The Task Force on Student-Police Relations approved a final draft of recommendations Friday, which it hopes will improve student-police relations on campus.

A round of applause and congratulations ended the final meeting of the task force, which has met since September, even though not all task force members were satisfied with the final recommendations.

The task force was appointed by MSU officials after an independent investigation into the placement of an undercover officer into the student group United Students Against Sweatshops, now called Students for Economic Justice, beginning about Feb. 19, 2000.

The recommendations include guidelines for when police can videotape campus events and plans to create a student events committee that will determine security needs for student events. The recommendations also suggest police not videotape events such as tailgates and political speeches.

The task force also recommended student groups meet annually with the Department of Police and Public Safety.

MSU President M. Peter McPherson said the task force accomplished its goal. He said the next step is to make sure all the committees the task force recommended get in place, which he plans to do this spring and early next fall.

“We’ve been able to sort through important issues,” he said. “Some of these issues have been around for a long time.

“All of this is within relatively easy reach. Some of it we’ve begun to get underway already.”

Becky Ford, task force member and American Civil Liberties Union student representative, said she was satisfied with the outcome of discussions about videotaping.

“If there is videotaping it won’t be done by the police, because people act differently when they know the police are taping them,” the interdisciplinary studies in social science and public policy analysis senior said.

But Tanya Palit, a task force member and representative from the ASMSU’s Women’s Council, said certain issues were not raised at all during the meetings, which began in September. The group’s final recommendations were supposed to be finalized in December, but members said extra time would allow improvement.

“What was not fundamentally answered is the deeper relationship between police and students,” said Palit, a representative from the undergraduate student government. “Cops are seen as the enemy.”

Palit also said students who were picked for the task force were not average students, which affected the recommendations created by the task force.

“We are not a normal group of students,” she said. “We are super-involved student leaders. I think a lot of the problems had to do with no average students being on the task force.

“If the effort was to reach out to the average students, then they failed.”

The group had recommended the police continue multicultural awareness and sensitivity training to be able to work with racial and progressive students better, but police officials and McPherson said the term sensitivity training implied police already weren’t sensitive to student needs.

“The term sensitivity training is a negative term,” MSU police Chief Bruce Benson said. “It is an insulting term to say that police need sensitivity training. It says that police are insensitive, and that is not the case by any means.

“The fact is the MSU police department has done more training on multicultural and diversity training then any police agency in the state - it is not necessary to point out to the MSU police that such training is good.”

Although there was not a final decision, the word sensitivity was not included at the end of Friday’s meeting.

When Palit and other members of the subcommittee for racial, ethnic and progressive students tried to argue to include the word, they were cut off by McPherson.

“It’s hard to be in the board room, speaking and get cut off by the president of the university,” she said.

Matt Weingarden, a task force member, said he will not sign the final draft of the recommendations without the word.

“Sensitivity is how police will learn to deal with the groups,” said Weingarden, who is co-chairperson of the Alliance for Lesbian-Bi-Gay-Transgendered and Straight Ally Students. “Awareness training is like, black people exist, gay people exist.

“I need to make sure the stuff we fought for is going to be in those recommendations - if they aren’t, then it is nothing more than a piece of crap. It’s so depressing in my mind that we worked so hard and to have core things be ignored.”

The task force approved a recommendation on when MSU’s Department of Police and Public Safety can videotape.

Henry Silverman, president of the Lansing branch of the ACLU, said the recommendations supported the police and administrator’s rights more than the students’.

“The report seems to be more on, ‘Look students you have to shape up and do what the police and administration says,’” Silverman said. “The context was supposed to protect students and let students know they had rights that the police and everyone else would honor, but it seems to be the other way around.”