CA Professor Claims That Campus Police Terrorizes Students And Staff
Dylan Rodriguez who is a professor at UC Riverside in California one of the many students and other administrators who want to defund the police on college campuses.
“[Police] were not there at the founding. It’s not a coincidence that the UC [campus] police that we experience now, that we are terrorized by now, that we bear the scars of now became what it was shortly after the formal abolition of US apartheid, Jim Crow, in the face of university induced de facto segregation and gentrification. That’s when the U.S. police became the militarized police force that is now,” Rodriguez stated.
Rodriguez appreciated that the discussion was allowed to question ‘whether there should be police presence on our campuses’ and thought that now ‘we’re in a historical moment that demands fundamental responses to fundamental problems.’
“The chair of the University of California board of regents admitted that he’s open to considering cuts in the number of police officers on campuses across the university system,” according to Campus Reform.
“The virtual panel was held to discuss whether or not colleges need their own police forces and if so, what kind of changes are needed “so that departments are responsive to the community, and students of color feel safe on campus,” the organization reported.
During the virtual panel, Rodriguez described university police as an artificial “moat” between the campus and the exterior communities.
“It also is critical to understand that the police presence in the U.S. system not only creates this artificial, though very material boundary are almost like a moat, a militarized moat between a public university campus and surrounding poor unhoused criminalized, black and brown working-class communities. Not only does it do that, but the roots of this modern U.S. campus police is in the repression of freedom-seeking, liberation-oriented social movements,” the professor claimed.
Full video from virtual discussion on ‘future of campus policing’
