Former United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch is tossing #NotAgainSU a bone in suggesting that Syracuse University create a Public Safety Review Board. The radio silence on #NotAgainSU’s social media pages is a strong indictment of Lynch’s lackluster proposal. What could have been a victory for the movement turns out to be a cringeworthy and theatrical attempt to pander to protesters.

The question is whether this board meets the demands #NotAgainSU protesters made this past spring. The short answer is no. The board Lynch envisioned is “charged with reviewing and commenting.” It won’t have the power to force Department of Public Safety Chief Bobby Maldonado and Associate Chief John Sardino to resign, and it can’t facilitate the disarming of DPS.

“External committees never have a lot of power, and that’s what we have here,” said Biko Gray, an assistant professor of religion at SU. 

Frustratingly, Lynch’s long-anticipated solution turns out to be just a bigger and less efficient bureaucracy. 

“We paid all this money for them to develop a board that is essentially neutered; that has no capacity whatsoever to do anything but provide peaceful recommendations to what is already a corrupt and destructive public safety department,” Gray said.

Who would want to be on such a “neutered” committee? Ultimately, “it’s a board that requires work from people who probably don’t have time to do it,” Gray said. Not only has Lynch’s investigation been a waste of time and resources, but now others will waste their time sitting on her ineffective board.

Sadly, I must admit, I had high hopes that Lynch’s investigations could answer very real questions about how DPS ought to operate at SU. College should be a Willy Wonka factory for scholars seeking to explore the depths of humanity’s collective imagination, and the presence of a police force looming over that potentially limitless sandbox gives me mixed feelings. 

The argument that “police provide safety” is valid, but a freer college community, of which I am a proponent of, requires students to take on limitless risks. It’s not clear to me what part DPS plays in that picture.

I find myself torn between a libertarian argument against zealous policing and a conservative argument that the police shield the law-abiding from perpetual threats of violence and crime. Nevertheless, there are those who agree with Gray when he says that “nothing but the abolishment of the DPS is going to address the issue of anti-Blackness as it relates to police brutality on campus.”

While Lynch’s milquetoast proposal frustrates me on an ideological level, the presence of DPS on campus produces existential fear for some, and SU’s failed attempt to pander to those fears by hiding behind the clout given to Lynch by her stint as President Barack Obama’s attorney general just proves the administration’s ineptitude.

When SU brought Lynch on board to review DPS, campus tensions were high between students and DPS. One could have reasonably assumed that SU’s decision to retain Lynch’s service came in direct response to the tense campus climate and the extent to which DPS’s was responsible for creating it. 

Regrettably, it’s now obvious that this expensive performance of hiring Lynch served only as a way for SU to save face. 

The narrative that Lynch’s investigation would be a direct response to DPS wrongdoing is false. Instead, the investigation is in response to SU’s institutional reflex for self-preservation, which the campus community has seen over the past two and half years, Gray said.

“The university wanted to preserve its reputation for being a ‘diverse’ campus that they wanted to address the question of race,” he said.

Regardless of what should come of it, this Public Safety Review Board will forever be fruit from a poisoned tree.

#NotAgainSU took the lead in initiating the discourse on policing in the SU community, and leaders of the movement couldn’t have known how nationally-relevant their actions would have been in the months following their sit-in of Crouse-Hinds. This past summer, the U.S. wrestled with a reckoning on race and policing, and many community members raised important questions about the function of policing.

Unfortunately, it seems the answers that Lynch has are just more of the same: more meetings, more committees, and more facades that work to do nothing more than save face.

Cesar Gray is a senior political science and government major. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at cfgray@syr.edu.

Published on September 22, 2020 at 12:17 am