“It was literally twenty-five of us holding signs in the lobby of a building. They didn’t even tell us to leave.”

On March 6, 2023, a group of students at University of Southern Florida (USF) were arrested for protesting House Bill 999, a bill targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and limiting the teaching of African American history. These students, nicknamed the “Tampa 5,” are now facing up to ten years in prison on invented charges. In addition to trespassing (in a public building) and disruption of an educational institution (holding signs in the lobby of a university president’s office), being tackled from behind by a police officer apparently counts as BAT LEO: battery on a law enforcement officer. If you’ve seen the video, you know this is bullshit. The arrests, in the words of Gia Davila, are “just political repression.”

Gia is one of several members of the Tampa 5 touring the country to raise awareness of the students’ situation, as well as the cause they continue to fight for. House Bill 999, she told The Nightly, was an affront to the campaign by Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to increase Black enrollment at USF. 

“A lot of our demands revolved around this diversity program, and we’d had a really hard time getting in touch with our university president,” Gia said. “She’s very elusive, and she makes these claims and does not follow through at all. A couple weeks prior to this bill coming into legislation, we saw that Ron DeSantis had been requesting information about the healthcare that trans students were receiving at our university– which is obviously a clear violation of medical laws– and we had walkouts across the state, there were huge protests around it, and our university president turned over all of the information to him. She did not listen to students. So after seeing that, we were like, ‘No, we need to have a meeting with her. We need her to come out with a formal statement against DeSantis saying she’s not gonna cut diversity programs at our university.’ So we marched to the building that her office is in, demanding a meeting, and not even two minutes passed before the police started attacking people.

“The chief of police started the aggression. He grabbed a student by the arm and yanked her forward, and then immediately after, grabbed me from behind and body-slammed me into the ground. They continued to harass and beat students after I was arrested, and they were screaming at people to go outside, but they were blocking an entrance and holding people so they couldn’t leave. And then they continued to arrest more people outside, despite the fact that they had complied and left the building.

“When I was arrested, I hit my forehead on the tile so badly that my head popped back, and then they put me in this hold where my arm was about to dislocate. They took me out back to a cop car that was already pulled up on the sidewalk, and I was crying because I had just been assaulted and groped” (by the chief of police, as he was arresting her) “and the cop was like, ‘Oh so now you wanna cry?’ And then when he went to open the door, he was like, ‘If you resist, I’m gonna slam you on this ground so fucking hard.’ So then I got into the cop car and I was like, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I was panicking, and they left me in the car alone to go beat up more people, and I literally was like, ‘I can’t breathe, the air isn’t working in here.’ So eventually I was able to calm myself down, and when finally they would come in and out, I tried to knock on the window as best I could. I was handcuffed, but there was a– they’re called CSO, Community Service Officers; they’re technically part of our University PD, but not police officers– and he was outside; I was knocking on the window to tell him, ‘I can’t breathe, the AC’s not working,’ and he totally ignored me. And finally when the cop came back, I told her, ‘I don’t think the AC is working in here,’ and she felt the vents and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, no air is coming out.’ And it was a really hot day. And she didn’t know how to open the plastic mediator to let the AC through.”

“The cop didn’t know how to open the mediator? In the cop car?”

“Yeah.”

The police somehow behaved with both viciousness and incompetence. “We were all in separate cars,” said Gia, “and I remember the cop who had Laura in his car kept coming up to the window of my cop car and being like, ‘I don't know how to do this paperwork, what am I supposed to say she did?’ And because I was the first person arrested, I could hear all the bullshit they were saying. They were saying such homophobic shit, transphobic shit, about going back for particular people to target them. I saw them punching my friend with a closed fist in the head and grabbing people. Just sitting there, hearing them, knowing what they were talking about and what they were about to do– it was just so disgusting.”

It was only after the arrests that the police decided what charges to fabricate. As Gia sat in the hot car, “They kept saying, ‘Oh yeah, she didn’t BAT LEO,’ and they asked me, ‘You didn’t hit anybody, right?’ and I was like, ‘No I didn’t hit anybody.’ But before they took us to jail, they read out all the charges, and they were like ‘BAT LEO, battery on a law enforcement officer,’ and I literally didn’t do that. They said earlier in the car that I didn’t do that, but they were like, ‘Well, now it says you did.’ They were being so racist, mocking my last name, putting on an accent to say my name. I was like, bro, fuck you, how are you going to talk to me like this while I’m stuck in the back of a cop car?”

We discussed the ubiquitous assholery of university presidents and police departments. Gia told us that the USF president, on video, on a faculty call, had compared the protestors to school shooters. “She was like, ‘There's a right way and a wrong way to protest, and they were protesting in the wrong way.’ She compared us to school shooters and said that the amount of ruckus we caused made the school roll out an active shooter protocol. Which, we were literally attacked!”

This all sounded very familiar to President Cauce and the UW Board of Regents. Cauce is infamous for neoliberal stall tactics: empty promises, patronizing students, and putting on a down-to-earth mask over her eight-million-dollar mansion and tuition-funded private chef. Gia agreed: “At our SDS conventions, when we talk more in-depth about the administrations at different schools, it’s crazy how similar they all are. The tactics they use to ignore students, the shit they pass through at their schools– I swear to God, they’re like the same beast.”

“A lot of times in universities,” she added, “we’re taught that direct action is not the best way to get things done, that you should become a politician and try to change things that way. But we see that the ideas politicians push forward as the way to make change, people have been trying for so long, and it has not worked. Since 2020, everything the people have gained– look at the way that states have retaliated against their people since then, the ways they’ve repealed the wins that the people have made, the ways that they’ve pushed through other legislation just to attack people. As soon as you see a hateful bill passing through Florida, it’s instantly in Texas, instantly in some of the surrounding states, and even some of the northern states. Especially with our case, I think it’s such an important national issue because of the freedom of speech aspect of it. We were literally just protesting, and protestors should never be attacked for protesting. It’s such a basic right. I think especially with Ron DeSantis running for president, he just sees Florida as a trial for what he’s gonna do to the rest of the country.”

Here’s a quote we love but aren’t sure how to work in: “She [the USF president] took her vacation early, that’s why she wasn’t in her office. And we were like, ‘Girl! What do you do?’”

The final, and most important, question: how can we help?

“The first thing is donating if anyone feels so inclined. The organizing around this and the legal fees have been really expensive. Our bail was $15,000 between the five of us; mine was $3500, and I paid for it out of my savings,” Gia said. “The other thing is signing the petition. The calls to action are linked through a website that everything’s centralized through. Also, if you’re part of an organization, passing a resolution and mailing it is super helpful. We’re going to trial on December 12, and SDS is holding a national day of action surrounding it, so attending any local protests on that day would be a good way to get involved and help.”

(For UW, this means PSU. PSU is the UW national affiliate branch of SDS, not to be confused with the other SDS, because they decided it was getting too easy to remember all the acronyms on campus. Love for all <3)

In a time of increased political repression, standing behind our fellow activists is more crucial than ever. No one should ever spend time in prison for protesting, and no one should be subjected to the kind of brutality and degradation these students experienced. Another thing Gia told us was that mainstream media tended to paint the incident as two-sided, when really it was an armed force of grown men and women attacking a young group of nonviolent protestors. As many of us have lately learned, the “two sides to every story” mentality proves deadly when one of the sides holds far more power than the other. There is no excuse for what the police did to the Tampa 5. Be in the streets December 12th.

Update: Charges against the Tampa 5 were dismissed by the county as of December 5th thanks to grassroots organizing efforts.