The capstone project for my Advanced Media Writing class was a two-part news feature story which included a print portion and multimedia portion. I interviewed Georgia State student Manoa Daniel about her experience getting sexually harassed on her way to campus, as well as her experience with a GSU police officer afterwards. Here is the article and virtual tour (video) of her walk:
--
When senior public
policy major Manoa Daniel was walking over the Decatur St. bridge to get to
class, a person not affiliated with the University exposed himself to her and
tried to engage in conversation on Feb. 24. Daniel attempted to report the
incident to an officer on campus, but she was instructed to just go to class. She
never got the name of the officer.
“The way [the
stranger] was positioned towards me, I thought he had a gun to me. I told
myself to keep looking up, and if I pretended not to notice, he wouldn’t do
anything. I couldn’t run because I was wearing these huge rain boots,” Daniel
said.
Daniel recalled the
strange man continuing to ask her questions and attempting to get him to look
at her. Once she noticed what he was doing, she yelled for him to leave her
alone and then clunked off heavily and quickly in her oversized rain boots.
When Daniel ran
into the Petit Science Center, security called Georgia State University Police
(GSUPD). An officer arrived and asked Daniel what the man looked like, but all
she could give him was a ballpark height and a vague description.
“I tried not to
look at the guy. I said he was 5-foot-6, 5-foot-7, and he had a navy jacket. He
was black with a medium skin tone. But we’re downtown. Black or white, a 5-foot-7-inch
guy with a navy jacket? That could be anyone,” she said.
The officer asked
Daniel if she wanted to press charges, but she said that if they were to
apprehend someone, she wasn’t sure that she would have been able to identify
them. She declined.
Officer Willie
Johnson, Supervisor of the Crime Suppression Unit at Georgia State, said that
protocol was not followed for Daniel’s case. He said that the officer helping
Daniel should have gotten all the information he could from her and then
contacted other on-duty officers to inform them of the situation. At that
point, there would have been at least 10 officers looking for the individual,
according to Johnson.
Unless
police officers know for sure that someone is the guilty party, Georgia law
doesn’t permit taking an individual from their destination.
“We’d get [Daniel]
in the car nonchalantly, pass by the man and say, ‘Hey is that our guy?’ and if
she says, ‘Yeah, that’s him,’ we’d radio the officers standing by the
perpetrator and say, ‘Hold onto him, she gave a positive ID’,” Johnson said.
They would then
get a statement from Daniel and arrest the perpetrator for public indecency and
disorderly conduct, according to Johnson—both misdemeanor charges.
Still
inside the Petit Science Center, Daniel looked at the officer and asked, “Well,
what do you want me to do? I have an exam, should I just go to class?”
He said, ‘if you
wanna go to class, go to class.’
So she walked
herself to class and never heard anything about it again.
Daniel said that the
officer didn’t recommend that she file a report. GSUPD has jurisdiction of the Georgia
State campus as well as a 500-foot circumference around it, which includes the
location in which the incident occurred.
“We could have
reacted to that,” Johnson said. “Its not [a student’s] responsibility to ask to
file a police report. Their responsibility is to report it to the police
department.”
Daniel said she
wants to see more spread out police presence in areas that are heavily
populated by students, even if they are not technically on Georgia State
property. She also wants GSUPD to be more concerned about student safety.
“I’d like to see
more of a reaction to reports. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable… That officer
made me feel guilty for saying anything,” she said.
For a case like
Daniel’s, the minimum protocol is to write a police report and title it “Information
for other officers.”
“I would have liked for him to report that. I
wish he got her name, her ID. That’s not how we do things here. That officer
did not do his job,” Johnson said.
--
No comments:
Post a Comment