Reimagining Campus Safety: Abolitionist Possibilities and Police-Free Futures

• In Event: On Abolition: Education Policy, Activism, and Police-Free Learning Environments

Abstract

In 2015, Black-led student activist groups from 76 U.S. colleges and universities issued demands for reforms to campus policing, largely through the requirement of police to complete cultural competence trainings and student inclusion on police oversight boards (Chessman & Wayt, 2016). At the University of North Carolina, however, Black students specifically demanded the university defund and disarm its campus police department as well as take action to discontinue its criminalization of “working-class, poor, and homeless Black and Brown people … in Chapel Hill and Carrboro,” stating “Policing as an institution must be abolished, and must be replaced with restorative and transformative justice practices, rather than functioning as a mouth into our penal system.” To be sure, police brutality and state-sanctioned violence (i.e., specific forms of harm, whether enacted by individuals or institutions, enacted within and beyond the boundaries of formalized legal systems) against vulnerable Black people is neither unique nor exclusive to municipal police departments. We must not forget the University of Cincinnati Police officer who shot and killed Samuel DuBose in 2015 or the deadly shooting of Jason Washington by Portland State University Police in 2018, both of which occurred off-campus. When considering more than 80-percent of campus police are authorized to patrol and make arrests off-campus (Reaves, 2015), Black people, whether affiliated with institutions or living in proximity to campus, exist in a heightened state of precarity when it comes to their individual and collective safety. When considered together, the aforementioned relationship between student demands, campus police patrolling patterns and involvement in shooting deaths off-campus allude to the inconsistency and erosion of previously conceived boundaries of college and university life.
In response to this reality, and through the concerted effort of student activists, racialized policymaking (Rodriguez, Deane, & Davis, 2021) with respect to campus safety and security has begun shifting toward more abolitionist aims. This includes the formation of abolitionist collectives like #PoliceFreePenn at the University of Pennsylvania, the national Cops Off Campus Coalition, disarming campus officers at Portland State University, and the student-led demand to severe relationships between municipal police and the University of Minnesota in following the murder of George Floyd, to which the university ultimately agreed. As a cross-case analysis, this paper explores how the aforementioned postsecondary institutions, as well as numerous others, have been forced to confront and begin to reckon with reimagining safety as a set of preconditions that would render the necessity for campus and other police obsolete. In particular, this paper proffers an understanding of overlapping policy contexts in which issues of affordable housing, food security, livable-wage employment and workforce development, and other life-affirming institutions shape the educational possibilities of urban colleges and universities as a relationship in which the university is no longer the domain of solutions while communities are considered the domain of problems (Yappa, 1999).

Author

• Charles H.F. Davis, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author