On Nov. 2, the University of Pittsburgh police forcibly prevented
members of the public from attending a Students for Justice in
Palestine event. Organized through the proper methods required by the
university, the event featured a Palestinian-American slam poet and
an Israeli journalist. SJP had earlier publicized the event through
fliers and social media and designated it as an event free and open
to the public.
Despite all this, within the first minutes of the event, the SJP
leaders discovered that the university police were refusing entry to
participants of an earlier Occupy Pittsburgh march that had taken
place around the campus in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland in
solidarity with Occupy Oakland, Calif. Before too long, a member of
Occupy Pittsburgh was handcuffed and cited when he refused to leave
the premises, although the event was free and open to the public, as
repeatedly stated by the SJP organizers.
It is clear that in this recent SJP event certain members of the
public were discriminated against by the police based on their
political beliefs and activity—that is, participating in the Occupy
movement. The campus police also verbally harassed the activists ,
describing some of the attendees as “hooligans” and
“knuckleheads.” University Police Chief Delaney even stated that
he wished he could “pick and choose who could attend” the event.
This entire ordeal points to the true nature of the police force
in a capitalist society, whose main task is maintain the extremely
unjust and oppressive status quo that benefits the capitalist class,
whether by threat of force or by outright and blatant violence.
