ANTI-RACISM DAILY

May 6, 2024

Rally to remove cops from campuses.

TAKE ACTION

• If you’re a student or educator, join the coalition and demand cops off your campus or institution. 

• Use these resources created by the Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators, a network of people who work in post-secondary education, to challenge policing on your campus.

• Use this toolkit to organize against police abuse in your community.

GET EDUCATED

Last week, peaceful demonstrations in solidarity with those in Gaza spread to colleges and universities across the U.S. These student-led and faculty-supported initiatives were met with unjust police brutality, leading to over 2,000 arrests and heartbreaking stories of participants being wounded and harassed by cops. These blatant displays of police brutality only underscore the dangers of having cops on campuses – not just at colleges and universities, but schools for students of all ages.

Over the past five years, campus police forces—once considered minor "rent-a-cop" operations—have come under intense scrutiny following several high-profile incidents. Notable cases include the fatal shooting of nonbinary student Scout Schultz by Georgia Tech police in 2017 during a mental health crisis (CNN) and the 2015 fatal traffic stop shooting of Sam Dubose by a University of Cincinnati officer (PBS). Other troubling events reveal patterns of racial profiling and excessive force, such as the University of Colorado police's questioning of two Indigenous students on a campus tour and the shooting of Black partners Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon by a Yale University police officer in 2019 (Liberation News).

Publicized cases of surveillance and the use of military-grade technology by campus police, as in the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a student strike, have raised alarms about the militarization and capabilities of campus law enforcement.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

These events and the broader movement against police violence catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have spurred student activists to demand the disarming, defunding, or abolition of campus police. Many universities have adjusted their approach to campus policing during the 2020-2021 school year. A study found that, during the 2021-22 school year, more than 1 in 10 schools with a regular police presence removed officers, and more than 50 school districts nationwide ended their school resource officer programs altogether (NCES). These are K-12 schools, not colleges and universities. But events like the Uvalde school shooting in 2022 and protests like these are likely to reverse these trends. After two student shootings occurred near campus, the president of Temple University promised to increase policing by 50 percent (Inside Higher Ed).

 The current protests at some universities, like UCLA, challenge those promises in an article published last week, Atmika Iyer reflects on the UC College Safety plan, its haphazard implementation across campuses, and whether or not they improved outcomes when violence sparked at the encampments (Cal Matters).

Students argue that campus police often engage in racial profiling, surveillance of vulnerable groups, and neglect or mishandling of sexual violence reports. And they’re not wrong; the same disparities we see in policing across the U.S. are reflected in how it shows up on campuses. The University of Southern California found that 31.7% of routine traffic stops by its campus officers in 2019-20 involved Black people, even though Black people made up just 5.5% of students, 8.8% of staff, 3% of faculty, and 12% of neighbors (LA Times). Ninety-three people, 51 of them students, were arrested on campus during protests the last week of April (USC).

The "Cops Off Campus" movement is one of many student-led initiatives to rally against policing on campus directly and, consequently, in broader society. Beyond that, students also organize to create community-driven responses to tensions that unfold on campuses, aiming to reduce their overall reliance on policing. Brown University’s Transformative Justice Program, created in 2019, uses abolitionist frameworks to address violence equitably (The Nation). The Police-Free LAUSD coalition, led by Black students, parents, and community organizations, prompted the LAUSD to cut $25 million from the $78 million LASP department budget in June 2020 (Medium).

“When we define safety on our campuses, we're defining safety based on the safety and comfort of privileged students, namely white students. We completely ignore what safety looks like for marginalized people. When we say get cops off campus, we mean re-imagining safety to being inclusive of everyone and creating a space that's genuinely safe for even the most marginalized and victimized people.” Alecia Harger (she/they), a then-sophomore at UC Berkeley and representative for both UC Berkeley Cops Off Campus and the transnational Cops Off Campus Coalition, in 2021.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Peaceful protests on college campuses met with harsh police actions, leading to 2,000 arrests and raising concerns about police on campuses.

• Recent violent and racially charged incidents by campus police have led to student demands for reducing or removing campus police forces.

• While some schools have reduced police presence due to activism, violence, and protests have caused some to consider bringing more police back, presenting a challenge to movements seeking to address campus issues without police.