GUEST COLUMN: NC State does not keep us safe

On Feb. 6, 2024, a student was arrested by NC State Campus Police on campus property and was then transferred to Raleigh Police Department. Your gut instinct, like many others, should be to ask, “What is the RPD doing on our campus in the first place?” Your second question might be, “What was the student doing?”

When Clery crimes occur on campus, we get a WolfAlert. When there is a death by suicide on campus, the relevant parties, per postvention protocol, receive communication. There are many unique city-wide notifications for specific crimes, ranging from kidnapping to police assault. On Feb. 6, 2024, you received nothing because no crime or event warranting an alert took place. So why was the Wolfpack student arrested?

The student was arrested after handing out flyers outside of the McKimmon Center during the Engineering Career Fair that had information about the weapons manufacturers advertising their jobs inside the building. They were not being aggressive, obstructing the flow of movement or being provocative. If they were, it would have been mentioned in the arrest, which it was not. So why was the student arrested?

The student was handing out flyers that were part of a larger protest of the aforementioned arms manufacturers on behalf of Palestinians. These companies that were at the career fair — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bae Systems, Caterpillar, Northrop Grumman and Siemens — sell their equipment to Israel which then uses it against Palestinians. They are, factually, profiting from what the International Court of Justice has called “plausible” genocide.

The student, as part of the effort to spread awareness of this war profiteering, approached fellow students who were at the career fair to tell them about this connection. Some shook their heads “no,” and the student continued on to others that shook their heads “yes.”

The police — both campus and RPD — did nothing. They saw what the student was doing, shrugged and looked away. They did nothing because a non-event was happening. So then, one final time, why was the student arrested?

The long awaited answer.

Behind the police bike line, under the loud police drone, next to the unmarked police vehicles, stood the answer: a single NC State administrator. With some words and gestures, this administrator turned a non-event into a student’s criminal record.

Not only did this administrator, who will remain anonymous, single-handedly create a student’s criminal record and jeopardize any future career because they advocated against war-profiteering, but they put the student directly and intentionally in danger.

The RPD has a history of police brutality and abuse of power. Darryl Tyree Williams, 32, was the latest victim, tased and killed by the RPD in February 2023. An investigation by ABC11 in 2020 found that Black people in Raleigh were five times more likely to be arrested than white people. A Rolling Stone investigation published in April 2023 uncovered a decades-long scheme of no-knock warrants, false drug charges and rampant corruption in the RPD.

RPD, being no different than any other police department, is in the business of defending property and corporate interests, often at the expense of the very people they claim to “protect and serve.”

NC State collaborating with the RPD, endangering its students, is part of a larger trend of heavy-handed responses by University administrators to students exercising their freedom of speech amidst tense times.

Administrators at Columbia University, for instance, berated their students for holding an “unauthorized protest” which “violated university policy” but stayed silent over the chemical “skunk” attack, a weapon used often by the Israeli Defense Force, that results in nausea, vomiting and chest pain.

At the University of Michigan, in a deviation from precedent, campus police arrested over 40 students on trespassing charges and sanctioned many of them from extracurricular activities, showing up with nearly 56 police cars made up of seven different security departments.

We are, by comparison, privileged that it was only one student. However, if our sister institutions are teaching us anything, it is that these administrators are not on the side of the students.

Just last year at NC State, these same administrators were telling us how much they want the same thing we want as we experienced a year of unprecedented amounts of death by suicide. Yet on Feb. 6, 2024, the administration stood directly across from us, directly in front of us, directly opposed to us, and put us in danger. With the help of RPD, they put their corporate partners first, in front of the safety of their own students.

If our administration is telling us anything, it is that they cannot keep us secure, ranging from chemical contaminants at Poe Hall to city police collaboration and arbitrary arrest. If our administration is telling us anything, it is that they do not keep us safe.