Some at UCLA protested what they called the university’s “collaboration” with LAPD in allowing the use of the university’s Jackie Robinson Stadium to process protesters arrested for curfew violations during the uprising sparked by the police killing of George Floyd.
In a letter, dozens of faculty members said police deliberately crowded protesters arrested in downtown Los Angeles and Westwood into sheriff’s buses and brought them to the stadium, where the university’s baseball team plays under a lease with the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs.
The letter says officers did not wear masks and disregarded other CDC, city and county measures to curb COVID-19 contagion.
“The cruel irony that this took place at a location used as a COVID-19 testing site is not lost on those arrested or on us,” said the professors, who demanded the university end use of the stadium by police. The professors who signed the letter include Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning and social welfare and director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy; Kelly Lytle Hernánde , director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient; and Cheryl Harris, professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the UCLA law school.
Click here to read the full article.