“Shockingly, Brown was asked by the college to remove her service firearm for a meeting with students following the hostile protests against her.”
Stacy Brown — chief of police services at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington — officially resigned after less than a year at her post. Protesting students at Evergreen disrupted campus and harassed employees, including Brown. These protests, that saw professors being descended upon by screaming mobs of students were caused by increased racial tensions.
Many of these incidents were captured on video and posted online. The disturbing videos show students cornering faculty members, yelling profanity-laced insults, and hurling accusations of racism. Brown became a target for protesters after being accused of “institutional racism.” Many of the protesters associated themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement, which is notorious for being anti-police.
At one point, students demanded Brown’s firing while calling her presence an “injustice.” Fliers that featured a caricature of Brown dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit were distributed around campus. Shockingly, Brown was asked by the college to remove her service firearm for a meeting with students following the hostile protests against her.
From the beginning, Brown was viciously berated by protesters, they even disrupted her swearing-in ceremony back in January. Dozens of students used noisemakers, drums, and horns to completely take over the ceremony while yelling, “f**k the police” and “death to pigs.”
Brown was taken aback by the response and spoke with the school newspaper about it. As a former student of Evergreen, Brown reminisced about peaceful and civil dialogue. Not to be outdone, angry social justice warriors submitted a letter to the paper a week later, blasting Brown with, “Police services and campus police may argue that campus police are here to help students and are less harmful than other policing institutions. However, even campus police are part of an apparatus that criminalizes and enslaves black people.”
The letter continued to explain that the main issue protesters had with Brown’s hiring was that she was white. They viewed the choice by Evergreen to hire her as giving “another white person” power over the oppressed student body (insert eye roll).
Not only did these irrational and dangerous students create an environment that made it impossible for Stacy Brown to conduct her job, she had very little backing from the administration.
In fact, it was the president himself — President George Bridges — who asked Brown to remain unarmed on campus to avoid agitating any students. He later acknowledged that decision to be a mistake.
Brown also spoke out against Evergreen for not arming campus police officers with rifles for active-shooter situations. Evergreen State College is currently the only university in the state that doesn’t arm their campus security with rifles.
The entire university has been an embarrassment all spring. The administration has lost control over events occurring on their own campus. President Bridges is possibly the most easily scared – in the face of adversity – grown man I have seen. He was so busy letting college kids run his campus that he forgot to support the law enforcement officials tasked to protect them. This isn’t surprising, considering how he has allowed his own faculty to be treated.
Will Brown’s successor be able to do any better?