Security Letter a Fabrication and Violation of Trust

To the Editor:

Last week’s letter to the Editor by Security Director Robert K. Jones concerning an act of harassment perpetrated upon [sophomore] Yvonne Etaghene, [junior] Catara Vinson and myself by security officers was very surprising. Particularly due to the fact that in a meeting two weeks ago between the three of us, Jones and [Assistant Dean of Students] Bill Stackman, Jones agreed to write a public letter of apology for the incident; which he said he could not deny was racially motivated. 
That’s correct. The letter that we all read last week, which stated that my colleagues and myself had “jumped to conclusions,” was supposed to be an open letter of apology. 
We, the students, agreed to edit and approve the content of his letter before sending it to the Review. Because of scheduling difficulties, we were not able to make the meeting. Instead of rescheduling, which Jones had been very adamant about doing for the first meeting, he forwarded the bogus letter to the Review and wrote us a tart e-mail, briefly dismissing us from the conversation and thanking us for our “concern.”
In the meeting, which occurred April 27, we demanded that the officers involved write a letter to the Review apologizing for the blatantly disrespectful act of racial profiling that they perpetrated on March 17. To this Jones replied that he was forbidden by the administration from engaging in “media wars,” a term he described to mean “you write a letter this week, I write a letter the next week disputing you, and on and on.” We stated that we did not want to engage in a media war; we just wanted an apology. A brief conversation between himself and Stackman yielded the result of Jones agreeing to write an apology. He said that he could not get the officers themselves to do so, because he could probably not get them to agree that they had racially profiled us.
Jones himself did see profiling as a possibility. Not surprisingly, he initially denied our concerns, repeatedly. Instead of even allowing that we may have been abused, Jones clung steadfastly to his interpretation that we had misunderstood. He even said that he found it hard to believe that racial profiling occurred at all on this campus, at which point we directed him to several incidents surrounding attacks that have occurred in the previous two school years. We told him that an abundant number of black men had been harassed, and he still refused to think that his officers might have been racially profiling us until questioned further by Stackman. Jones then acknowledged to Stackman the likelihood that we had been harassed. 
After “seeing the light,” Jones also agreed that it was quite possible that his officers stared at us the first time the rode by because they thought we were the thieves. Not because they “recognized us,” as he said in his letter. The only problem he saw with their actions, however, was that the officers did not, after they figured out that we were not the thieves, roll down their windows and explain that they had thought we were the suspects, and proceed to ask us if we had seen anyone fleeing. 
I would like to now point out areas in Jones’ letter where he stretched the truth in order to blur the racial composition of the incident. 
Jones stated in his letter that the two officers who originally responded to the theft were as follows: one white and one black; and that a second white officer later joined the car. This is untrue. We ourselves saw two white officers waiting in the car on Elm Street being joined by a third officer, who was black. This is the way that the officer in the passenger seat of that car explained it to me over the phone after the incident, and this is the way that Jones himself described it in our meeting when going over his “investigation” of the incident. Why change this information in the letter? Also, Jones’ letter was the first time the suspects have ever been white. They were not white the night of the incident in the explanation of one of the harassing officers. They were not white when Jones agreed that the officers had probably stared at us to determine if we were the men. In fact, they could not have mistaken us for the men if they thought they were white. 
I am extremely disappointed and angered that Mr. Jones agreed to write an apology for racial profiling but then attacked our common sense and breached all the agreements that he had made with us. He has proven himself to be a fabricator, despite the safeguard we attempted to implement by having a Dean of Students present at our meeting with him. As I have joked before, this ex-Chief of Police has engrafted the Blue Wall of Silence into the Grey & Brown Wall of Silence. His actions are very unfortunate, and no longer funny. 

–Tarika Monique Powell
College junior