Column: Bloomington public safety commission condemns IU treatment of protesters

Editor's note: This guest column was updated on May 17, 2024, to reflect "Imagining Safety" is a documentary film.

As members of the City of Bloomington’s Community Advisory on Public Safety (CAPS) Commission, we are appalled at the videos of SWAT police and state troopers assaulting and arresting non-violent protestors and their supporters on the Indiana University campus on April 25 and 27.

CAPS works to amplify the voices of the most marginalized residents on issues related to safety. The violent suppression of principled calls for peace, freedom, democracy and equality by students, professors and other community members will forever stain the history of our city. Using militarized police — including rooftop snipers — to intimidate non-violent protestors is a violation of free speech and an overuse of state force with the intent to suppress dissent.

People attending an institution of “higher learning” should not be assaulted, traumatized or criminalized by their university for criticizing its policies, or for supporting the students doing so.

The violent militarized response by IU cannot but recall the Kent State University shooting that occurred on May 4, 1970. In that atrocity which occurred less than 400 miles away, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine, who were protesting against the U.S. expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, the presence of the National Guard on campus and the military draft. Like the Kent State protestors, the IU student and faculty protestors and their supporters rallying in Dunn Meadow were not violent and posed no threats to safety.

Peaceful assembly in order to engage in political speech is a protected right under the Constitution, and those assembled have the right to demand changes in administrative personnel, ending partnerships with Crane Naval Base, financial divestment from Israel, and equal treatment of Muslim and Middle Eastern students.

In the recent CAPS-hosted documentary film screening and panel discussion of “ Reimagining Safety ” held on the IU campus, we learned that many of the problems of U.S. policing stem from the history of state repression targeted against particular racial and ethnic groups to further the practices of settler-colonialism, genocide and chattel slavery.

The use of violent, militarized police force against city residents speaking against injustice show us that this “history” is far from over.

We are inspired by the students and other community members who are peacefully demanding changes in institutional practices that they find morally repugnant. We are proud of the protestors and their supporters for remaining non-violent in the face of police brutality and provocations, and for refusing to be intimidated into silence.

The initial confrontation by SWAT teams and mass arrests made on Thursday, April 25 were repeated on Saturday, April 27. Saturday’s arrests targeted student organizers, including one who was referred to on police scanners as “a Black man with an Afro” and who has received a five-year ban from campus, five times longer than the one-year ban that other protestors received.

Criminalization, administrative punishment and violent suppression of lawful political dissent are harmful to democracy and threats to public safety. We demand that Indiana University immediately cease these activities and hold responsible the people who made those decisions. To that end, we have drafted a CAPS Resolution Denouncing Violent Suppression of Pro-Palestinian Protests which was considered on May 1.

Moreover, we applaud Bloomington City Council Members Isabel Piedmont-Smith and Sydney Zulich, who have released statements condemning the University’s actions . We urge Bloomington residents to ask the Council to adopt a statement on May 1 denouncing the University’s actions.

The undersigned Members of the Commission are writing to express our common opinion; this letter is not the result of an official action by the Commission. Kamala Brown-Sparks, Jason Michálek, Nejla Routsong are members of the Bloomington CAPS Commission.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Column: Bloomington public safety commission condemns IU treatment of protesters