Politics aside, Kaitlin Bennett and the individuals who showed up to protest her agree on one thing — the UCF Police Department failed in its response to the chaotic situation at UCF’s main campus on Thursday.
Knight News reporter Andrew Carson interviewed Bennett, a President Donald Trump supporter, on Friday.
Bennett said she showed up publicly unannounced — but coordinated with the UCF Police Department — to campus to ask students questions and show support for Trump.
“I wasn’t there to speak on campus,” she said. “I was there to make a YouTube video about, basically, a discussion whether students think Joe Biden or Donald Trump would be best for Black America.”
Bennett said UCFPD watched the events unfold and said the police department should be embarrassed it could not get control of its students.
“I never felt unsafe around this herd of psychos on your campus,” Bennett said, referring to the protesters at UCF.
UCF Police Department Chief Carl Metzger said Bennett’s event was the first free speech event on a large scale since the pandemic began. He said UCFPD should have acted quicker when it came to enforcing university policy in a Thursday statement posted on Twitter.
“That statement is a lot of bogus and something needs to be done to hold the people who made that statement accountable for their lies,” she said. “They literally said I was there to agitate.”
She said if she was there to agitate, she would not have sent her head of security to coordinate with UCFPD ahead of time.
Bennett said her executive protection team did not start any physical altercations. Knight News has requested UCFPD’s body worn camera footage from Thursday’s events to independently verify this.
UCF student Arren Huckleberry, who goes by the singular gender neutral pronouns they and them, said they believe the university’s response to the situation was disappointing.
“It seems like a lot of performative action,” Huckleberry said. “They are saying all of these things, as we saw with the Kaitlin Bennett [situation], they didn’t actually enforce it. It almost seems like theatre, like safety theater. They are saying all of these things that are supposed to make us feel safe but they are not actually doing anything.”
Former UCF student Anthony Sulvinski, who said he recently dropped out due to financial reasons, showed up to protest with a megaphone on Thursday.
Knight News interviewed Sulvinski on Thursday and discussed the events from his perspective.
