Editor, Daily Nexus,

I am outraged at the Isla Vista Foot Patrol’s strategy this Halloween of arresting possible troublemakers before they created serious problems and the way in which the police dealt with the crowds. As stated in Monday’s article “Revelers Enjoy Well-Monitored Halloween Scene” (Daily Nexus, Nov. 1), there was three times as many bookings as the previous year, my roommate being one of them. Why? Because, as Lt. Sol Linver claimed, they were trying to arrest possible victims and crime makers this year. They spotted someone who they thought might commit a crime or be a victim of a crime and arrested them as a preventive measure. How are they supposed to make that decision unbiased? As they told my arrested roommate, they had arrested many girls in the aim of saving them from being raped – that is bullshit. My roommate was walking down Camino Corto on Friday night with my other female housemate when she was stopped at the roadblock on Trigo Road and taken into police custody. Not only was she arrested for unlawful reasons, but her arrest resulted in leaving the girl she was walking with wandering the streets alone.

Not only is it inappropriate to be arrested unjustly, but, while my friend was handcuffed on the side of the road, barefoot and freezing cold because the police felt it necessary to remove extra items of clothing, she was sexually assaulted by another male handcuffed next to her. Here she was supposedly arrested to “protect” her, yet when in the “safe custody” of our police officers she was in the most harm. When she asked for assistance from the five officers standing a few feet away they took notice of what was happening but said nothing and did nothing. We are supposed to rely on the police to help us, yet they allow this to happen right in front of them. I can’t believe that the one institution in which we are supposed to trust and go to for help could be so fraudulent.

This one incident has sadly made me lose confidence in our police’s decisions and way of protecting us. In one night, both my friends were put in danger as a result of the police’s unneeded preventive measures.