UCSC NAACP Calls For Investigation Into Rope Tied Like Noose

SANTA CRUZ, CA — The University of California, Santa Cruz NAACP chapter has called on officials to launch an investigation after a rope tied like a noose was found hung on a street sign last week.

The organization said it also wants police to consider upgrading traffic cameras in the area and suspend or expel any students involved in the act.

The UCSC NAACP said in an open letter shared Tuesday that it was "appalled both by the boldness of people to intimidate Black lives by echoing the racial violence of past lynching, and by the following complicit nature of our institutional systems to not communicate effectively to the populations which may be directly impacted, such as our Black student leaders."

The letter was also signed by the Santa Cruz NAACP chapter.

While campus police stopped short of calling the incident a hate crime because they said they did not know the motives of the people who hung the rope, police said Monday that they were investigating it as a "bias-related incident" and said it was "deeply troubling to those who observed it."

UCSC NAACP called on the university to fully investigate the incident, and keep Black and brown student leaders and organizations informed with updates to ensure the safety of students of color on campus.

An update on the investigation into the incident was not immediately available.

UCSC NAACP was also critical of the university's response to the incident, saying it did not go far enough to offer support to students.

UCSC was reached for comment and deferred to a July 7 letter sent to the campus community.

In the letter, campus officials encouraged the community to seek support amid a time of "troubling actions and toxic rhetoric" in a letter sent last Tuesday, signed by Teresa Maria Linda Scholz, associate vice chancellor and chief diversity officer, and Jennifer Baszile, interim vice chancellor for student affairs and success. The UCSC community will support each other not succumb to divisiveness, they wrote.

Scholz and Baszile referenced the rope tied like a noose and called America's history of lynching Black people "a national shame" and "a horrific public spectacle designed to silence, traumatize, and disempower individuals and entire communities."

"Regardless of what may have been intended, these actions recall some of the ugliest legacies of white supremacy and remind us all of the daily threat of violence faced by ABC-identified students, staff, faculty, and community members," they wrote. "Anti-Blackness cannot stand."

The letter also noted a recent vandalism incident at the Hillel Center, which serves Jewish students. The incident was apparently related to mental health issues, not hate, but came amid a time when anti-Semitic acts are on the rise, Scholz and Baszile said.

They encouraged the community to seek help through support service offered by their colleges, resource centers and other programs, including Counseling and Psychological Services.

UCSC NAACP noted the difficulties that students may have in reaching out to the CAPS program during the summer months. CAPS staff may not be able to identify with what students of color are dealing with, UCSC NAACP wrote.

The organization questioned why students should be expected to reach out for support.

"For an educational institution that has existed over 150 years, and as an embedded facet of that institution, students of color and folx of color attending UC Santa Cruz and within the overall Santa Cruz community deserve far more than just eight sentences in a sparse response letter," UCSC NAACP wrote.

UCSC NAACP was also critical of media reports from Patch and TV station KION, which referred to the item hanging from the street post a rope, rather than a noose.

Campus police have not used the term "noose," though the rope does appear to have been tied like a noose.

"We wish to encourage and bolster our reader[s] in initiating and continuing a calling out of the various intersecting forms of racial injustice that haunt and envisage a complicit, omnipresent oppressive system of injustice forcibly embedded within the Black and Brown communities across the nation."

Campus police have released a video of a group hanging the rope over the street sign and ask anyone with information to call police at 831-459-2231, ext. 1.

View the suspects below:

Read the letter in full here: