The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe by Choudry Aziz

The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe by Choudry Aziz

Author:Choudry, Aziz [Choudry, Aziz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2020-02-19T16:00:00+00:00


TASERS: THE BATTLE OVER CAMPUS ‘GUN CONTROL’

A major battle that tested the faculty-student-staff coalition of justice was a year-long confrontation with the administration over what the students defined as wrong governance. The first confrontation emerged against the use of electroshock weapons (tasers) as ‘standard issued’ weapons for the University Police Department (UPD). The issue arose in 2013 over a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the California State University (CSU) system, to which SFSU belongs, and the State University Police Association, a union representing all of the CSU campus police departments (Miller, 2013). A major point of the CBA stipulated that University police would be permitted to carry tasers at all CSU campuses but that CSU would defer the decision on whether these would be distributed at individual campuses to each campus president (Barba, 2015). While 17 campuses had already issued tasers to their UPD by that time, SFSU did not participate (Middlemiss, 2014; Rodriguez, 2013). To guarantee that the SFSU President would not change his mind, SFSU Historical and honorary Student Orgs formed a new coalition called Students Against Police Brutality . Students organised rallies, demonstrations and town halls and called attention to the dangers that tasers and an armed police force would entail. Students were reminded of the killing of Oscar Grant. On New Year’s Day 2009, Grant, a 22-year-old Black man, was murdered in Oakland, California by a police officer, Johannes Mehserle. At his subsequent trial, the police officer’s legal defence team argued that Mehserle mistook his gun for a taser. Massive protests and rallies were organised against police brutality and anti-Blackness and demanded justice for Oscar Grant and other victims of police brutality. Black-Palestinian solidarity was evident in these protests where posters carried the slogan ‘Justice for Oscar Grant! Justice for Gaza! End Government Sponsored Murder in the Ghettos of Oakland and Palestine’ (The Palestine Poster Project Archives, 2009). In February 2014, the SFSU student coalition was successful in pressuring President Wong to deny university police access to tasers on campus (Abu-Zaghibra, 2015). But the success was temporary. A new CBA between the police union and CSU in 2015 guaranteed all campus police access to tasers as ‘standard issued’ weapons as part of their equipment package (California State University, 2015, see ‘Bargaining Agreement: Unit 8’). In fall 2015, students held more rallies outside the Administration Building but by then the campaign had suffered a major defeat and could not be sustained.



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