Christine Farolan and Chase Childress
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks during the pandemic have forced a reckoning in America about racism and racial justice. The failure of police reforms to curb the rampant killing of unarmed Black people by police has led to widespread protests against police violence—protests that were met with startling displays of force by the police. As demonstrations continued through the end of the summer, activists of color brought nuance to our national conversations of policing. Persistent efforts on the part of community advocates have fundamentally shifted our conversations, locating the roots of American policing in the protection of property and maintenance of the slave economy and identifying its modern management function: a catch-all for social issues our government has failed to solve. Frustration, not just with the actions of individual officers but the institution of policing itself, has led to calls to abolish, disband, or #defund the police.
Depending on who you ask, “defunding” the police might mean divestment and reallocation of some, but not all, funds away from police departments to social services and BIPOC communities. It might also mean the total disbanding or abolition of police forces as an initial step in creating a new, community-led approach to public safety. In other words, calls to #defund police exist on a spectrum.
Despite these differences, the persistence of #defund campaigns and related protests has caused an unprecedented shift in our national conversations concerning racial justice and critically linked the problem of policing with the problems of our capitalist economy. #Defund campaigns typically highlight the massive amount of money city budgets allocate to police departments while police officers continue to harm BIPOC communities as schools and social programs struggle for funding. They have also drawn attention to just how police departments have spent our money: the militarization of police forces, the myriad and interconnected ways police harm BIPOC communities, and the broader resistance to transparency and oversight among police departments.
#Defund campaigns have also caught on at college campuses. Students from colleges and universities across the country have been demanding the defunding of their campus police, the termination of contracts between their campus police and local municipal police, and the abolition of their campus police force. Petitions or statements have circulated at several institutions, including the University of California school system, Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Iowa, New York University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Temple University, and Yale University.
On our own campus, Black student organizers have demanded that the Northeastern University Police Department cut ties with the Boston Police Department and be defunded and disarmed. They have also outlined a plan for a Restorative Justice Center, which would receive the funding taken from NUPD and relieve NUPD of its duties related to mental health checks, drug and substance abuse, and non-emergency medical transports. Additionally, as of Dec. 16 2020, 885 individuals have signed a petition calling for transparency from NUPD.
Both municipal and campus policing are rooted in legacies of white supremacy. Modern American policing began in part with Southern slave patrols, groups of primarily white men who surveilled enslaved Black people to stop them from organizing meetings. It developed further in the 1800s following the model of the London Metropolitan Police to quell labor strikes, protect property, and otherwise maintain political control in a world of burgeoning industrial capitalism. Campus policing began under the legal doctrine of in loco parentis (“in place of the parents”) to preserve university property for a student population that was primarily white and upper-middle class. Campus police then evolved in response to civil unrest spurred by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, at a time when white residents were fleeing urban areas.
Given this history, it follows that municipal and campus police share many of the same issues—and exhibit the same tendency to protect property and not people. First and foremost, campus police are capable of and have exhibited the same level of violence as municipal police. To name just a few examples, university police were involved in the 2015 death of Samuel DeBose, the 2016 death of Joyce Quaweay, the 2018 shooting of Charles Soji Thomas, and the 2012 death of Gil Collar. On Nov. 12, 2020, Northeastern’s own campus police violently arrested a thirteen-year-old boy. Further, like municipal police, campus police are often called in instances of racial profiling, in which the caller assumes that the student, professor, or employee doesn’t belong in campus public or academic spaces because they are Black or brown. Additionally, campus police participate in the racial profiling of an institution’s community members even when they are not responding to a specific call.
Though woefully understudied, preliminary research on interactions between Black students and campus police are strikingly similar to those that occur with regularity in communities around the country. African American students report frequently being approached by campus police in academic spaces, such as libraries and science laboratories, for being “out of place” or “fitting the description” of suspects in ongoing investigations. Experiences from unwarranted police questioning and unjustified orders to disperse to disturbing threats and insinuations given by officers color Black students’ experience of campus life. Such interactions with campus police underscore the widespread discrimination and microaggressions perpetuated by administrators, faculty members, and fellow students, and make it more difficult for Black students to exist on college campuses, let alone succeed academically. Even the production of a campus identification card—a document that should serve as a second indication of belonging—is sometimes inadequate to clear the student of suspicion, at least in the eyes of the responding officer. In short, for Black students, campus police do not serve and protect them—the campus police department functions to systematically exclude them from academic resources, services, and classes.
Campus and municipal police also share problems in responding to sexual assault or intimate partner violence. On college campuses, where sexual assault is rampant yet underreported, campus police involvement is rare. When campus police are involved, their efficacy is arguable. Studies note that police officers endorsing so-called “rape myths”—cultural notions of rape victims “asking for it” or lying about being raped—is harmful to survivors, given that police decide whether and how to proceed. This may result in survivors’ distrust or retraumatization when interacting with the police. Though such studies involve only municipal police, there is little reason to assume that campus police are not similarly problematic in their responses to sexual assault. This is especially true when campus police often receive the same training as local municipal police, as discussed below. While university processes are flawed in their own right, campus police are not necessarily the best-equipped to respond to instances of sexual assault. University administration can provide a number of immediate solutions that the police cannot, such as suspending a perpetrator or changing a survivor’s housing or class schedule to avoid contact with the perpetrator.
In many instances, demands to defund campus police have been met with willingness to provide increased officer training, but in some ways, training is part of the problem. NUPD, like most other campus police departments, provides officer training similar to municipal police. But a mismatch between officer training and criminal activity that actually occurs on campus makes that training both inappropriate and inadequate. Formally, officer training frequently involves scenarios in which quotidian interactions with civilians turn deadly. Some campus police officials in Massachusetts have even received counterterrorism training from the Israeli military. Informally, the set of beliefs and attitudes now commonly and professionally known as the “warrior mindset” become instilled through a variety of channels. For example, officers regularly disperse crowds with thin or no legal basis, conduct illegal searches that lack probable cause, and incorrectly enforce the law without any legal consequences. Thus, both formal and informal socialization processes ensure this mindset penetrates into every interaction police have with the public. Though some police departments include racial bias training—or even training that acknowledges the history of policing in America as an institution rooted in slavery and designed to protect property, not people—it is perhaps unsurprising that these isolated messages are drowned out in the messaging police receive from their peers and trainers. As the most commonly reported crimes committed on college campuses are property-related, the military-style training that campus cops receive is all the more concerning.
Campus police officers, like their municipal counterparts, are also frequently part of local police unions. Police unions have historically escaped criticism, perhaps because they symbolize law and order on the right and organized labor on the left. But recently, police unions have come under intense public, legal, and academic scrutiny as a primary actor responsible for the failure of reform efforts to halt deadly police killings. At least one empirical study concluded that police protections, which are negotiated by police unions, were positively correlated with police violence and other abuses. Another concluded that the acquisition of collective bargaining rights in Florida sheriffs’ departments led to a “substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct” relative to other police departments. But most urgently, because police unions bargain with municipalities over provisions concerning the hiring, firing, and discipline of officers alongside more traditional terms of employment like salary and wages, police unions have been able to secure employment terms that effectively shield officers from accountability. Though a number of terms and conditions common among these agreements are concerning (including many procedural protections that allow officers to cover up misconduct and foil investigations), particularly problematic are those agreements that mandate destruction of officer disciplinary records, require arbitration in cases of disciplinary action, and indemnify officers in civil suits. Unions also reinforce the entrenched police culture known as the “blue wall of silence,” which encourages police to coach accused officers and conceal misconduct with the help of lawyers supplied by the union.
While union efforts to secure worker protections are vital in other sectors, we should question whether unionization among police is desirable. Police officers alone among workers are authorized to use deadly force and have historically been called upon to break strikes and other labor demonstrations. Unlike similar organizations, such as teachers’ unions, police unions shield public officials who have an incredible amount of discretion. By ensuring that officers do not pay the cost of their own misconduct, unions increase the likelihood that officers will engage in the unlawful exercise of lethal (and less than lethal) force. By allowing campus police officers to unionize on campus, the already-challenging job of proving officer misconduct in a municipal context becomes a nearly herculean task on campus, where less administrative oversight couples with increased union protections to systemically exclude Black students from the full benefits of campus life.
But for all the similarity between public and private police, this still does not adequately grasp the real consequences of those forces operating in tandem. Formally, memorandums of understanding (MOUs) coordinate activities between campus and municipal police and may specify that certain events or services on campus be provided by municipal officers. Efforts to discover precisely what these MOUs on our own campus entail through public records requests are frequently met with a slow and lackluster response on the part of Boston PD and flat denial on the part of NUPD, which, as a private police department, does not have to provide records to the public. This lack of transparency for police forces is characteristic of the polices forces within the state as a whole but is particularly concerning where the jurisdictions of two police forces overlap.
Based on obtainable data, we can conclude that campus police, like municipal police officers within Boston, conduct unlawful and unnecessary stops motivated by racial profiling, exhibit the same patterns that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline as other school police officers, and ultimately redouble the harms against BIPOC caused by municipal police as they patrol the ever-expanding bounds of the campus. Without data indicating otherwise, it is reasonable to conclude that officers who receive the same training behave the same way—and perpetuate the same harms.
Demands to defund or abolish the police must include private police, which augment the harms of public police and come with their own issues of transparency. For example, multiple Chicago-area schools joined to create “Solidarity Street,” a coalition to demand police-free campuses. Solidarity Street has been vocal in combining the defunding of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and that of its schools’ campus police in its goals. As one organizer stated, campus police departments and institutions of higher education are “partners in crime of a racist system” who inflict harm on BIPOC communities through policing, gentrification, and more. Other organizers noted that abolishing police involves the “reimagining” of all frameworks under which people can be policed, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Child Protective Services, and that abolition is ultimately a hopeful vision for a future where people and communities are centered. In advancing the defunding and abolition of both CPD and campus police, the coalition has organized with Black Lives Matter Chicago, Brave Space Alliance, and other community groups. Solidarity Street provides an example of uncompromising organizing that recognizes the shared and compounded harms of municipal and campus police.
Calls to #defund the police must include all forms of police, public and private. The institution of policing, as an arm of white supremacy, protects property, not people. Campus police, frequently reaping similar benefits as municipal police while being exempt from many of the same reporting requirements, problematically view their task as protecting the (perceived-as-white) university from the (perceived-as-Black) urban space which frequently surrounds campus. As a result of systemic factors and structural racism, campus police officers do not simply reinforce discrimination against Black students, but in fact extend and compound the function of municipal police to exclude people of color from full participation in public life. Both students and administrators must broaden discussions of policing to our own campuses—and critically consider our own complicity in the harm against our fellow classmates and community members.
Chase Childress is a joint J.D./Ph.D. student in Northeastern University’s School of Law and School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Both his criminology research and law study focus on reducing the harms of the mass carceral and mass deportation state and exploring the ways in which partnerships between criminal justice agencies, non-governmental organizations and private companies have impacted communities most vulnerable to state violence.
Christine Farolan is a J.D. student in Northeastern University School of Law’s class of 2021. On campus, she is involved with the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association and has worked with the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic. She hopes to be a public defender after graduation, practicing from a lens of decarceration and prison abolition.