Surveillance hot topic at CSUF
Fresno Bee 1/22/07
The police were worried that "extreme followers" of Gary Yourofsky might cause trouble and officers would be needed, says university Police Chief David Huerta.
There were no problems, however. And when the news spread later that the on-duty cops were in civilian clothes, it fed suspicions that university police were spying on Yourofsky.
Now, 26 months later, Fresno State professors are debating questions of when, where and how university police can conduct covert surveillance to gather information on the campus.
Professors are struggling to find a balance between their constitutionally protected freedoms of privacy and speech against what it takes for police to ensure security on a campus of 24,000 students, faculty and staff.
The surveillance debate is scheduled to continue today when the Academic Senate — a group of 68 professors who formulate university policy — takes up the issue again.
Fresno State psychology major Aaron Lopez sees the two sides of the debate. "It seems good and bad," the 20-year-old from Exeter said last week. "It's definitely good to feel safe and secure. But it could be an abuse of power depending on how far you take it."
That November night in 2004, Yourofsky appeared at Fresno State to lecture about being a vegan — someone who doesn't eat animal products. It wasn't his first visit to the campus.
The year before, Yourofsky appeared at a university-sponsored conference on revolutionary environmentalism and spoke about liberating more than 1,500 caged animals from "an animal concentration camp" in Canada.
Chief Huerta said his officers — who don't attend all speeches by off-campus speakers — weren't in uniform at the Yourofsky lecture because they didn't want to stand out and offend the crowd. He's not sure whether the officers identified themselves to event organizers.
On two other points, Huerta is definite. He said his officers didn't take notes on what Yourofsky said, and their verbal, post-lecture report was brief: Nothing happened. Huerta said he doesn't know whether his officers gave information to other law enforcement agencies.
Huerta concedes that the 2004 incident caused some people at Fresno State to mistrust his department, and partly led to the current debate about when, where and how his officers can conduct covert surveillance.
"We have to prove ourselves worthy of their trust again through our actions," Huerta said.
Fresno State graduate student Holly Meeks remains one of the skeptics.
"How are police officers out of uniform going to deter anyone?" asked the 26-year-old from Visalia. "If you want to deter violence, you put a cop with a gun in there and give the organizers a heads-up. It's just polite."
Fresno State social work professor Donna Hardina also is skeptical, still convinced that Fresno State officers were spying on Yourofsky because of his political views. Huerta said his officers weren't spying.
But the university police weren't the only officers in plainclothes at the lecture that night. Undercover officers from the Fresno County Sheriff's Department also were watching and listening.
In April 2005 — five months after the lecture — the news surfaced that two undercover officers from "an outside agency" were in the audience, which led advocates of civil liberties to speak out critically.
An assistant sheriff said later that the university had asked for his department's assistance; Huerta said last week that he only asked the Sheriff's Department for information about Yourofsky.
Fresno State's administrative machinery began to turn.
In May 2005, Welty issued a memo putting tight restrictions on surveillance by university police.
Later, he appointed a campus task force, which proposed a first-ever policy on covert surveillance. The Academic Senate is now debating that policy, but university President John Welty gets the final say.
The proposed policy says university officers ordinarily will wear their uniforms at campus events to deter crime. But, it also says university police might need to conduct covert activities to collect information at "public or private meetings of university-sponsored organizations or in university classrooms."
Reports of drug dealing or harassment of professors or students might necessitate covert surveillance, said Associate Provost Ken Shipley, who was chairman of the task force.
Fresno State student Abdulwahed Jawad, an 18-year-old electrical engineering major from Saudi Arabia, said that makes sense. He said criminals won't recognize officers in plainclothes and crooks will be easier to nab.
But many professors believe outside surveillance could stifle "the ebb and flow of ideas" in classrooms and damage academic freedom, said psychology professor Mike Botwin, who is chairman of the Academic Senate.
Professors or club advisers would be told, in most cases, if plainclothes officers would be sitting in on their lectures or meetings, according to the policy.
But the Academic Senate voted in December to prohibit covert surveillance in university classrooms.
Political science professor David Schecter, a member of the task force, said the policy is imperfect, but better than no policy. And, he added, Fresno State professors need to trust Welty to control the campus police department.
Plus, Schecter said, the policy has safeguards. University police would have to explain in writing to the university president that undercover officers are investigating a crime and that "less intrusive means" are not an option.
The president could deny a surveillance request from campus police.
That doesn't reassure everyone, however.
Eugene Zumwalt, a retired Fresno State professor, warned the Academic Senate that it's a mistake to give any university president the power to decide when covert surveillance can occur. "You'd have to assume that, at any given moment, Big Brother is listening anywhere on campus," Zumwalt said.
A former Fresno State president sacked Zumwalt from chairmanship of the English Department in 1970. Zumwalt said he was booted because he was critical of the school's administration.
The irony of this debate? Off-campus cops can come to Fresno State and the university can't stop them, officials say.
"If the FBI wants to come and sit in your classroom," said Senate chairman Botwin, "they can do that, and we can't legislate against that."