How I Could Just Kill A Man

OPS brings the smack down but only proves that if cops are bacon, OPS are Bacos(tm)...

I hate the Office of Public Safety. More specifically, I hate their routine abuse of power, the fact that they have the rights to search and seizure, and other such bogus practices that my tuition money and fees help pay for.

To put all of this in perspective, let me inject a footnote: I have a problem with authority figures. This could be a deep-rooted psychological issue, but it's probably because I was beaten up every day in the public schools and made to believe it was my own fault, and once I was even punched in the face by an EMT who was convinced I was on drugs, when in fact I was in diabetic shock.

But regardless of my problems with authority, I do in fact have good reason to hate the OPS. I hadn't been here for even two weeks before they fucked with me. It went down like this, see: my roommate and I put darkly comedic fake death threats on our dorm room door. Here is the letter that let The Man bring me down:

Dear Fellow Residents:

My name is Brian Boone and I have had all that I can take of living in this room. I have the roommate from Hell. He is crude, crass, obnoxious, regularly intoxicated and an incurable kleptomaniac. I haven't slept since I got here, nor can I get any homework done. I've decided to take matters into my own hands. My roommate, one Casey Kelly, has got to go. And I'm not talking about conventional means, like kicking him out, or changing dorms. No, friends, Casey Kelly will soon die. I've had all I can handle and I am going to kill him next Friday. I've purchased the gun at a local Wal-Mart filled with six bullets and have it hidden in my room, anxiously awaiting the day that I will strike Casey Kelly dead with my new Magnum pistol. Casey Kelly will be dead and he will be a worry to me no more. May he rot in Hell. In the meantime, I would appreciate if you guys wouldn't tell Casey Kelly that I'm going to kill him in his sleep next Friday. I really think it would kill the surprise. In closing, die, Casey Kelly, die.

Sincerely,
Brian Boone

Granted, I would hope that the authorities would investigate a note like this found in the dorms. However, a real would-be murderer would have to be pretty stupid to post it on his door. Moreover, the entire joke was that we posted a second copy of the notice right next to the first one. The second notice had the same text, but with the names switched, so it said that Casey Kelly was going to kill Brian Boone. Thus, to anyone but my retarded little brother, the whole thing should have been easily identified as a joke. Even our RA found it amusing and thought nothing of it.

But alas, a janitor always comes along to show us what is true and right. She was doing her daily vacuuming or whatnot and saw the notes on our door. She read one, got concerned that we might not be kidding, and reported my roommate and myself to University Housing. Within a day, there was a message on our voice mail from a random bureaucrat, saying that she had one of our notices and needed to investigate if the incident was serious or not. We sent her a message, confirming that it was a joke. They ignored us anyway, and tattled on us to the OPS and Eugene Police Department.

My roommate and I were then summoned by our RA, who gave us the business card of some campus cop who we were to meet with the following Monday. So we met at the office with the aforementioned pig, who, in spite of all the hassle, laughed it off and told us we had wasted his time, which he could have used to focus on serious crimes. Wasted his time? He wasted my time. I didn't want to meet with him. Everyone knew it was a joke, and it was much more hassle for us than them. It's just another way that they can justify their brutish, invasive behavior and blame it on students who didn't really do anything wrong. For the record, had we been charged with any crime, it would have been "menacing," a class A misdemeanor.

According to Oregon state law, obtained through a very nice OPS employee, the crime of menacing occurs when, "by word or conduct, a person intentionally attempts to place another person in fear of imminent serious physical injury." A subjective law if I ever heard one. Who but the victim can judge whether the questionable behavior caused fear? By this definition, OPS officers themselves are guilty of the charge of menacing.

Personally, I consider tear-gassing a group of teenagers to be a menacing act, as is stalking and harassing a student waiting to get inside Hamilton.

Hypothetically speaking, of course. If perchance a student used a minor chemical weapon or stalked and harassed another human being, they would certainly be apprehended by OPS and charged with, at the very least, menacing. So basically, jokingly "threatening" to kill my roommate is a more deplorable and dangerous act than following and harassing a student, at least in the eyes of the OPS.

Stalking a student and following him into a building, when he was exhibiting no negative effect on his surroundings, is an act of menacing, simply because it made this one student fear for his safety. The OPS is supposed to lessen the fear we feel while walking around at night. We shouldn't be afraid of the OPS itself, and of the possibility of more incidents like the one at Hamilton reoccurring. If the OPS is protecting us from other students, who is protecting us from actual criminals in the Eugene area?

The November 2 incident at Hamilton didn't even initially involve any real OPS employees or EPD officers. The "cops" who first created the problem with the student were in fact student patrol members. These are essentially undergrads on work-study who walk around campus, shining flashlights in people's eyes, keeping the peace, investigating any dangerous activity. It's a big power trip, actually: little Johnny and Susie get to play dress-up as police officers and annoy and oppress their classmates.

But since they are only lowly college students, the student patrol officers have to call in OPS or EPD officers if some sort of criminal activity is actually going down. This is what happened at Hamilton. Nine cops eventually appeared, giving the impression of a riot: too much angry police force for a non-incident.

The fact that much of the grunt work of daily patrolling is done by student officers proves that the OPS really doesn't give a shit about the safety of the students. Rather than do their jobs and risk their own safety for the sake of ours - i.e. the job description of police - they make a bunch of teenagers go out in the dark and risk their well-being.

Perhaps more to the point, another student isn't going to be able to do any good in a situation involving other students and criminal activity. Since they have no real power, the student patrol officers must call either the OPS or the EPD, making their own presence futile. It's almost as if OPS is trying to look nice and student-friendly by sending out our peers to keep us in line. We're not going to respect kiddie narcs any more than we're going to respect the adult narcs, however. We don't want them harassing us when we're doing nothing wrong, and all they really want to do is feel powerful and, uh, menacing.

As for the regularly employed OPS officers and EPD moonlighters, they're just plain pissed off that their lives didn't go according to plan. They weren't good enough to fulfill their dreams of becoming real cops, or, in the case of the EPD officers assigned to campus duty, they're upset that they don't get any fun or dangerous assignments. Perhaps they should move out of Eugene and go where the crime is, like, say, any city where five kids with beer bottles is not considered a riot.

Thus, the porcine patrol take out their disappointment in life on us, the student body at large. Their essential uselessness, along with the fact that they aren't allowed to carry guns, makes them fully aware of their small penii. The OPS piglets get none of the inflated sense of self-esteem the real cops get from carrying a gun, but there is that certain element of intoxication by power. This sense of authority, created of whole cloth out of their pseudo-cop uniforms and badges, makes them feel good about themselves. And by making life Hell for students, they can feel better about their own.

To return to the ordeal with my roommate, even though the OPS, of the scary green and yellow flashing lights, did hassle us for no apparent reason, it's as if they didn't really give a damn about our safety. The notes said we would kill each other on Friday, and Officer Bob wanted to meet with us on the following Monday. They must not have been that concerned. You'd think known premeditation of murder would merit some urgency. I tell ya, the whole thing makes me so mad, I could just kill someone.

Brian Boone, a sophmore majoring in Journalism and Theater, is a staff writer for the Oregon Commentator.