City should select Kelsay

I am perfectly satisfied with interim Police Chief Troy Kelsay in being Iowa City’s permanent police chief. The reason for this he is well-educated and experienced: Kelsay was the police captain of field operations and has been with the department since 1991. He was promoted to sergeant in 2001, to lieutenant in 2014, and to captain in June 2015. Kelsay has a B.S. from the University of Iowa and graduated from the FBI National Academy in 2012.

Retired Capt. Rick Wyss reminds us that Iowa City has faced its own form of police brutality with the Eric Shaw case. A most difficult case, in which Shaw was shot and killed by an Iowa City police officer on Aug. 30, 1996, inside his art studio on South Gilbert Street.

Wyss said, “Probably the most difficult time for me was the Eric Shaw incident; it was very difficult for a variety of reasons. That was a very difficult time for law enforcement in general.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the Shaw case, he was a young white man working in his father’s business when a lone policeman looking to make a name for himself shot him. Somehow the conclusion was that it was Shaw’s death was his own fault because he was on the telephone in the dark and the phone looked like a gun. Iowa City then, and not even now, was not a hotbed of crime. That was the problem. Too many policemen bored with no action in their precincts.

We in America are at a critical “very difficult time for law enforcement” nationwide when police brutality is now part of the social media, and we must have a man in place with the experience and education to not only to deal with the crisis but also understand it.

From his experience on the job in Iowa City, and his education, it seems that Chief Troy Kelsay may be our man.

Mary Gravitt

UI not so inclusive

Our university has good intentions for being trans-friendly on a surface level, but a deeper look indicates otherwise. The new “gender neutral” restrooms are a great addition on campus, but there are still issues with them. If the picture of the restroom sign in the DI article on July 12 is what the signing will be for all of the gender-neutral restrooms, then the new signing still uses binary genders and does not accurately depict that it is “gender neutral.”

The article states that “single-user” restrooms, also known as unisex restrooms, were “repurposed” to be gender inclusive. Before we celebrate UI’s “renovation,” we need to know how exactly they were renovated. Is a sign change on the outside of the room enough to say it was renovated? Couldn’t you say that the single-user/unisex restrooms have always remained gender-neutral then? Will there be a change to the binary sign outside of the gender-neutral restrooms? While single-user/unisex restrooms are generally a safe place for the LGBTQIA+ in general and have been helpful to have 147 of these on campus, UI needs to send a message that these “repurposed” restrooms were not re-signed in order to segregate cisgender and transgender persons on campus.

We need a policy that specifies that transgender persons can use multi-user restrooms for the gender they most identify with in addition to these single-user restrooms. That is the step UI needs to take to make restrooms gender inclusive.

Jessica Brierton