Neil Sandhu is a biomedical engineering senior and Mustang News columnist. This column is purely satirical. Any connection to actual people or events
is coincidental.
In what is being called one of the most overt displays of totalitarian rule since scooters were outlawed on campus, police killed the vibes of more than 100 innocent students on the evening of Oct. 6.
San Luis Obispo police officers arrived on the 300 block of Hathway Avenue. after receiving multiple complaints of “some tool playing ‘Closer’ on repeat for a straight hour.” As soon as the police arrived, partygoers reportedly started screaming “Buck the Police,” in what can only be described as a nod to the Cal Poly-UCSB soccer game.
The students’ spirit and good nature were not shared by the overly-militarized police force, who used their combat boots to stomp through the grass in the front yard that the occupants had diligently been watering with “Natty Light” for the 13 months prior.
The police, hopped up on their own egos, forced partygoers to pour out their liquor before being allowed to leave.
“It’s total bullshit,” intramural football sophomore Chad Johnson said. “I had to drive all the way to Atascadero to get that because Campus Bottle is too strict with fakes. They can’t just take peoples’ alcohol, that’s illegal.”
To Johnson, being busted was a serious inconvenience. To other students, like aesthetic development senior Don Pezetti, it was traumatizing.
“I’m a single dude who lives in Mustang, so Thursday nights are usually just me and the guys, playing some rage cage, bumping some deep house and texting the same 11 people to see if they know of any parties,” Pezetti said while choking back tears. “I saw my boy post a snap story of him at a party, and he said I could come through. I didn’t even get inside, man. What am I supposed to do now? The Uber surge charges are like 4.8x, I don’t wanna walk.”
This is not the first tragedy incurred at the hands of this tyrannical government, and it won’t be the last. San Luis Obispo passed a series of laws that seriously disenfranchise under-aged drinkers. Under-aged drinkers make up a plurality of this campus; they are our friends, our neighbors and our students. We cannot stand by and allow the government to continue their unconstitutional “Drinker-ID” laws. Our country is actively stopping people from buying liquor just because of the way they look. This is the very definition of discrimination.
This Week of Welcome alone, it was estimated that 23 parties fell victim to the San Luis Obispo Police Department, with more than 20 minor-in-possession tickets being handed out throughout the week. These aren’t just stats, they are stories.
Twenty-three aux chords left unattended and alone.
Twenty-three beer soaked dance floors, but zero people doing the Dab.
Hundreds of ping-pong balls that will remain under the couch until move-out and a countless number of students left to roam the streets of Hathway and pretend like they have any chance of finding another party.
Our police force has repeatedly stripped our rights as citizens. If we want to play house music at an unreasonably loud level on a weekday, we have that right. If we want to walk down the street ripping a clearly open bottle of Taaka, we have that right. If we want to urinate in someone’s front yard at 3 a.m. when no one is looking, we have that right. Don’t let the unreasonable, small-minded police take your freedom away from you. We don’t pay $20,000 in tuition just for parties to get busted up like this.
It’s time we stood up as a community, and let the world know that even the “Happiest City in America” has problems too.