COOPER POINT JOURNAL EDITORIAL BOARD
Related: Police Services Purchased Cameras Disguised as Smoke Detectors
Evergreen has both a long history of political activism and a recent history of police surveillance and intimidation. These cannot coexist.
A look at the Cooper Point Journal archives displays this foundational history: students in the 70’s protested the war and light pollution, resisted the initial arming of police services in the 90’s, and conducted teach-ins in response to the still-ongoing Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This rich tradition of political involvement continues today.
However, in the last two decades, the college and federal government has responded to this history by infiltrating and spying on local and student political organizations. In the late 2000’s, federal law enforcement infiltrated the Evergreen/Olympia chapters of Students for A Democratic Society, who were resisting the export of weapons through the Port of Olympia. Evergreen Police Services interrupted and filmed activists in a student group meeting. United States military spy John Towery joined the group under an assumed name. Simultaneously, Evergreen’s Chief of Police Ed Sorger shared information on campus activists with city, county, state & federal police, and Towery himself. More recently, as reported in this issue, campus police purchased covert surveillance cameras, following their quiet purchase of AR-15 rifles.
These legacies of the college are at odds with one another. If this college is to persist, it must do away with one.
We choose to reject the spying.
In this spirit, we would like to recommend the following reforms:
1. Police Services will publicly post all purchases and property acquisitions as they occur.
All purchase orders are public records. As citizens of Washington and members of this college, it is our right to access these records.
As it stands, we are not granted access to this information until enough suspicion builds that we are inclined to request it. Only after a student noticed rifles in Police Services’ vehicles did we request related records, and it is only by accident and excellent journalistic paranoia that we have come to know about the covert surveillance cameras.
Through its actions, Police Services has demonstrated that it is not responsible enough to use discretionary funds without community supervision. Under the federal Campus Crime Statistics Act, Evergreen is already required to make regular reports about on-campus crimes. Using a similar model, Police Services should be required to post their purchases in a public area, and provide these purchases online weekly in an accessible format. If a Police Services employee (or other college employee acting on their behalf) fails to do so, they should receive a formal reprimand in their personnel record. If this occurs again, they should face serious consequences, including the possibility of dishonorable discharge.
In addition, Police Services conducts no regular inventories of their equipment. Other Evergreen departments regularly inventory their equipment to monitor for property loss and insurance purposes. Other Evergreen departments do not possess weapons. Police Services should be required to publicly conduct a twice-yearly inventory of their equipment, with similar penalties as above.
2. Evergreen will conduct an external review of its compliance with its Patriot Act Policy and fully comply with the review’s recommendations.
This policy explicitly prohibits the use of surveillance cameras outside retail areas, surveillance of First Amendment protected activities, and sharing student and student group information with local, state and federal law enforcement.
If Evergreen had been following its own policy for the last fifteen years, we wouldn’t have to be writing this editorial. Why should students be expected to comply with school policies when the school itself does not? Students, staff and administration all agree to follow the social contract. Similar to student conduct code violations, Evergreen employees should be subject to penalties when they fail to comply with school policies. If they were not made aware of such policies, then their supervisors should be subject to these penalties. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Evergreen should reconvene the Patriot Act Policy Review Committee to oversee this external review and empower the committee to enforce compliance with the review’s recommendations. The policy states that the committee “shall be formed consisting of representatives from those areas most likely to be affected by a request under the Patriot Act.” As such, its members should be drawn from groups that represent communities historically subject to government surveillance, including but not limited to: the Equity and Inclusion office, the Geoduck Student Union, the Black Student Union, Pasifika Roots, the Black Cottonwood Collective, the IWWGEU, the Cooper Point Journal, the Native Student Alliance, as well as current and future groups not mentioned. These members should be appointed by their own respective organizations rather than selected by senior administration.
The committee should also be empowered to revise and strengthen the Patriot Act Policy. The requirement that police have “reasonable suspicion” to conduct covert surveillance is a lower bar than the “probable cause” and the judge-approved warrant that off-campus police are usually required to obtain. Like at other colleges, Police Services should be required to request approval for covert surveillance from senior administration. Rather than plainly stating that police should “refrain” from surveillance and other activities, guidelines should be explicitly stated, with penalties including immediate dismissal without pay associated with their violation.
As stated in the current policy, this committee should meet at least twice annually. Failure to maintain a regular majority quorum should result in a public, formal reprimand of the policy steward, which for now is the Executive Associate to the President. A similar formal reprimand should be made if the Police Community Review Board and the Bias Incident Response Team does not meet, neither of which have met once this year. The Patriot Act Review Committee should be given preference when it makes records requests, and its meeting notes should be public record.
3. Evergreen administration will make themselves available for public comment.
It is highly unusual that a college newspaper has to do intense investigative journalism to even determine what the college’s policies are. A failure by senior administration to familiarize themselves with the workings of the press has made this college opaque.
Although some have criticized the Cooper Point Journal for regularly being critical of actions taken by the college, both administration and media relations consistently fail to send press releases or communication from the college about any developments, including positive ones. For example, Marketings & Communications chose to post their press release about the opening of the Veterans Lounge directly to thurstontalk.com. The Cooper Point Journal was not informed at all.
On the other hand, the administration has explicitly directed the Cooper Point Journal to communicate all inquiries about the school exclusively through Public Relations Manager Alison Anderson. The combination of this stonewalling policy and the lack of public releases from the school itself obscures both an understanding of college relations and adherence to state law.
These directives mean that we as student journalists must operate as if alienated from the campus community; requesting comments through public relations, and having any and all interactions mediated by a public relations officer to gain even basic access to information about our own institutional policies. This directive seemingly violates not only the Social Contract, but also Washington State Law (WAC 174-121-010, 9e), which states that “Evergreen policies apply equally regardless of job description, status or role in the community.” Marketing & Communications has made clear that requesting information “as a member of the Evergreen community” is distinct from info requests as a student journalist. This effectively gives individual students access to information but does not allow student journalists to disseminate information to the student body.
We empathize with Evergreen’s resistance to appearing in the news media. Bret Weinstein’s 2017 Fox News interview did irreparable damage to the reputation of the college. We too continue to receive undue attention from right-wing media and have become reasonably paranoid about doxxing threats. But we are student-journalists, and it is our job to learn and participate in our community. It is the job of our administration to administrate, which, in our media-saturated world, requires active communication with the press.
In addition, Evergreen should comply with state law and assign additional staff to its public records division. Evergreen’s sole public records officer faces a huge backlog of records requests. This includes requests from national journalists made as far back as 2017. We continue to receive responses to requests made by our staff from last year; as most of our editorial staff each year are seniors, at times we suspect the college is waiting us out. Evergreen should model its revamped public records department on the University of Oregon’s, which posts online every request it receives and demonstrates that it often completes requests in as little as a week.
The external review conducted after the 2017 protests recommends that Evergreen:
Develop a strong, pro-active and integrated internal Evergreen campus communications plan that restores a sense of trust and transparency among campus constituencies…while there may be some understandable concern by senior administration that internal campus communications may be shared with or visible to hostile external audiences for distortion and exploitation, the risks are far greater of a deterioration of the fabric of the campus community, characterized by feelings of mistrust and exclusion from the administration.
Evergreen needs to halt its rapid deterioration.
Evergreen is on the verge of becoming a fundamentally broken institution. If these cracks in its foundation are not repaired, we as students should consider the social contract severed.
