Texas State University’s student senate recently held an “emergency meeting” to vote on a resolution calling on the school to ban its police department. The resolution was authored by one student senator who was arrested last week during an incident on campus involving the assault of a student wearing a MAGA hat, but appears to have not passed a student senate vote.
Texas State University student senator Claudia Gasponi — who authored a resolution last month to ban the school’s Turning Point USA group from campus — has now authored a new resolution to ban the university police from campus.
The resolution was drafted following the student senator’s arrest last week, along with three other students, during a counter-protest gone haywire.
The proposed legislation, entitled, “The Removal of Excessive and Abusive Policing Resolution,” calls for “the dissolution of the University Police Department,” due to the alleged “over-policing” on campus that “specifically targets and endangers people of color.”
“Texas State University’s student population is mostly people of color,” states the resolution obtained by Breitbart News, “and in order to be truly inclusive, the needs of people of color must be set as a priority and not an afterthought, especially in an institution that historically has disenfranchised people of color.”
“I’m not retaliating because I was arrested, I’m retaliating because I was violently assaulted and I saw several of my friends get violently assaulted,” said Gasponi at the emergency meeting on Wednesday. The student senator had referred to her arrest as an “assault.”
“I know that the university police department hasn’t done jack to correct these assaults that are happening,” continued Gasponi, “So — I wrote this [resolution], not because I’m upset I got arrested. I’m upset that we have a violent group on campus that is mandated and paid for by our administration to do the administration’s bidding.”
The student senator went on to claim that while “racism and homophobia and transphobia in our university police department is a huge problem,” there are still bigger issues at hand, such as “the administration” supposedly using the police department to “terrorize the students” on campus.
“Dissolving UPD is, like — it’s like, so beneficial to disempowering our administration,” said Gasponi, “they’re using UPD like a gun pointed at our face, so that we stay in line and we don’t remove white supremacy.”
“People say, like, you know, like, ‘you should feel safe with police on campus,’ like, no,” added the student senator, “As a person of color, fundamentally, no. That’s not what police were created for, that’s not what police have done ever in their lives — policing in of itself is corrupt, like, the creation of police.”
The resolution had also accused the police department of using their discretion “in favor of white supremacists,” adding that the department had not properly trained its officers in “de-escalation, LGBTQIA+ sensitivity, disability sensitivity, and racial sensitivity.”
“University Police has a history of using excessive force against students,” states the resolution, “and therefore the Texas State University Student Senate calls for the dissolution of the University Police Department.”
The resolution — which appeared to have been struck down in a vote by student government — was authored by Gasponi following her arrest during a counter-protest that had gotten out of control after a protester assaulted a student wearing a MAGA hat. The student senator faces charges for resisting arrest and “search or transportation; interference with public duties.”
Last month, Gasponi authored and championed a student government resolution to ban the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, claiming that the move to censor the conservative group was “actually in protection of freedom of speech.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.
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