Over a yr after it was conceived as a ground-breaking response to Greece’s notoriously unruly universities, a particular campus police pressure has formally deployed — to underwhelming outcomes.
The squad of 1,000 officers deployed in September to 4 out of Greece’s greater than 20 college campuses.
In Athens and the second metropolis Thessaloniki, all have been chosen for having the very best cases of drug buying and selling and petty crime.
“We’ve not seen them,” deadpanned one professor at Athens Polytechnic.
Armed solely with batons, the freshly skilled college safety squads (OPPI) have been deployed sparingly — and underneath the safety of seasoned riot police — following protests from outraged pupil teams.
“The campus police turned up as soon as, there was uproar, and so they pulled again,” stated Sabina Kurrizi, a historical past pupil at Thessaloniki’s Aristotelio College, additionally a part of the initiative.
“Riot police are defending the OPPI, who’re presupposed to be defending us. It is absurd,” she added.
Greek universities are chronically underfunded and notoriously disrupted by strikes, sit-ins and violence in opposition to college students and workers.
Primarily based on the newest figures, Greece spent slightly below US$4,100 ($6,402) per pupil in tertiary training in 2015, in response to the Organisation for the Financial Co-operation and Improvement, in comparison with an OECD common of greater than US$15,600 ($24,360).
Riot policemen standing contained in the campus of Thessaloniki’s Aristotelio College on 27 Could 2022. Over a yr after it was conceived as a groundbreaking response to Greece’s notoriously unruly universities, a particular campus police pressure was formally deployed this month. Supply: Getty / AFP
“Having a police squad guarding one other police squad is surreal,” says Theodoros Tsairidis, the top of the Thessaloniki cops union.
Efforts and considerations for security
“Have to be a world first,” he quipped to AFP.
Insufficient state spending on training is a long-running concern in Greece.
In 2009, the yr earlier than the Greek financial disaster, the training ministry’s annual funds was greater than US$6.9 billion ($10.7 billion). This yr, it is lower than 5 billion.
In 2020, the rector of Athens College of Economics and Enterprise was assaulted in his workplace by a bunch of hooded youths, who put an indication round his neck that learn “Solidarity to sit-ins”.
Upon coming to energy in 2019, the conservative authorities of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis made regulation and order a prime precedence.
“Our authorities is decided to make the sense of security in (universities) a actuality,” Citizen’s Safety Minister Takis Theodorikakos stated this week after the police raided Athens Polytechnic in an anti-gang crackdown.
Greater than 30 folks have been arrested within the swoop in reference to three gangs who turned a part of a dilapidated pupil dormitory right into a hideout, police stated.
The Polytechnic is one other campus chosen for the OPPI deployment.
“Prevention is at all times preferable to suppression,” Deputy Schooling Minister Angelos Syrigos instructed the each day newspaper Kathimerini on 20 September.
“Having a police pressure close by creates a way of security, and will avert violent incidents or harm,” he stated.
‘Local weather of concern’
However a police presence in universities is very controversial in Greece.
Throughout the Greek dictatorship, the police helped the military brutally crush a 1973 pupil rebellion on the Athens Polytechnic.
Additional outrage was triggered this month when riot police fired tear gasoline throughout a pupil live performance at Aristotelio.
Aristotelio workers instructed a information convention this week that the presence of riot police was disrupting each day life on campus.
“That is an anarchic pressure that creates a local weather of concern. Lessons can’t be held underneath a local weather of concern,” electrochemistry professor Sotiris Sotiropoulos instructed reporters.
“It is a threat to our bodily and psychological security,” he stated.
Scholar reactions are blended. “Sure, there have been incidents of lawlessness, however now we’ve got tank-like police automobiles on campus… lots of my fellow college students are afraid to stroll round,” says Irini, 21, a biology pupil at Aristotelio.
However Artemis, a 22-year-old psychology undergraduate, says the college’s sprawling park-like campus is harmful at evening.
“There’s drug buying and selling every day, and frequent fights and stabbings. There are additionally common sit-ins and vandalism by people who find themselves not a part of the college,” she stated.
“We will not have simply anyone coming in and doing no matter they really feel like. College students don’t have anything to concern from elevated safety,” she argued.
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