The Lumberjack



Students Serving The Cal Poly Humboldt Campus and Community Since 1929

Tag: assault

  • Wildberries shoplifting incident triggers protest and backlash

    Wildberries shoplifting incident triggers protest and backlash

    by Dezmond Remington and Jasmin Shirazian

    Allegations of assault, worker mistreatment, and profiling have been leveled at Wildberries Marketplace in Arcata in response to a video showing an altercation between a customer and store manager Aaron Gottschalk.

    The video, posted on the r/Humboldt subreddit by an anonymous user, was originally shot on Sept. 30. It shows Gottschalk grabbing a young girl’s wrists and pulling her into shopping carts and eventually onto the ground by her backpack straps.

    A protest on Jan. 21 at Wildberries was attended by several dozen people, and former and current Wildberries employees spoke out against perceived mistreatment and profiling by Gottshalk (who declined a request for an interview).

    Tatum Keller, a former Wildberries employee, said managers including Gottschalk profiled customers they considered to be a high theft risk, asking employees to pay special attention to certain customers. 

    “It was always usually motherfuckers who were in hoodies or looked homeless… or just not white,” Keller said. “It was never a fucking white man. Anyone under the visible age of 30… any person of color they’d be like, ‘hey, watch out for this person.’”

    In a statement from Phil Ricord, the owner and president of Wildberries, Ricord said shoplifting was a serious problem at Wildberries and other stores in the area. Ricord said that Wildberries decided not to press charges, but was still placing the blame on the girl. 

    “Unfortunately, shoplifting and its prevention at times leads to unintended consequences,” Ricord said. “Had the individual involved responded to numerous verbal demands to stop no further action would have been necessary. Instead, they decided to ignore those demands and continue their exit from the store and were forcibly restrained until law enforcement arrived.”

    Ricord also said that due to the incident, store shoplifting policies have been revised to eliminate physical confrontations between the accused and the staff. 

    However, Keller was not optimistic. 

    “It was probably every single day, if not every other day, someone was chased out whether they had something or not,” said Keller. “Definitely not surprising. It happened before I worked there, it happened during the time I worked there and it’s going to continue to happen still.”

    Despite the purported changes in store policy, Ricord was also not too optimistic about how shoplifting would be handled in the future at Wildberries. 

    “Shoplifting has unpredictable and unfortunate consequences,” Ricord said in an email. “The incident, taken in its entirety is proof of that.”

  • A Look Into HSU’s Annual Crime Report

    A Look Into HSU’s Annual Crime Report

    Clery Act reveals numerous sexual assault cases within the last 3 years at HSU

    Humboldt State University’s 2019 Clery Act Annual Security Report reveals more than three sexual assault cases at HSU in each of the past three years.

    Amelia Wagoner, a victim rights advocate and kinesiology major at HSU, said the problem goes deeper than the statistics suggest.

    “The amount of reported cases here and throughout the nation do not reflect campus safety,” Wagoner said. “The reporting process is traumatic and most survivors don’t want to deal with it.”

    The Clery Act federally requires all higher education institutions to disclose campus crime statistics. The newest report for HSU, released in September, covers crimes from January 2016 to December 2018. All Clery Act reports for California State Universities are available on the California State University webpage.

    HSU’s report notes five rapes in 2016, five in 2017 and four in 2018. HSU doesn’t have the most rape or sexual assault instances within the CSU system, but it did have one of the largest percentages compared to its relatively low student population. Sexual assault victims made up .05% of HSU students.

    HSU requires students to go through a consent course before attending, and all members of clubs or sports teams attend a Title IX seminar once per year. Title IX is a federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in federally-funded education institutions, and the seminar focuses on teaching consent culture and anti-hazing.

    Geography major Allie Jones expressed concerns about the faculty behind HSU’s Title IX seminar.

    “At HSU, nobody on the Title IX team is a woman,” said Jones. “I’m sure the coordinator is qualified for his job, but as a woman I’d feel more comfortable having another woman to talk to.”

    For now, Wagoner urged students to play their part in improving campus safety.

    “Make sure everything is okay,” Wagoner said. “If you see or hear something that doesn’t seem right, do your part to make a difference.”

  • OPINION: Don’t learn safety by accident

    OPINION: Don’t learn safety by accident

    HSU waits to tell students about assaulter on campus

    It took Humboldt State nearly 20 hours to alert students that there had been an assault on campus committed by another student.

    Within those 20 hours that student who was the assaulter could have hurt someone else. For 20 hours students walked around aimlessly on campus without a care in the world because they had no idea there was an assaulter loose on school grounds.

    I do not live on campus however I do know what it is like to have someone invade you in your personal space and then not feel safe.

    We pay thousands of dollars every year just for HSU to fail to alert us that something like an assault took place in a residence hall. I have a younger sister who will be heading off to college in a years’ time and I fear that she will attend a school that lacks putting students’ safety above anything else.

    Our parents drop us off for the first day of the rest of our college career during move-in day. Having that institution leading them to believe that we are in their capable hands, yet how many students have been hurt on or near campus in the last five years? I have received one too many emails and text messages from HSU telling us about the death of yet another student or a student’s gone missing.

    There are these emergency posts placed around campus to call someone in the event you’re in danger, but the people that put us in harm’s way the most is the school themselves.

    How are we supposed to know when to be vigilant and stay in groups during a certain time or day when the school, our keepers, casually wait to alert us?

    This needs to change. I want to feel safe on my campus, on our campus.