The Graduate Employees Organization, AFT Local 3550, unequivocally condemns the latest round of police violence at the University of Michigan. This is now the fifth time that University police have brutalized protestors in one calendar year. We reject the criminalization of pro-Palestine protest and the normalization of police violence on our campus. GEO members call on everyone on campus to stand up to the creeping authoritarianism of this administration.
On October 7, 2024, over 300 students, workers, and community members marched through the Ann Arbor campus to call for an end to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and to reiterate the demand for divestment of the U-M endowment from companies complicit in Israel’s continued campaign of death, destruction, and displacement in Palestine and now Lebanon. At approximately 5:00 PM, as the march was making its way back to its starting point, campus police singled out an undergraduate student, tackled them to the ground and arrested them for allegedly “using a megaphone.” After police arrested the undergraduate student, they hit, pushed, and pepper sprayed protestors indiscriminately, injuring over seventy students and community members.
Also at 5:00 PM, members of the United Michigan Medicine Allied Professionals (UMMAP, AFT Local 6739), representing respiratory therapists, social workers, and occupational therapists at Michigan Medicine, picketed in front of Taubman Medical Center to demand a fair contract. Like those marching on main campus, these union members used megaphones to make their voices heard. But in contrast to Palestine solidarity protestors, they were not subject to police violence or interference.
This stark difference in treatment of protestors by the UM Police Department exemplifies the “Palestine Exception” that our members have experienced over the past year. The Board of Regents, President Santa Ono, and Deans of Colleges think that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, when it comes to Palestine, are forbidden. They continue to use any and all tactics to criminalize pro-Palestine protest, including arbitrary restrictions like banning the use of megaphones, in a well–documented and broad campaign of repression that targets workers across campus in all sectors of the university. GEO members have been repeatedly subjected to multiple forms of repression. These include criminal prosecution, like the recent unprecedented felony charges at the state level by Attorney General Dana Nessel, and University HR’s repressive disciplinary measures in the workplace, like demanding GSIs remove any displays of solidarity with Palestine, including email signatures and pro-Palestine signage.
We reject the Palestine Exception. If we cannot freely protest against our university’s complicity in the genocide against the Palestinian people, then there is no freedom of speech or freedom of assembly on campus at all. We call on the University police to reverse the campus bans and for local and state prosecutors to drop these politically motivated charges. Campus workers must come together to resist the normalization of police violence and any attempt to repress pro-Palestine activism. For a free and democratic campus, not a police state!
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