File photo/The Daily Cougar
As a result of the criminal activity throughout the semester, particularly the robberies in outlaying parking lots, the UH Police Department officers have been under much scrutiny. Likewise, students have been vocal about their displeasure with them. Some of these students have become rude and disrespectful, going as far as comparing the campus police officers to mall cops.
Despite the good police officers do around campus, which often goes unrecognized, like the police officer who fished a student’s iPad out of a portable toilet barehanded, students decide to focus solely on the negative.
Students should back off a little. The men and women of the UHPD are officers of the law, not psychics. They cannot predict when, where and by whom a crime is going to happen.
Police officers have a difficult job. They have to deal with people questioning and criticizing their every move. For example, people questioned why did they not add more security after the first robbery and why it took so long to catch the suspect.
The reality is nobody expected another robbery within days of the first. It is understandable that victims of the robberies could not recollect explicit details about their robbers, and so it should be equally reasonable that the police officer cannot do much with vague details. Chasing down every African-American of average height and with short dreadlocks wouldn’t accomplish anything.
Contrary to popular belief, campus police officers are not the same as mall cops. According to the Texas Education Code Sec. 51.203, they are vested with all the powers, privileges and immunities of peace officers and must be a certified police officer under the requirements of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officers and Standards. Translation: they are very real officers with real handcuffs and every right to jail anyone breaks the law.
It is also important to note that they are also real people. As police officers, it is their duty to deal with everything that comes with their job, but as people, odds are they sometimes get tired of constantly being criticized.
It is easy to complain about things we don’t understand and think we can do better. But rather than complain about the time it takes to detain suspects, those complainers should better spend their time coming up with solutions to the problems. It is easy to complain, but much more difficult to fix and address those complaints.
Mónica Rojas is a journalism freshman and may be reached at [email protected].
“The men and women of the UHPD are officers of the law, not psychics. They cannot predict when, where and by whom a crime is going to happen.”
This is true of all local law enforcement. Which is why there is a saying:
“When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”
Don’t rely solely on the police to protect you.
The police have been a thorn in the side of students. They are comparable to mall cops because they exert so much energy to police non-criminal activity with unnecessary force ie the undie run/post Obama debacle and any other event involving large groups of African Americans, that they do come across as mall cops. Ready for some action but never the right action. I don’t think that the understaffed UHPD should get any slack when it has been the same old song for years and years.
I’ve seen footage of the undie run. I saw no unnecessary force. There was a crowd that was too large for the area, they told people to leave, the people refused to leave. People who continued to refuse to leave the area after being told they could not be there anymore were arrested. Additionally, all arrests that were made were done by HPD, not UHPD. Please get your facts straight.
First of all spell anonymous right…secondly you saw video but you weren’t there. What wasn’t caught on tape was the take down of a guy that walked past the cops and which brushed them the wrong way and three officers took him down. Those were UHPD cops that arrested that student.I actually know them by face because I worked for the university and saw them often. I wasn’t some fair-weather observer like you. The point is UHPD is severly understaffed and too reactionary instead of precautionary and when they react it is often wrong. Some reform needs to occur.
All I see is fatties in suburbans. Work a crosswalk or something & I mean out in the middle of the street, not behind the utility box in a lawn chair. They might be cops but they are the dregs of the cop world. Overpaid parking attendants. They would pull a UC-Davis inna heartbeat.