By Thomas Barland, for the Chippewa Valley Post
Last Sept. 26, at 10:15 a.m., a married couple, visitors from Texas, was walking the bike trail on the edge of the UW-Eau Claire campus near the Water Street bridge, when they encountered a UW-EC police officer who asked where they were from. It was a cool day, particularly for visitors from Texas, and very windy. As a result they were bundled up, with their jacket hoods over their heads..
They explained they were visiting from Texas and found the weather cold. The officer agreed that it was cool, made some other casual statements, and left them. Being people of color, they were outraged that they had been questioned by a police officer who wanted to know what they were doing.
An hour later at 11:14 a.m., a UW-EC faculty member was walking down an alley within half a block of the campus (and a bike parking area), while carrying a bicycle tire rim. As he approached the back door of his home he was hailed by the same police officer who earlier had questioned the Texas couple.
The officer explained that there had been recent thefts of bikes from the campus and he was just checking. The faculty member was incensed by the implied suggestion that he might be carrying stolen property. He loudly and profanely stated that he had a $2,000 bike rim which no student could afford. With that statement he entered his home and slammed the door. The entire encounter lasted less than a minute, according to UW-EC Police Chief David Sprick.
The faculty member was a person of color and, in fact, the son of the couple who had been stopped on the bike trail earlier that morning.
The faculty member’s wife, who is white and herself a faculty member, wrote to the Eau Claire Leader Telegram an angry “It Seems to Me” column which appeared on Sunday, Oct. 16, arguing that these were racist police stops. At the time she wrote she did not realize that the University police force was not part of the Eau Claire city police, which had no involvement in either incident.
Were these racist police stops?
The U.S. Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio states that a police officer has the right to make what came to be known as a “Terry stop” if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the subject has committed a crime. Do either of these two incidents fall within the “Terry” rule?
The first clearly does not. The officer was responding to a report of the presence of a younger person who had been prohibited from being on the campus. The second one is a weak “maybe.” Actually, in the second case the officer did not attempt to exercise a “Terry” restraint, when the faculty member broke off the encounter.
So, was it the matter of race which prompted the two encounters? We leave that to the reader.
The encounters do raise the issue of how careful a police officer should be when contacting, for any reason, a person of color. Even prior to September, the UW-EC and Eau Claire police were discussing how to collaborate on improving their police training curriculum by emphasizing “impartial policing.”
These are very sensitive matters. The officer believed he was being polite. But people of color have good reason to be easily angered. Many people of color report that they have been stopped by police under circumstances which they believe would not have produced that result if they were white.
That this happened in Eau Claire, which prides itself as being a friendly and wholesome place to live, should give us pause as to just how welcoming we are. Many years ago UW-EC tried hard to bring in students of color, particularly from the Milwaukee area. That program did not succeed, at least in part because students reported not feeling welcomed in the city.
Have things changed?