Xavier students call for better treatment

By Tylan Nash
Contributing Writer

A night of relaxation and enjoyment for Xavier University of Louisiana students turned into a night of horror after they were locked in their university’s cafeteria and instructed to clean up. The action that followed by the university’s campus police eventually turned into chaos with students being pepper sprayed and reports of arrests on Dec. 3.

The university announced that as of Dec. 6, the two Xavier police officers who were involved have been released from their positions with the university, and that Xavier’s Director of Public Safety Chief Jacques Battiste had resigned. Curtis Wright, the university’s Vice President of Student Affairs will serve as the temporary Director of Public Safety, until the university finds a new chief to fill that position.

“After being locked in the cafeteria, I started to panic. Then, I saw some of the students run away from the gate and towards the door, and after they came through it, that’s when I heard people start to scream,” said Eryck Wiles, a sophomore student at Xavier, who recalled when the incident occurred.

After the stress of the semester, students said they went to the cafeteria in the University Center to relax and be with their friends at the annual Midnight Breakfast event. Multiple students said they tried to escape the lunchroom when police staff locked students in, trying to get them to remove disposable plates and other utensils. Eventually, some students said they found an exit that is connected to the cafeteria that leads to the University yard, and that’s when students who were still inside the building said they were met by Xavier’s campus police department officers. Students took to social media afterwards claiming that XUPD officers body slammed, handcuffed and pepper sprayed students as they attempted to exit the University Center.

“We have much bigger fish to fry on campus, so the fact that people were pepper sprayed because they were trying to leave a cafeteria they were locked in is ridiculous,” said Piper Thurman, a sophomore at Xavier.

Students said they were upset, but not surprised by the actions that the Xavier police department took at the Midnight Breakfast. The university held a forum in their University Center ballroom on Dec. 5, with school administrators and Xavier police department present, as a way for them to hear from students directly. Many students filled the University Center’s ballroom to use the forum to voice their concerns with how the police department chooses to protect the school.

They shared that the university’s police department did not have adequate response times to emergencies, and one student told officials in the forum that she felt unsafe walking from the library and back to her dorm across the campus at night this Fall semester, and had asked for a campus police patrol car to take her to her dorm room. The patrol car took 30 minutes to show up, and the police officer who escorted her was not pleasant, the student said at the forum. Others pointed out that reports of assaults, vandalisms and robberies seem to remain consistent, and that they felt there was not sufficient attention to other threats to campus safety by the police department. The university is located in the Gert Town neighborhood. Students must cross through the community to get from one side of the campus to the other.

“What happened was unnecessary, and it could have been avoided,” said Kimani Hamilton, a Xavier sophomore. “XUPD was completely out of line when they decided to lock students in the cafeteria, and only made it worse when they started to pepper spray students.”

Xavier University’s president C. Reynold Verret addressed the university in a statement indicating that the incident that occurred did not reflect Xavier’s legacy or mission.

“Please know, you are valued, and your concerns are important to me. I am reviewing how we treat and serve you on all fronts to insure you receive the care and respect you deserve from all of us,” Verret wrote in the statement.

This article originally published in the December 10, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.