Students should not fear police

Police worry students have no respect for justice, so they hit students over the head with it. Students think police don’t sympathize with them as fellow humans beings, and that they have no respect for individuality or moral integrity, and so they learn to duck.

Rick Hale

It’s becoming obvious that the relationship between students and police is an unsuccessful one, because it isn’t a relationship at all.

One of the things I’ve recently noticed is the multitude of advertisements that want students to continue living on campus. Prejudices regarding personal development aside, this could only be an effort to make the university some much-needed money. Many students living in the dorms — especially juniors — would very likely cause a crackdown on minors in possession on campus.

Such an effort obviously would be applauded by MSU Provost Kim Wilcox, who has been striving to remove the “party school” label from MSU for some time now. But it’s important to realize that the removal of a label is meaningless; ripping the label off a bottle of Burnett’s will do nothing to improve its taste.

But advertisements on cafeteria tables seem trivial when compared to some of the more alarming situations I’ve seen:

An East Lansing Police Department car driving by a front porch on M.A.C. Avenue where a bloody fight took place against the side of the house in front of 30 students. The fight ending before the East Lansing Police Department car returned, and not one student — including myself — reporting what happened.

Beefed-up police cars coasting behind a sophomore who is wearing long hair and a Volunteers of America coat as he walks home from the library on a Thursday night.

Another shark of a car speeding through a red light on Grand River Avenue — with no siren — a few months later, right past that same sophomore, who is stumbling on whiskey legs, but now has a buzz cut and a tidy wool coat.

Two students getting jumped on Grove Street. No one helping them to find their wallets in the dark. No one asking whether the gashes on their faces were serious wounds — all while a police car idled at the end of the street.

Someone in a crowded basement by the beer pong table saying, “Cops cops cops cops cops.” The basement instantly becoming quiet and then empty.

A police officer with long blonde hair, jeans and an Iron Maiden shirt stealth-MIPing every freshman “Martyr In Possession” walking down the sidewalk. No requisite badge in sight.

I’m being honest when I say that police are frightening more people in this city than they’re protecting. I know they have a job to do, but inciting terror is most emphatically not a part of that job.

Who is right and who is wrong, then? What do right and wrong even mean?

These are questions with no right or wrong answers. So, rather than focus on the “whether,” humor me while I consider the “why.”

Why do students drink? Because it provides a momentary escape from the world of structure, classes, clocks and expectations.

Why do officers care? Primarily because that escape sometimes involves a car, and that car can sometimes permanently prevent people from returning to the world of structure, classes, clocks and expectations.

My own middle name is a monument to the most horrible consequence drinking and driving can have. I understand genuinely why police so ardently want it eradicated, and I agree with them.

But I believe their current methods are staggeringly unsound. I’m not the only one who’s appalled when an East Lansing police officer pulls me over and the first phrase out of his or her mouth is a blatant “how much.”

I’m trying to be sincere here. I don’t mind walking a straight line to prove the truth. I don’t mind blowing zeros into the little black machine.

But I cannot pretend to understand how that officer stooped next to my Geo with hand on holster can expect his loaded question to build in me any sort of respect for the law that isn’t rooted only in blind, instinctive fear.

Rick Hale is a State News assistant copy chief. Reach him at halerich@msu.edu