When the 2,000-member Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus went on strike on September 8, the union’s demands focused on two main concerns: COVID-19 safety, and reducing the on-campus police security force by fifty percent.
“After the police killings of so many Black people this summer, the movement for Black lives demanded the removal of police from schools—elementary through university.”
According to Jeff Horowitz, co-chair of GEO’s North Campus Organizing Committee, the university is currently slated to spend $12.5 million on the salaries and benefits of sixty police and 130 security officers, many of them assigned to the University’s Medical Center in Ann Arbor. Add in the university’s two other campuses in Dearborn and Flint, Horowitz tells The Progressive, and this year’s policing budget balloons to $17 million.
University of Michigan Students, faculty, and staff see these expenditures as unnecessary and like their colleagues and peers throughout the country, have organized a wide-ranging movement, often using the hashtag #copsoffcampus, to demand greater transparency in university budgetary decisions as well as a reduction in spending on campus security.
Jess Slattery, a senior studying anthropology and economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, credits the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others for this Fall’s surge in campus activism and notes that U-Mass’ anti-policing campaign, called DEFUND UMPD, is a direct outgrowth of the school’s Racial Justice Coalition.
“Our goal is to defund the campus police force by 90 percent within five years,” Slattery says, “to a still high $6.4 million per year. We want to see money moved to programs such as the Center for Women and Community and the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health.”
DEFUND UMPD is also demanding an end to police patrols of residential areas on campus. Calling the patrols “reminiscent of broken windows policing,” where minor infractions become the focus of police attention, Slattery says that the University’s southwest quadrant is the most heavily patrolled section of campus; not coincidentally, it is where the majority of the school’s students of color live.
Transparency in budgetary decision making is also a major concern. Students “want stronger pathways so they can be better informed about how the UMPD spends its money,” Slattery explains. “We want more information to get a fuller picture of police work over the past few years, with access to reports on things like property damage and accidents.”
Because of COVID, Slattery reports that most of DEFUND UMPD’s work is being done remotely over Zoom. But, she says, despite the challenges of online work, U-Mass students and their faculty supporters are resolute in demanding that administrators take their concerns seriously. “We’re working to build relationships with every student group and academic department so we'll have the broadest base of support possible as we go forward.”
Like DEFUND UMPD, budgetary transparency is also a key focus for activists connected to UnKoch My Campus, a six-year-old national organization founded to expose the influence of big donors on college campuses. The group’s #copsoffcampus campaign has developed a police divestment toolkit of sample letters and petitions to school administrators, along with a step-by-step guide on how to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. To date, the campaign has a presence on ten campuses, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts.
Jasmine Banks, UnKoch’s executive director, admits that, though the connection between donor transparency and campus policing may seem tenuous, there is a direct pipeline between the Koch network’s promotion of “public safety” through increased community surveillance—tracking devices, cameras, and other electronic monitors—and their efforts to promote limited government, personal responsibility, and unregulated capitalist expansion.
“After the police killings of so many Black people this summer, the movement for Black lives demanded the removal of police from schools—elementary through university,” Banks explains. “Since we are committed to anti-racist action, we knew immediately that creating a digital campaign and helping students with political education, outreach to media, and putting a campaign together was a natural fit with our other work.”
Other schools, including Harvard, Northwestern, and all ten campuses of the University of California, have mounted similar anti-policing efforts.
When students at UCLA, for example, got wind that the campus police budget was going to be increased by $519,367 for the 2020-21 academic year, they were outraged.
Victoria Copeland, a Ph.D. student in social welfare, notes that this funding increase is occurring at the same time as fiscal austerity measures are being imposed in other areas of university life. In addition to the economic downturn provoked by COVID-19, she says, UCLA’s decision to reduce financial aid packages by $9,000 for some of its students is causing extreme hardship. “It’s clear, now more than ever, what UCLA deems a priority and it’s certainly not the lives of its students,” she says.
UC students and their faculty supporters find this appalling and have articulated a clear set of demands including the abolition of the entire University of California Police Department and the reallocation of the $138 million expended annually to address community and student needs.
The movement has been building for nearly a year.
Dylan Rodriguez, a professor of media and cultural studies at University of California, Riverside, notes that the current anti-policing efforts grew out of a movement led by graduate students and contingent faculty at University of California, Santa Cruz, last fall. “They organized for a Cost of Living Allowance [COLA], and many people on every UC campus supported their living wage campaign. That campaign began with the withholding of fall 2019 grades and became a wildcat strike in the winter 2020 quarter” to demand that the university increase their $2,400 monthly stipend by $1,200.
“Grad students were living in their cars because they could not afford rent,” Rodriguez says. “Some were not eating properly. But the administration at Santa Cruz responded by calling in the local police; cops came in full riot gear, with plastic face shields, as if they were going to war. This ignited people’s rage over policing on campus. You can say that the COLA campaign turned into a police abolition campaign.”
Colleges and university administrators, meanwhile, argue that having a robust police force on every campus is imperative, not only to maintain public safety but to comply with the 1990 Clery Act, which mandates that all colleges that disburse federal financial aid must record and disclose information about crimes that occur on or near campus.
According to the James S. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 75 percent of campuses had armed officers on patrol in 2015, up from 68 percent a decade earlier. But it’s worth noting that patrols are nothing new. Yale University hired New Haven officers to patrol the grounds as early as 1894 to protect buildings from property damage.
While other elite schools quickly followed suit, police ranks remained relatively thin until the 1960s when campus protests escalated and officers were brought in to put down student sit-ins and building takeovers. Still, it was not until 2007, when thirty-two students were murdered on the campus of Virginia Tech, that security began to significantly ramp up.
Although recent statistics are unavailable, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in the 2011-12 school year, 15,000 sworn police officers, 11,000 non-sworn officers, and 5,000 civilians worked in campus law enforcement. Most were authorized to carry firearms, tasers, pepper spray, and tear gas.
More than eight years later, the number of officers is likely similar. In fact, The Atlantic reports that more than 4,000 police departments now patrol public and private campuses across all fifty states.
Activists working to get #copsoffcampus know that they’re fighting an uphill battle, but they nonetheless believe that they will win. “There is momentum on police abolition,” UC professor Rodriguez concludes. “We, as students, faculty, and staff, want to be on the right side of history.”
Graduate students at the University of Michigan want that, too, and say that their strike will last as long as it takes to make headway on their demands.