Two years ago, Chipalo Street, then a graduate student at Brown, was walking on campus in search of a party when a Department of Public Safety officer approached him and requested that he provide him with proper identification. When Street refused, the officer summoned the Providence Police Department, and Street was promptly arrested, allegedly being injured in the process.

The public outcry that ensued was heard in every corner of the University, and the now-defunct Coalition for Police Accountability and Institutional Transparency, a taskforce that sought to not only remedy this injustice but prevent future ones as well, was born.

Two years later, Street and former members of the Co-PAIT agree that the DPS has come a long way, but there is still much work to be done.

The Brown Daily Herald reports:

Many students agreed with Street. Co-PAIT made significant strides in raising awareness of police accountability and prompting DPS to review its policies. But despite its efforts to foster a long-term alliance between minority students and DPS officers and to provide a better process for reporting biased incidents to DPS, the breadth of issues was "too much to be addressed with the amount of people that we had," said Christine Goding-Doty '08, a former Co-PAIT member.

Goding-Doty said Co-PAIT's collapse during the spring of 2007 may limit efforts to prevent racial profiling and further improve police accountability.

"After Co-PAIT ended, the spaces to voice whether (racial profiling) was still happening and the capacity had decreased," she said.

Or perhaps, the number of profiling incidents on campus has simply decreased? Crazy thought, I know, but it is a possibility, especially given all the fallout after the Street incident.

Moreover, in an age of blogging, a time in which anyone and everyone with an opinion can have their voices heard on the Internet, it’s hard to believe that students would willingly remain silent if a similar incident had occurred.

The fact that no one has is telling.

[Media Credit: Jacob Melrose]