TO THE EDITOR:
Chancellor Folt has asked us to clarify the role of campus police officers at the Confederate Monument on our campus in light of misinformation that has been in circulation. There’s nothing more important to our University and our police force than the safety and wellbeing of every member of our campus community.
We care deeply about our students and our community’s rights to free speech. Our officers do their best to protect the safety and freedoms of everyone in our community.
The safety of our campus is always our highest priority, and out of necessity, UNC Police have maintained a heightened presence around the monument to ensure that members of our community are safe and able to protest peacefully and have their free speech rights protected.
By nature, public college campuses present unique challenges for campus police because members of our campus community and outside groups often come together to protest or to participate in other activities.
Specifically, we have been and remain concerned about our students getting caught in the middle of violent conflict similar to that experienced in Charlottesville, especially in the presence of the monument.
To protect the safety of people on our campus, police response sometimes involves the use of plain-clothes or undercover officers.
Although deploying undercover officers on our campus is rare, it is a standard policing practice that has been used on other university campuses (i.e., when threats associated with public spaces are credible, crowds have formed, tensions are high or unknown individuals with questionable intent are on campus).
While we understand that people would like information about specific instances, we simply cannot share every detail with the public that would compromise the work of our police.
