9/27/2010: Mat Wolf of the ODE has a story on Friday’s riot. Remember all those stories about how computers and texting make our students withdraw from reality? Never mind – turns out somebody organized a party with facebook and it got out of control, the cops were called, and now it’s the latest UO video to make it big on youtube. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, unlike the episode below from UCF a few years ago, involving an armed university police officer engaged in an undercover anti-tailgating action:
Look carefully, the plainclothes UCF officer in the green shirt is pointing a gun at a student, and behind him, that really is a man in a sombrero with his hands in the air. I know what you are thinking: this is why university police need guns, to deal with out of control drunken students in sombreros. What could possibly go wrong? Well, read the news report:
A cell phone video showed the confusion in the moments leading up to the shooting as plain-clothes Officer Mario Jenkins is seen alone in a rowdy crowd of tailgaters at the Citrus Bowl. Moments after that, Jenkins pulled out his gun and fired it at one of the tailgaters. Then Jenkins was shot by Orlando Police Officer Dennis Smith, who had no idea Jenkins was a UCF officer. Jenkins’ supervisor admitted to having let him go into the crowd without backup, even after telling Jenkins he needed backup.”It was an error,” said UCF Police Chief Richard Turkiewicz. “Major Mingo was distracted over paperwork.”
The officer was killed. And what happened to UCF Police Chief Richard Turkiewicz, who oversaw this pre-emptive strike on the tailgaters? UO VP Frances Dyke hired him as UO’s interim DPS Director. No shit.
From the ODE story on the UO situation:
ASUO President Amelie Rousseau condemned EPD’s response to the event, and said she believes that the use of weapons against students was an uncalled-for escalation of force, and identified it as “crude and disproportionate.” She also said that she believed the incident has affected her views on whether or not DPS should adopt a sworn and armed police force pending the passage of state legislation. “I think this should make all students and the University administration think twice about bringing this type of intimidation on to campus.” Rousseau said, “This is exactly why we don’t want a police force on our campus.” DPS was not involved with Friday’s incident.
Intimidation or not, I agree that this incident shouldn’t drive any knee-jerk decisions on converting DPS to a regular police force.
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