“John Koch, President of the College Democrats, urged students to keep their faith in GTPD. ‘These are people who have sworn an oath to protect us,” Koch said. “They’re armed for a reason.’”
And that reason is to enforce the law. The police motto “to serve and protect” applies to the law, not the citizens the law is written to protect. From a legal standpoint, the protection of individuals is a side effect of a police officer upholding the law. This well-documented American legal doctrine was ignored in the quoted piece and the concerned article. We cannot manufacture or reprint skewed claims, no matter how much we would like to believe they are true.
Similarly, a key perspective was omitted: it is not the successful use of force that is required to deter crime, but the equal threat of its use. By the very definition of “deter,” if the use of force is necessary, we have already failed. The area around and on campus is targeted because there are no weapons allowed. Criminals see no-firearm zones as safe targets because they assume we are law-abiding citizens. The police force works in a similar fashion. If police were to advertise their absence from an area, crime would likely increase. We have made known an area where there is little threat of deadly force, so why would that area not be a target? Unfortunately, cursory searches for crime statistics and their locations yield less than satisfying results, so supporting my argument with statistics is not possible at this time.
Nicholas Smith
Fifth-year CS