With the death of George Floyd and high racial tensions across America, Lehigh University needs to think about how they are protecting students of color, specifically black students, on campus. What we need right now is a plan to have safer policing across Lehigh's campus.

All officers of LUPD need to be trained in implicit biases and made aware of these implicit biases. This is important because the police structure originated from fugitive slave catchers protecting rich white property. It is a system made to be against black people. While I as a student do not know what these trainings would look like, I believe that Lehigh University should reach out to organizations/offices dedicated to screening police officers and educating LUPD on implicit biases, such as The Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Institute of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. According to the Center for American Progress, training increases awareness and consciousness, and reduces biases.

Additionally, Lehigh University needs to invest in a form of data collection in order to hold police accountable; we need to know things like who is arrested? What is their race and ethnicity? These are questions that are not hard to answer, LUPD would simply need to release the statistics. Once again, I am a student, and I believe that Lehigh University should ask the same offices I listed previously about what this data collection and reporting could look like. The Black Student Union on campus can also help you shape what this data collection might look like, especially since most of us have experienced some form of microaggressions and racial profiling from LUPD’s campus. 

As a black student on Lehigh’s campus, I feel as though this is the one of the things Lehigh University can do to make us feel safer, to make a campus that is safe for everyone.