Letter To The Editor: Having a lot of cash doesn't make one a dealer

Having a lot of cash doesn't make one a dealer

I wish to inform my student body of an act bordering on police brutality that occurred on campus earlier this week. A friend of mine was awoken on Monday morning with a knock on his door that turned out to be campus police.

The policemen proceeded to handcuff my friend and his roommate, push them down on the ground, call them "dirty ________" and attempt to get a confession about dealing marijuana. The police searched the room and found no scale and no baggies - what they did find was a gram and a half of weed and $800 in cash. Since the drug-sniffing dog the police had called in "knew the money was drug money," it didn't matter that the cash was not, in fact, used for drug trafficking. Even if the dog smelled traces of drugs on the money, there is no possible way to prove who the residue was from; money passes through hundreds of peoples' hands daily.

The cash allegedly used to buy and sell drugs was, in fact, for a synthesizer. My friend had seen an ad for it on Craigslist and the seller only accepted cash, which is why he had such a large amount in his room at the time of the search. Since UConn is a state school, the dorms are considered state property, which means unfortunately police do not need a warrant to search a room.

If you've been following the weekly police blotters in this paper, you'll notice that there has been an evident increase in minor drug offenses. I don't think this is because more people have been smoking pot, but because the job of campus police has been transformed into a witch hunt, and marijuana users are the ones being burned. What the blotter doesn't tell you is how disrupted the lives of these "criminals" become after they are arrested. If you've been touched by an injustice similar to the one my friend found himself in earlier this week, come forward. Tell someone. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, Latino, Asian, male, female, gay, or straight. Campus police needs to know that they cannot continue targeting nonviolent crimes and abusing their power, especially when their job is to serve and protect, not instill fear in individuals doing no harm to anyone else.

-Marisa Gumpert

6th-semester English major