Interrogating Racial Power in Campus Policing

• In Event: Centering Voices: Developing Methods to Support Activism and Overcome Antiracism

Abstract

Campus police are ubiquitous: 95% of postsecondary institutions operate their own campus police department (Reaves, 2015). The rapid growth of campus policing in the last 50 years has coincided with rising enrollments of students from racially diverse and immigrant communities. Campus policing is generally framed as an instrument of crime control, yet this may overshadow how underrepresented students are surveilled and punished in ways similar to the policing of communities of color in broader society. Thus, the aim of this critical case study (Patton, 2015) to understand how a university constructs and implements a theory of policing through the voices of campus police officers.

Author

• Jude Paul Matias Dizon, University of Southern California