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Campus safety officers are denouncing a demand by student activists at Occidental College in Los Angeles that they stop wearing bulletproof vests.
The police do not carry weapons on campus and vests are their only protection. Officer Jasmine Vasquez said: “We don’t have any other protection to defend ourselves. If we don’t have our vests, all we have is our voice and our hands.”
The students taking part in the protests are part of a coalition called “Oxy United for Black Liberation.” They are reportedly occupying the school’s administrative building “indefinitely,” or until their list of 14 demands are met.
Those demands include immediate removal of LAPD’s presence and immediate demilitarization of campus safety. Campus security officers say they find the students’ demands “frustrating.”
Bretibart News reports that the administration building at Occidental seems “somewhat chaotic” with students living on the first floor and college staff working above.
One black female student told Breitbart: “We are extremely tired of being marginalized on this campus.” The student claims that she and fellow black students are stopped daily by campus security, based solely on their color, and questioned whether they are students there.
Another freshman student told the news agency that the activist’s grievances are “being blown out of proportion.”
Another one of their demands is that the college hire “physicians of color” to treat “physical and emotional trauma associated with issues of identity.”
Sara Semal is the Sr. Director of Student Wellness at the college.
When asked if students of color have different physical ailments from other students that perhaps only a black physician could address, Semal said in part:
“I think that medically, no. And yes, because we can’t compartmentalize our medical, physical health without taking into consideration the emotional and social issues that affect our health…. And sometimes, yes, a person of color might be more sensitive or understanding to those issues..”
Meantime, the Huffington Post reported yesterday that the Occidental College protesters have won the faculty’s support for the president’s resignation.
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