Native teens pulled from college tour want changes
ALBUQUERQUE — An attorney for two Native American brothers from Northern New Mexico who were pulled from a Colorado State University tour earlier this year are asking for policy changes, saying campus officers violated the teens’ constitutional rights by stopping them and patting them down without any suspicion of a crime.
A letter sent Wednesday from American Civil Liberties Union attorney Sarah Hinger demands the university revisit its campus police policies and training to avoid another “humiliating” situation similar to the April 30 encounter.
Video shows two officers stopping Thomas Kanewakeron Gray and Lloyd Skanahwati Gray and checking their pockets as they toured the university, which the brothers had called their top college choice.
Thomas Kanewakeron Gray, then a student at Northern New Mexico College in Española, and Lloyd Skanahwati Gray, then a senior at the Santa Fe Indian School, had driven seven hours from their home in the village of Santa Cruz, just east of Española, to Fort Collins, Colo., for the tour. They are members of the Mohawk tribe.
Police said a mother on the tour had called 911, saying she was worried because the Grays were “real quiet” and wore dark clothing.
The incident was met with outrage nationwide
as one of numerous examples of racial profiling to make headlines this year.
The young men’s mother said she is disappointed the university hasn’t taken more steps to prevent similar racial profiling incidents. Lorraine Kahneratokwa Gray said in a statement Thursday that the university made “false promises to right this wrong.”
Mike Hooker, a spokesman at Colorado State University, said in a statement that policies are being developed to make the univesrity more welcoming to Native American students.
In an interview, Hinger told the Associated Press the civil liberties organization is hopeful university President Tony Frank will heed calls to conduct more campus police training and a review of policies dictating how officers and dispatchers respond to “bias based” reports on campus.
But the ACLU is not taking “any avenues off the table” — including possible legal action — should the university not follow through on its requests, she said.
“The Gray brothers were confronted, detained, and searched by CSU police, leaving them humiliated, scared, and literally marginalized,” Hinger’s letter said. “This exercise of sanctioned police power magnified and legitimized the bias of an individual and created an injury beyond what a private individual could inflict alone.
“For this reason, it is imperative to revisit both policy and training if the university hopes to prevent its police from being used as a tool of bias in the future,” she wrote.
The school previously said it would refund the money the teens spent on travel and take steps to prevent a similar situation from happening again, including the use of lanyards or badges to identify tour guests.
Frank also has decried the Grays’ experience, saying they “wound up frightened and humiliated because another campus visitor was concerned about their clothes and overall demeanor — which appears to have simply been shyness.”
“The very idea that someone — anyone — might ‘look’ like they don’t belong on a CSU Admissions tour is anathema,” he said in an email to students last spring.
Information from The New Mexican was used in this report.