Listen to the word on the street, read the bathroom graffiti or log on to the Internet. Police are not popular.

It’s an inevitability that campus police will be viewed as the enemy by some students. They are the enforcers, put in an authoritarian position to enforce the law.

But police don’t always have to be viewed as the bad guys on campus - they aren’t. What MSU’s Department of Police and Public Safety has to deal with is a severe public relations problem.

The Task Force on Student-Police Relations aims to conquer that problem. The 30-member group will hold its first public forum at 8 p.m. today to give students the chance to make their voices heard about the department’s problems. Comments can also be submitted at www.taskforce.msu.edu.

Too often, students only see MSU police officers getting out of their cars to write tickets or investigate some kind of domestic problem. Students don’t see the police as an entity whose purpose is to be helpful or assist with problems.

It would be beneficial for students to be able to interact more positively with officers on the street, on duty in buildings and on patrol, so they can build an image of someone more than a ticket writer.

And despite the department’s recent efforts to improve relations with minority students, many still believe they are the victims of racial profiling. Campus minority groups seem to find themselves the target of larger police presence at their events, and some minorities students feel they are too frequently suspected of wrongdoing. This breeds a kind of tension that begets intense mistrust.

When mistrust on this scale runs so rampant, it becomes very difficult to reach a kind of understanding and cooperation that police work requires to be effective. And on a campus of 40,000 students, it’s important to foster this cooperation.

Alcohol is also a large concern with the student body and the police force. According to statistics compiled by the MSU police, there were 1,025 alcohol-related arrests made in 2000. Campus police need to find a way to work with students and avoid those three words nobody wants to hear: minor in possession.

But the main issue plaguing police on campus surrounds the treatment of student activist groups - the main catalyst behind the creation of the task force.

Last month, the MSU Board of Trustees established a university policy on undercover police surveillance of student groups. It said such surveillance could only occur with approval of the university president under “extraordinary conditions.”

The job of creating guidelines and definitions for this policy has now fallen to the task force. This group must define exactly what is meant by “extraordinary circumstances.”

This definition needs to allow the police freedom to work and do what needs to be done to investigate crime, while enabling each organization to operate normally without police intimidation.

This task force has been a long time coming to present solutions to many age-old problems of student-police relations. We hope it can find a way for students and police to see eye-to-eye, and create a better, more smoothly run campus.