they thought that procedure was adequate.

Maldonado said that during these meetings, DPS and SPD provided the committee with updates into investigations.

“There was some discussion about when you’re in the thick of an investigation, you can’t necessarily be as transparent as your community expects,” Maldonado said. “[Meetings were] more of an update as to what was being done and, if we couldn’t provide information, explaining why.”

#NotAgainSU, a black student-led movement, held a sit-in at the Barnes Center at The Arch for eight days in protest of the racist incidents.

Between the emergency meetings, a few committee members met with student protesters and SU’s Student Association to find out what the campus needed to remedy the broken trust between DPS and students of color, Teshome said.

Committee members found that they accomplished more attending the #NotAgainSU sit-in than meetings with DPS. All they could do during meetings was demand more from DPS, Abogado said.

Maldonado said he couldn’t speak on why students felt meeting with student protesters was more effective.

“I can understand why, in a sense,” he said. “I know that some members of our committee were active members of the #NotAgainSU movement.”

DPS asked the committee how to communicate with sit-in protesters only after members of the committee became active participants in the sit-in, Teshome said. Several members attended emergency committee meetings in between nights where they slept on the floor of the Barnes Center.

Rice said the committee should be allowed to draft policies and give feedback before DPS implements new policies.

“The inherent flaw in an advisory committee is you can only advise, you can’t change,” Rice said. “I think potentially giving more of a capacity to students to draft a policy — not one that will immediately be implemented — to say this is what us, as students, we don’t feel comfortable about.”

If DPS cares about how #NotAgainSU rose in response to the department’s lack of transparency, it needs to understand that past procedures were not effective in addressing hate crimes, Teshome said. The department needs to feel the struggle that students of color felt during that time, he added.

Teshome wants to meet with DPS officers during committee meetings to speak directly to them on issues affecting students of color.

Maldonado said he had not heard Teshome’s suggestion from the committee but agreed it would be helpful for bridging the gap between the committee and officers.

“I don’t think racist incidents will ever go away on campus and Syracuse’s culture,” Teshome said. “But I think going forward, the committee members and the students are not going to take any more bullsh*t or half-assness from the leaders. I think that’ll ultimately bring more effective change.”

Published on January 22, 2020 at 10:29 pm

Contact Richard: rjchang@syr.edu | @RichardJChang1