Initially, I didn’t know what to do with those badge numbers. I had no plans to file a complaint, but I did want answers about what exactly made those officers think I looked suspicious. Was it my hoodie? My bike? A look I gave them? My ethnicity? So I filed a public records request for the body camera footage of our encounter, and sat down for a Zoom interview with Chico State police chief Matthew Dillon and Commander Christopher Nicodemus.
During our conversation, Nicodemus gave his take on why my encounter with the police played out the way it did. Chico State regulations ban biking in the campus core. I was followed home because the officer that initially sighted me was too far away from me to approach me, he said, so he contacted an officer that was near my location to look for me.
As for why the first officer thought I looked suspicious, Nicodemus said it was because I had biked away after he spotted me.
“What he thought was that you looked at him and turned around and rode the other direction, which rose his level of suspicion in his mind,” Nicodemus said, adding that Chico State police officers see “a lot of theft on campus.”
The explanation left me with more questions than answers. I hadn’t noticed a police officer anywhere near me while I was biking. Would the officer have had the same response if he’d seen a blonde-haired girl biking away from him?
But what really stuck with me was what Nicodemus said next: He pointed out that the three officers treated me with respect during the encounter.
“The contact was very brief. I mean they were with you for like a minute and a half maybe,” Nicodemus said. “I didn’t see any searching or any use of force or anything like that. So to me quite honestly, in my world that’s not even a blip on my radar.”
I was blunt with Dillon and Nicodemus. It’s hard to feel respected when three police officers follow you home, label you as suspicious and question what you are doing at the university you attend. I’m a Latino who felt racially profiled by police. Why would I feel respected?
They both thanked me for sharing my perspective. They acknowledged that two of the officers who stopped me weren’t wearing masks and one didn’t turn on his body camera — both violations of department policy that they said they would “deal with internally.”
But since our conversation, I can’t stop thinking about the disconnect university police have with students of color. I’ve interviewed campus police officers multiple times during my time as a reporter at Chico State, and I’ve heard from students at Chico and other campuses who feel they’re treated differently by campus police because of their race. We’ll learn a lot more about the relationship between campus police and the communities they serve when the Racial Identity and Profiling Act takes full effect at California colleges next year, and student journalists like me will continue to follow the story.
Talking to Dillon and Nicodemus, though, I didn’t get the impression they understood the fear it can incite in people of color when police approach them, especially when there are three of them. For the officers who detained me, this was just one of many stops they enforced throughout their career — to Nicodemus, it wasn’t even a blip. But for me it caused me to fear for my life, a feeling that lingered much longer than those few minutes.
Julian Mendoza is a fellow with the CalMatters College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. This story was produced in collaboration with Open Campus and supported by the College Futures Foundation.
