Review committee not U.'s first attempt to address profiling

Freshmen and sophomores may be shocked by the racial profiling allegations leveled against the Penn Police in the wake of the Oct. 11 arrest of Spruce College House Associate Faculty Master Rui DaSilva.

But older students may be wondering why previous attempts at resolving similar issues failed -- and question whether the new Public Safety Advisory Board subcommittee investigating racial profiling will be equally ineffective.

On Jan. 19, 2002, police officers asked then-College senior Dimitri Dube to leave the 7-Eleven on 38th and Chestnut streets. The officers told Dube that the cashier did not want him in the store, The Daily Pennsylvanianreported at the time.

He was then stopped by University Police officers as he walked home. Although Dube did not say the officers abused him, he believed his race made him a target -- which spurred him to file a formal complaint with the officers.

Dube later advocated changing the complaint process when he learned that it lacked objectivity.

"Police are the only ones who see the complaint and review it," he told The Daily Pennsylvanian at the time.

In response, a wide coalition of Penn student groups, including the United Minorities Council, tried to reform police behavior and streamline the complaint process.

Some of these efforts were relatively successful. Chief of Police Tom Rambo created new guidelines, which included training geared to reinforce officers' safe and courteous interactions with the community.

Three students were also appointed to the Division of Public Safety Advisory Board -- an action that some students believed would facilitate the creation of civilian review boards.

However, the effort to create the boards did not turn out the way student leaders had hoped. College senior Alex Breland resigned from the board in protest when he realized that a civilian review committee would not be formed.

In theory, the board would function as an avenue of appeal that existed outside of and parallel to the internal police complaint procedure. It was modeled on the system at the University of California, Berkeley.

And while the Undergraduate Assembly and minority groups endorsed the idea, some administration officials were skeptical.

"What we don't want to do is add one more bureaucratic thing," Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush told the DP at the time.

But she also was concerned about making the officers feel as though they were always second-guessed.

"We don't want our officers to feel as if everything they do is under intense scrutiny," she said.

While minority representatives focused on the fact that the police union's contract with Penn prohibited external reviews, the proposal for a civilian review board was ultimately rejected because the majority of the advisory board felt that the existing complaint procedure system was adequate, said Dennis Culhane, a Social Work professor and the chairman of the Public Safety Advisory Board. Culhane is also the chair of the new subcommittee formed in the aftermath of DaSilva's arrest.

DaSilva was pepper-sprayed and arrested by a University Police officer on Spruce Street on Oct. 11 while wheeling donated bicycles to the Quadrangle. Although he was issued a summary citation for disorderly conduct, the charge was later dropped at police request.

Last Friday, the subcommittee of the Public Safety Advisory Board, which was formed to address the implications of this case, met for the first time to determine a meeting schedule and procedure to review police practices.

It was formed after the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and University President Judith Rodin asked for an external review of the incident.

Unlike the civilian review board, which would have been a new bureaucratic instrument wholly outside the police system, the subcommittee is part of an existing advisory committee.

Furthermore, "the goal of the committee is to review the Penn Police Department's policies, practices and procedures in regard to racial profiling and to review the recent incident to see what way it can inform that review," Culhane said.

The goal of the committee's work as it pertained to the Dube case had a slightly different focus.

"We did not review it as a singular case -- instead, we instituted a system of reviewing all complaints against police in the aggregate in the nature and disposition of complaints," Culhane said.

Breland said that he doubts that the mere creation of a civilian review board following the Dube incident could have prevented DaSilva's arrest. However, he added that he believes the existence of a civilian review board "would have changed the response afterwards."

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