Students protest policing on campus

By PAVAN ACHARYA and RUSSELL LEUNG daily senior staffers @pavanacharya02 / @rjleung7

By CASEY HE the daily northwestern @caseeey_he

Evanston received $43 million from the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and 2022 to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hoping to identify areas of need, the city put $3 million toward a novel solution: participatory budgeting.

The program allows residents, with the support of city staff and volunteers, to submit their ideas for funding allocation to the city and develop some of them into policy proposals for citywide consideration on the ballot.

When SESP Prof. Matt Easterday heard about Evanston’s participatory budgeting, he thought the program would be the perfect opportunity for Northwestern researchers

Easterday said his team of researchers submitted an application to the city, which contracted them to help develop the program.

Sixth-year learning sciences Ph.D. candidate Kristine Lu, a researcher on Easterday’s team, studies democratic deliberation –– the process groups use to work on a shared political problem.

Lu said Evanston’s participatory budgeting allowed her to study the real-world applications of democratizing deliberation through designing and facilitating in-person meetings with residents.

“It has helped me see a lot of things that most people aren’t able to see, whether it’s researchers taking traditional political science methods or teachers who are trying to teach civic knowledge,” Lu said.

More than 200 students protested Northwestern’s policing of Black community members and presented a set of demands for Black student safety and support at a Tuesday demonstration at The Rock.

Students chanted phrases including “No justice, no peace” and “Money for students, not police.” The event’s co-organizers condemned the University’s response to the Clark Street Beach shooting on April 12, both during and after the emergency, in addition to the school’s failure to meet some of the demands Black students presented during the 1968 Bursar’s Office Takeover. Medill freshman Atarah Israel then read a poem about racial justice she originally wrote in 2020 but that she said “still has a lot of resonance today.”

Some attendees said the protest was also prompted by recent changes in policy enforcement at the Black House. According to SESP and Weinberg sophomore Micaiah Ligon, a protest co-organizer, Multicultural Student Affairs recently announced a University representative will make students leave the space at midnight Saturday through Thursday and 10 p.m. on Fridays. Previously, students said, the University would not enforce a closing time at the Black House.

Several attendees, including event co-organizer and Medill senior Onyeka Chigbogwu, said Black students should have been consulted about the decision.

“This is one of those small forms of policing,” Chigbogwu, a former Daily staffer, said. “People think of police just as the squad cars (or) how many literal physical cops are hired by Evanston or by the University on each corner. But policing is also an action we do in so many spaces.”

Weinberg sophomore

Dylan Carey attended Tuesday’s protest. He said he sees police officers all across campus and that their presence makes him “uncomfortable.”

He added University Police’s response to the Clark Street Beach shooting showed the force’s inadequacy in keeping community members safe –– despite its size and presence.

“I feel like I see them everywhere. And for me, I don’t do anything wrong, but yet I still get a visceral reaction,” Carey said. “I just think that for the amount of money that we spend on them, they don’t do enough.”

Student organizers referenced a statement they

» See DEMANDS, page 6