About a month after a hate crime occurred on campus, San Jose State’s UPD hoped to discuss those incidents that affect the Asian American and Pacific Islander community during its event in the Martin Luther King Jr. Library Thursday.
UPD Chief Michael Carroll said the goal of the event was to start a conversation between the police officers and the university community to analyze possible solutions and preventive measures against hate crimes.
“This space is an opportunity for us to be transparent with the community in regards to some of the things that we're encountering, some of the things that we have done and some of the things that we plan on doing in future,” Carroll said.
The most recent hate crime on campus occured the morning of Sept. 2.
“A hate incident . . . occurred this morning during which two Asian American students were verbally confronted by a non-affiliate woman of Latinx descent who told them to leave the country,” Interim President Steve Perez stated in a campuswide email.
Perez said UPD were called to investigate and the students opted not to pursue the matter, though the assailant has been banned from campus for the maximum of 14 days in compliance with regulations.
Although Thursday’s event was intended to be a bilateral discussion, the student attendance was extremely low with only three students.
Carroll said to start solving the problem of hate incidents, UPD needs to have those individuals who are affected at the table.
Regarding outreach for the event, UPD Capt. Frank Belcastro said the event was widespread on campus.
“Emails went to every student group provided by your student enrollment people,” Belcastro said. “So there's over 300 different student groups that had individual emails, it was on the SAMMY App and on the SJSU Event page.”
Carroll said he also spoke to several Asian American student groups and passed out flyers to the SJSU community.
Carroll said even if many of those students thought the event was a great idea, they did not show up.
“I never even knew there was a meeting until people started posting online about how nobody showed up,” said Joshua Montes, master of education student.
Jinni Pradhan, the Center for Asian Pacific Islander Student Empowerment program director, said although she didn’t initially know about the event, she was able to attend the second part of the meeting on Zoom.
Pradhan said UPD is working hard to build a connection with the SJSU community to address the problem, but low attendance at the event might have been because students were busy with their classes and work schedules.
Montes said he barely even has enough time to attend my club meetings.“I am not sure how motivated people are to attend police meetings,” Montes said.
Electrical engineering junior Posa Chi said the events aren’t entirely effective.
“On average I think people are more afraid of failing grades rather than a potential hate crime happening [on] campus,” Chi said.
Chi said those events should take place in high traffic areas on campus so that students can stop by the stage and participate in the discussion.
Carroll said although building up a conversation with the community requires time, the participation in those events is a critical element to make possible the development of strategies to address the hate crimes on campus.
“We don't have knowledge of each other's lived experiences,” said Carroll. “So we have to create any type of space that we can learn from each other.”
Carroll said establishing the trust between UPD and the university community won’t happen overnight.
Bob Lim, vice president of Information Technology and chief information officer shared that sentiment and said there is an importance of talking and discussing issues that directly affect the community.
“Not only do we have to learn how to talk, we have to learn how to address what we see and what we experience in an unbiased way,” Lim said after the event. “We have to be able to do that.”
He also said the more people who are empowered to learn how to have conversations, the more others might feel comfortable to talk about their experiences.
Carroll said one of the most difficult things to talk about in the U.S. is race because people are uncomfortable and there’s a deep history that comes with it.
“We have to get more and more comfortable talking about race and in that way, we have a better understanding or respect for each other,” Carroll said.
