With growing student safety concerns, the Minnesota Student Association’s legislative body discussed in its first forum meeting on Tuesday how to better advocate for student safety without relying on the University of Minnesota Police Department.

MSA sent out a survey last March asking students a series of questions surrounding campus safety. The survey prompted students to select all campus safety aspects they have concerns with; 16 options were available, including security presence on or near campus, sexual assault and theft.

Of the 731 responses, 88 students responded that they had no safety concerns on campus.

During the meeting, Morgan McElroy, ranking MSA voting member, introduced a bill co-signed by several MSA members that would allocate $1,500 of MSA funds toward the creation of the Campus Safety Task Force.

“Essentially, the task force would revolve around the safety of students on and around campus,” McElroy said.

The task force would serve as the primary liaison for MSA on everything regarding the safety of students in the surrounding neighborhoods, such as Stadium Village, Dinkytown and Como. Potential initiatives could include working with UMPD on the improvement of SAFE-U alerts, McElroy said.

However, the bill received pushback from members and was tabled until further notice. In addition to budget concerns with the bill, several members of MSA and forum attendees expressed concerns about working with UMPD. President of MSA, Amy Ma, said in an interview with the Minnesota Daily last spring that she hopes to minimize UMPD presence on campus.

Jae-Lah Lymon, a member of the University’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, said that she wished her and other student groups were consulted prior to the bill’s proposal. She also said students of color, LGTBQ+ students and students with disabilities should have been consulted. Lymon and SDS are advocating for a campus and community police council that would hold police accountable for any misconduct.

“A lot of people don’t feel safe by UMPD and don’t feel safe by police at all. I feel like part of that is because we have no way to hold them accountable,” Lymon said. “I think that the best way to strengthen trust and [the] relationship with UMPD is to give community members power.”

Nikhil Kumaran, the director of MSA’s Infrastructure Committee, said his committee will focus on increasing lighting in the neighborhoods surrounding campus. He also said he is open to exploring more campus safety issues and working on amplifying student voices in conversations about police accountability.

“Personally I think [the issue of police accountability] is bigger than just MSA … I feel like we need more voices and not all those are in [MSA],” Kumaran said.

The Minnesota Student Association’s new Row the Vote initiative is recruiting student ambassadors to increase voter turnout on campus for the November election.

Since the beginning of August, MSA has recruited 54 student ambassadors across campus to participate in the initiative. Ambassadors dedicate one hour a week to nonpartisan voter registration initiatives by sharing social media posts, contacting their personal networks, and answering questions about the voting process. Before the election, MSA hopes to have up to 75 ambassadors.

In past years, MSA’s Voter-Palooza event helped register students to vote in-person, but the pandemic reshaped voter outreach strategies. With the help of other University of Minnesota students, MSA hopes to reach as many students as possible before the November election.

“People are kind of scared about the status of the USPS, whether or not their vote is going to be counted or whether or not it’s safe to be voting in person,” said Rose Lloyd, MSA’s deputy government and legislative affairs director. “These pieces of information get kind of lost for students who aren’t in political science or who aren’t really plugged in with the ways that voting works.”

Row the Vote ambassadors are trained through a 20-minute presentation on Minnesota voter registration and given a brief voting rights history. Ambassadors are then given a script and asked to virtually reach out to 50-100 people in their network.

“We give a brief history of voting rights and who has historically not had access to the ballot because that’s very important for us to educate voting ambassadors on,” Lloyd said.

Sanju Sivaan, who is a current Row the Vote ambassador, said that she has reached out to her friends, roommates and classmates. She eventually wants to reach out to student groups on campus and her connections on Instagram.

“I think that a lot of people seemed to appreciate [my reaching out] actually, which was surprising to me,” Sivaan said.

The Multicultural Undergraduate Political Science Coalition is a student group on campus that plans to work with MSA in getting students registered to vote.

The president of MUPSC, Rielle Miguel, says she hopes to diversify the leadership within the broader initiative.

“We don’t want ambassadors to only be social science students. We want to expand it to even STEM majors and design majors. But, along with that, we also want to make sure that more people of color are the ones who are leading this,” Miguel said.

The University ranked second out of 76 campuses listed as top voting campuses in the U.S. based on data from the 2016 presidential election, according to WhoWhatWhy, a nonprofit news organization. The University showed a 65% student voter turnout rate. The WhoWhatWhy report considered accessibility to voting polls on campus, whether students can use a student ID to vote, if schools ran voter registration drives and if there was early voting on campus.

Nationally, college student voter turnout more than doubled from 2014, increasing from 19% to 40% in 2018, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education.

Lloyd said she wants to continue to see those numbers rise.

“We just hope to see those numbers go up even more this year. We would love a record high voter registration and voting rate,” she said.