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Monday, August 10, 2020 | Vo l u m e 1 2 5 | I s s u e 1
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UNM law professors request delayed fall semester after two test positive for COVID-19 By Genevieve Romero @Vieve2020 A group of tenure track School of Law professors at the University of New Mexico have formally requested a delay in the start of the fall semester. According to a letter obtained by the Daily Lobo, law school faculty members Christine Zuni Cruz, Barbara Creel and MarcTizoc González sent a letter to UNM School of Law Dean Sergio Pareja on Aug. 5 urging him to push back the start of the semester until Sept. 8. The letter referenced that the law school has reported two positive cases of COVID-19 in the past few weeks. The first was announced on July 24 and the second on Aug. 4, according to the letter. A UNM School of Law employee confirmed the two cases were reported, and requested anonymity citing concerns of peer scrutiny and possible retaliation from the administration. According to the employee, policies were not in place prior to the first positive case, and
multiple employees have expressed concern over the lack of COVID-19 protections for faculty, staff and students with the pending school year. In addition to the coronavirus disruption, the letter also referenced that on July 27 an “illegal intrusion into the IT environment” had occurred. The letter referenced it as a possible “ransomware attack” which had “rendered the law school network server completely inaccessible.” The letter stated that “the hack resulted in the deletion of information and data preventing faculty from preparing for the semester.” Based on those unprecedented events, the faculty asserted that they need a delay in the semester to better prepare and reconsider other teaching modalities given the pandemic. “We believe it is our duty, as tenured faculty members entrusted with shared-governance responsibilities, to ask that the administration acknowledge the overload and additional stress caused by the cyber-attack and neither ignore, nor deny its
impact on teaching preparation and related work,” the letter read. The faculty members said that “any of these challenges would be difficult to weather. Altogether, their quick succession causes us to call for the administration to ‘hit the pause button’ in recognition of the immensity of the burdens experienced by the faculty.” The professors also referenced the civil unrest that has occurred nationwide in response to the video of the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department and the impact that has had on faculty, staff and students of color in particular. “However the crises impact us individually, and community in different ways: in particular Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities nationally, and in our state are being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and recession,” they wrote. “It is therefore unfair to expect uniform resiliency.” The Daily Lobo attempted to contact Dean Pareja multiple times for comment over the weekend but didn’t receive a re-
Liam DeBonis / Daily Lobo / @ LiamDebonis
The University of New Mexico School of Law on UNM’s north campus.
sponse as of the publication of this article. The in-person New Student Orientation for the School of Law is currently scheduled to begin on Aug. 12, with the semester scheduled to start on Aug. 17.
This is a developing story. Genevieve Romero is a freelance reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Vieve2020
Sandwich shop standoff Community members protest police By Bella Davis @bladvs About fifty protesters — including families with children and moms in yellow vests — gathered downtown in front of Filling Philly’s, a cheesesteak shop on Central Avenue and Third Street, on Thursday afternoon to decry an incident that happened there Sunday night. As a Black Lives Matter protest came to a close at around 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 2, Black New Mexico Movement organizer Te Barry walked a few protesters to their cars. They’d heard that the New Mexico Civil Guard (NMCG) — a local militia founded by Bryce Spangler Provance, a man who has a swastika tattoo and a documented leadership role in a neo-Confederate organization — was in the area but didn’t know precisely where. According to multiple witnesses, when a group of protesters walked by Filling Philly’s, a militia member inside the shop pointed his gun at Barry. Barry then called the police and waited across the street with a small group of protesters for the police response. The police didn’t arrive for more than 30 minutes, despite there being dozens of police cars patrolling downtown throughout the
protest, according to Barry. “APD monitored the situation as it unfolded and had officers nearby to stop any violent interactions … Officers worked for several hours with people on both sides of the incident to document their allegations in the form of a police report with a detective, rather than escalating the stand-off,” an Albuquerque Police Department press release stated. Barry said officers responded to the area half an hour after he made the call but stopped a block away from Filling Philly’s and talked to a few protesters, requesting that Barry walk over and talk to them. When Barry refused, the officers left. Barry, a Black man, suggested that if he had pointed a gun at the militia members rather than the other way around, the police would have responded much differently. “If I’d have walked past that building and flashed my gun at them, you guys (the police) would’ve been here,” Barry told the Daily Lobo. “They’d have swarmed me with guns and had me arrested.” Barry said he was already home by the time he got a call from a detective, roughly two hours after the incident. “It’s like if you’re Black and you need help, they don’t come out,” Bar-
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presence in Albuquerque Public Schools By Genevieve Romero @Vieve2020
Nearly 150 young people, students, teachers and community members demanded Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) defund its police department during a protest outside of APS headquarters on Saturday evening. Organizers said police depart-
ments in school systems contribute to the criminalization of Black and Brown communities and aggravate the school-to-prison pipeline. “We are out here to demand the defunding and abolishment of the APS Police Department,” Fight For Our Lives organizer and leader Zoey Craft said. Monica Armenta, a spokesperson with the APS superintendent’s office, said Albuquerque Public Schools
Liam DeBonis / Daily Lobo / @ LiamDebonis
Protesters gather outside the Albuquerque Public Schools main office near Uptown on Aug. 8, 2020.
“understands many of (our) students and their families experience public education through a lens not always understood by all, and (they) will continue to do what they can to eradicate racism where it exists” in a statement to the Daily Lobo. Armenta said the APS Police Department does “not operate in isolation” and all officers undergo restorative justice training with the expectation to use arrests as a “last resort.” The APS budget for the 2019-20 school year totaled more than $1.4 billion with nearly $7.5 million of those funds directed to the APS Police Department budget. The Department of Justice conducted investigations into Albuquerque Public Schools in 2017, when the school system was suspected of targeting minority students and severe punishment tactics. APS maintains that “whenever possible we will attempt to use mediation, counseling and mentoring in lieu of enforcement action,” according to APS police budget documents released this year. However, Isabella Baker, a University of New Mexico student and organizer at the Learning Alliance of New Mexico, dismissed
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