A New York City college is encouraging police officers to use one specific campus bathroom that is allegedly in sore need of repair.
And a student at Brooklyn College, part of the public City University of New York system, is even drafting a petition to ban police officers from the campus, which is in the neighborhoods of Midwood and Flatbush.
Donald Wenz, the school’s public safety director, told student newspaper The Excelsior that the college wants police officers to use the bathroom in the campus’s West End Building ‘rather than walking across either quad to use the bathroom’.
Brooklyn College has officially stated that it prefers for police officers to use one specific bathroom on its campus. Pictured is the campus, which is located in the Midwood and Flatbush neighborhoods
Meanwhile, a student is drafting a petition that would seek to ban police officers from campus entirely. The school said in a statement that it offers public servants the right to use their facilities ‘as a courtesy’
An investigation by the New York Post found that said bathroom has an ‘out of order’ toilet and lacked both soap and paper towels.
A student told the Post: ‘You can only wash your hands in one of the sinks because the other two are broken.’
The news comes as an unidentified student is drafting a petition, to be delivered to the university’s president, to ban police officers from campus entirely.
The student told the Excelsior that they want the university’s president to make a statement that declares: ‘We do not want the NYPD on campus in any respect even if it’s just to take breaks and use bathroom.’
The school prefers for police officers to use the bathroom in the school’s West End Building (Number 8 in this campus map). An investigation by the New York Post found that the building’s bathroom was in sore need of repair
Donald Wenz, the school’s public safety director, said that police officers using the bathroom in WEB is preferable to having them ‘walking across either quad to use the bathroom’
Multiple students told both their campus newspaper and the Post of how people feel ‘triggered’ by the presence of police officers on campus.
A college spokesperson told the Post that it offers public servants the right to use their facilities ‘as a courtesy’.
Tensions between police officers and students at the school reached a breaking point two years ago, after it emerged that an undercover police officer had been surveilling Muslim students in an effort to try to find Islamic terrorists.
The woman, who went by the name of Mel, short for Melike, spent four years earning the trust of Islamic students at the college as part of an NYPD operation to spy on Muslims.
A documentary about the police operation, ‘Watched,’ has been screening on campus this semester.