I try to draw these students into conversations that will make them be more aware of the need for a police presence and argue against the stereotypes that are created about the police in general.

Recently, it especially was difficult for me to talk to a graduate student who, sitting in an intersection waiting to make a left-handed turn, was given a $175 ticket and three points on his license for completing the turn after the light changed to red because of the person ahead of him waiting to move out of the intersection. He would have been blocking traffic if he had not moved, but he got out of the way as he had been taught.

A police officer immediately pulled him over. The student stated his reasons for getting out of the intersection, but there was no talking to the police officer, probably because he was dealing with “a student.”

The student went to court to argue his case and, with the typical justice of the East Lansing court, was told to pay the fine. His explanation of why he completed the turn was ignored.

The reality is, if it had been an older individual, no ticket probably would have been written. A warning would have been given and that would be that.

With that long lead-in and a focus on why students fail to respect law enforcement and the courts that back up apparent biased behavior on the part of that law enforcement, I come to an evening not long ago.

I was coming from dinner at BD’s Mongolian Barbeque in Okemos, traveling down Grand River Avenue, heading back to my office on campus. As I approached the light at Hagadorn Road and Grand River Avenue, the light changed to yellow. I applied my brakes, and I was stopped as the light changed to red. The car in the outside lane, who was well behind me, sped up and ran the red light at a speed well above the limit. My reaction was, “We see this all the time and oh well!”

The problem is that there was a police car waiting to make the left turn onto Grand River Avenue. It was a black, fairly unmarked police car, but there were officers in it. They were watching the intersection. They saw the speeding car run the red light. They proceeded to do absolutely nothing!

I assume they saw that the individual was older and that, perhaps, had an effect upon their enforcing the law or not. Luckily for the speeder, he was not a student. If he had been, he probably would have been arrested on the spot.

At the intersection were a number of cars waiting to proceed and turn right or left. Since they were not moving, all watched the speeding car run a red light while law enforcement looked the other way. Many of the watchers were young and probably MSU students.

The lack of response from the officers should be a lesson to us all. We all carry notions of one sort or another about students, adults, people who don’t look the way we do, people who do not share our beliefs and a thousand other ridiculous biases. It is critical that we shed these notions and look at all those around us as equal human beings. I think we all need to be brought up short and told to stop living our lives with an uneducated concept of who people are. We need to look at them for who they really are and get rid of the biases.

To the police officers of the community, I would say: In the future, when your fellow police officers complain about the nasty students who have no respect for them, obnoxious students who fail to trust law enforcement, young jerks who are abusive to the law, please remind your colleagues that the old saying “actions speak louder than words,” does ring true.

Watching policemen fail to enforce the law and possibly endanger the citizenry around them speaks so loudly that it is almost impossible to correct in the minds of students.

And with that, I am really glad that individuals didn’t try to jump through the intersection when that light on Grand River Avenue turned green. If they had proceeded quickly, the resulting accident surely would have produced bodies heading for the hospital or worse.

Craig Gunn is a State News guest columnist and director of the communications program in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Reach him at gunn@egr.msu.edu.