During the lull of the winter exam season, Kingston Police arrested a Queen’s commerce student.
Kingston Police officers and campus security escorted the uncuffed student from Goodes Hall for allegedly trespassing on the afternoon of April 14.
“Police were asked to assist in removing an individual who was refusing to leave Goodes Hall when requested,” Kingston Police said in a statement to The Journal.
According to Kingston Police, the student was belligerent with police and continued to refuse to leave the area, resulting in an arrest under the Trespass to Property Act.
In an interview with The Journal, the arrested student—who is not being identified due to a compelling risk to her emotional safety—called her arrest unwarranted. She was working on her finals when she was asked to leave the building.
“I spent the day in jail, and it was not a good experience,” she said.
The student alleged Kingston Police broke her prosthetic arm and cut her pants off her body during her arrest. Kingston Police disagreed with the student’s alleged experience.
“Due to subsequent unruly actions during transportation, the individual was brought to police headquarters, where they were held until no longer considered a risk of breaching the peace,” Kingston Police said.
The student’s arrest follows a Notice of Prohibition from Goodes Hall the University issued earlier in April. The April 14 incident wasn’t the first time the student violated the notice, Kingston Police explained.
The student, who has a prosthetic arm, alleged she received the Notice of Prohibition due two instances where she felt she was treated inappropriately by her professor and her classmates due to her disability.
“[The University] said that I went to [my professor] and yelled at him, which I didn’t. I feel like most people would know I didn’t, but I definitely asserted myself,” she said.
According to the student, Queen’s took her advocacy for accommodation as inappropriate behaviour.
She told The Journal she filed a Harassment and Discrimination (H&D) claim through the Human Rights and Equity Office (HREO) because Queen’s allegedly never accommodated her. Upon following up, she discovered her case had been dismissed.
The Journal was unable to verify the students’ claims because the University won’t comment on any specific student circumstances due to privacy legislation. According to the Queen’s HREO website, the right to be accommodated, and the corresponding duty of the University to respond quickly and appropriately to accommodation requests, are well established.
The student claimed she had no idea she was going to be banned from Goodes Hall. She said her Notice of Prohibition from the building was issued via email in early April, which the University attributed to a pattern of inappropriate behaviour.
“The school just sent me a letter saying I [couldn’t] come into [Goodes Hall],” the student said. “There was no ‘meet with us’—it was just ‘you displayed inappropriate behaviour, don’t come in.’”
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