Opion Page 6 The Michigan Daily Vol. XCI, No. 41-S Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan 18% too steep a tuition hike IT IS ALL VERY painful indeed. With the economic chaos that currently burdens the University, finding a way out will inevitably result in casualties. The question is, where should the changes-and the consequent suffering-take place? By proposing an 18 percent tuition hike, the University administration has chosen studen- ts to be the victims, especially low- and mid- dIe-income students. Shelling out more and more money each year makes an education much more difficult for many, and impossible for others. As an alternative to skyrocketing tuitions, we feel that deeper cuts are needed in Univer- sity programs, cuts which would eliminate the need for mammoth tuition hikes. We believe that instead of forcing prospective students out of an education here, it would be less pain- ful to make such cuts deeper, and the trim- ming more rigorous. There will be damage either way; an accessible University should be the main goal. Unfortunately, students are kept out of much of the vital review process, and denied access to critical information concerning University financial affairs. As a result, it is difficult for us to propose specific targets for further cuts. As painful as they would be, wherever they would be, we regard them as preferable to letting tuition costs go through the roof. Again, nothing will be easy-difficult sacrifices will have to be made. But the paramount goal of the University, the number one priority, should be accessibility. The most dreadful scenario to imagine-rather than a University stripped of many attractive programs-is a University filled only with rich kids, unaffordable to the poor and middle class. Letters and columns represent the opinions of the individual author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the attitudes or beliefs of the Daily. Thursday, July 16, 1981. The Michigan Daily By Frank Browning LONDON - Until last spring, when the Battle of Brixton made headlines around the world,. Britain remained-for much of the world-the land of "fair play." Its friendly, unarmed bobbies, in particular, seemed, the very model of social toleran- ce. Now, as Britain reels from some of the worst urban rioting in its history, people everywhere are wondering what has hap- pened to British tolerance and the social peace underlying it. The answer, it appears, may lie in what has happened to the British police. FOR DESPITE the legend of the friendly bobby, many of this nation's year-long series of social explosions have been set off by charges of police abuse, especially in non-white neigh- borhoods where unemployment runs highest. For blacks-who here include Africans, West In- dians and dark-skinned people from Asia-unemployment now runs as high as 50 percent in some districts. Not all the outbreaks this year have been simple racial conflicts, by any means. Rioting in the Tox- teth districts of Liverpool this summer, and in Brixton last spring, pitted young blacks and whites alike against police. In Brixton, tensions between the police and the interracial com- munity have been rising steadily for two years. Those tensions were only worsened when local, uniformed police were pulled off their beats and replaced by plainclothes officers who ran massive stop-and-search operations throughout .the district. During the first ten days of April alone they- stopped some 1,000 people, springing from un- marked cars, grabbing "suspec- ts" for quick frisks and questioning before releasing them. "If you're black, young and wearing sneakers, they stop you," said one seasoned social worker who requested anonymity. Or as the conservative financial journal, The Economist, noted, "Unemployment does not make people throw bricks and firebom- bs . .. But police harassment makes people hate policemen." TWO LAWS PERMIT these wholesale roundups, both of them enacted in the early 19th century when London was first organizing its professional police forces. The first, and the most hated, is the "sus" law (formerly, the Vagrancy Act of 1824) permit- ting police to detain and hold anyone who appears -"suspicious." The Thatcher government has promised to repeal "sus" this year. But it does not plan to change the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 which allows officers "to stop, search and detain ... any person who may be reasonably suspected of having or conveying in any man- ner anything stolen ..." Racial prejudice had no bearing on the passage of these laws. That is not the case, however, with a new bill in Parliament which many blacks fear threatens their very existen- ce in Britain-the British Nationality Bill. Underlying their current problems with police, they say, lies a pervasive new racism in Britain, which has made serious inroads on police operation and now threatens to deprive blacks of many rights en- joyed by other British residents. THE BILL WOULD replace the current single category of British citizenship and create three varieties of status: straight British Citizenship, Citizenship of the British Dependent Territories, and British Overseas Citizenship. Only the first category of people would be permitted to enter and live in Britain. Initially even so-called "territorial" or "overseas" people born in Britain were to be. denied full status unless one of their parents was British; that provision has now been liberalized to grant such children full rights if they reside in Britain for 10 years. More ominous, perhaps, is the growing hostility toward blacks within the police force charged with protecting them. Last winter the Lambeth Council (covering Brixton and adjacent neigh- borhoods) published its report on police-community relations. Said one magistrate, "As a Justice of the Peace, I occasionally ask to be taken around the police operational field. I sometimes go in police cars and get driven around. They do their best to provoke blacks by shouting at them from cars. It is quite nor- mal for a police officer to shout obscenities." An even more stinging criticism came from the National Association of Probation Of- ficers: "One major effect of the police tactics is that black people feel they have lost the freedom to walk the streets of Lambeth without fear of arrest, and several have claimed that they have been told by a police officer that if they wish not to get "nicked" they should stay in- doors. Frank Browning wrote this article for the Pacific News Service, for which he serves as an associate editor.