BY THE CAMPUS POLICE WORKING GROUP

The following is an excerpt, with source citations removed, from the recently released report On Campus Police Forces. In July 2020, the AAUP appointed a Campus Police Working Group and charged its members with drafting a report on the role of police on campus, the appropriateness of higher education institutions’ having their own police forces, the impact of systemic racism on campus policing, and changes needed to ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming for diverse peoples, especially those who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. 

Policing in its broadest sense—a function performed in one way or another by public safety officers, private security firms, and municipal police departments—is not new to the academy. The widespread creation of university police forces, however, is a recent development implemented with unprecedented rapidity and breadth. They are also objects of newly energized protests on campuses across the country in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people at the hands of law enforcement officers. 

The first US university police force was the Yale Police Department, established with two officers in 1894. They were charged initially with keeping the unhoused people of New Haven from sheltering in university buildings. The current trend toward proliferation of police departments at colleges and universities has multiple roots. These include administrative concern over large-scale student protests during the 1960s and 1970s, the 1990 Clery Act that requires institutions of higher education to report on crimes that occur on and around their campuses, and the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.  The Clery Act was just one element in a cascade of federal criminal justice legislation that included the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, and the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001.  

The combined effect of the late-twentieth-century pursuit of ever-tougher criminal justice policies and increasingly vast law enforcement powers (and numbers) was to manufacture a humanitarian crisis in which the United States has the most incarcerated people of any country in the world in both absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population. The “land of the free” is home to less than five percent of the world’s population, but nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. One in thirty-five Americans were incarcerated, on parole, or on probation in 2016—slightly more than the combined 2010 population of Chicago and Los Angeles. Yet people of color made up 70 percent of those incarcerated in 2016—ensuring structurally that many white people will remain shielded from the scope of this crisis. 

While many Americans are becoming increasingly aware of systemic racism in law enforcement and criminal justice in our society, the alarms have also been sounding on higher education campuses for some time. According to the US Department of Justice, 92 percent of public colleges and universities in 2012 had sworn and armed campus officers, as did 38 percent of private ones. The growth of police forces in higher education has been swift and sudden. The Atlantic notes that between 2005 and 2015 “the percentage of both public and private colleges nationwide using armed officers increased from 68 percent to 75 percent.” 

As campus police have proliferated, so have the racist and violent impacts, in many cases resulting in death. In 2011, campus police pepper-sprayed seated student protesters at the University of California, Davis. In 2013, George Washington University police officers were found to be performing illegal off-campus detentions. In 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer shot and killed a Black man, Samuel DuBose. The same year, Yale University police pulled a gun on a Black student. In 2018, a University of Oregon police officer pulled a gun on a student of color, mistaking him for a white suspect. The same year, Portland State University police shot and killed a Black man. Also in 2018, University of Chicago police shot a student having an apparent mental health crisis. Any college and university presidents congratulating themselves that their campus police officers have not shot or killed a student or community member should understand that it may only be a matter of time before they do. 

These trends in campus policing take place within the broader structural transformation of US society. As our downtown areas and historically Black and Latinx neighborhoods have gentrified into upscale shopping and living hubs, an enlarged police presence and increased arrests for minor quality-of-life infractions have become standard operating procedure. Campus police forces have played their part in this reorganization of space, labor, and bodies. One example of this trend is the “cruise-ship university,” with university campuses becoming high-profile oases, separated sometimes only by a few feet from systemically impoverished neighborhoods, that offer up a boutique experience to undergraduates while keeping the supposed unseemly elements of urban life at a safe distance.  

The role of campus police has not remained confined to campus. In 2012, 90 percent of sworn campus police officers had the authority to make arrests in areas near campus, and 70 percent of campus police agencies had their off-campus roles defined by signed agreements with local law enforcement. Off-campus arrests are central to the project of campus policing, as illustrated by the fact that sworn officers on 81 percent of campuses in 2012 were responsible for off-campus patrol jurisdictions. Disturbingly, the extension of campus patrols into adjacent neighborhoods creates a loophole in local measures to keep law enforcement accountable and transparent in interactions with the public. 

The ostensible mission of keeping students safe has been a Trojan horse for interlocking processes of gentrification, urban renewal, community displacement, mass incarceration, and bond issuance and securitization by public universities for large-scale construction projects. The people whom campus police target both on and off campus include members of systematically marginalized communities, local residents unaffiliated with the university (including unhoused and transient populations), student and labor activists (insubordinate members of the campus community), and members of the community traditionally understood as “criminal” (including bicycle thieves, rapists, and mass shooters). Tellingly, while increasing the number of campus security or campus police officers does increase the number of arrests for minor infractions, it has not been found to reduce rates of campus crime.

Campus Police Working Group
Megan Horst (Urban Planning), Portland State University, chair
Michael Hames-García (Philosophy), University of Oregon
Rudy Fichtenbaum (Economics), Wright State University
Michael Magee, AAUP staff

Read the full report On Campus Police Forces.