Part 3: BUPD is not “soft” policing
In response to my survey of 36 Boston University students regarding their experiences with the BU Police Department, many non-Black students replied that they were more comfortable with campus police than municipal police because they were designed to deal with students, and thus meant to be more lenient.
Former BUPD Chief Thomas Robbins published an op-ed in BU Today in 2015 claiming BUPD shouldn’t be abolished and that campus police are shining examples of community policing.
“University police must work within the framework of the university environment to ensure a safe, secure campus for students to flourish,” Robbins wrote. “To take the university police off-campus and merge them into an agency of jurisdiction would greatly diminish the effective community policing model that colleges and universities currently have.”
Some may look at the BUPD, and see a “softer” form of policing — one entirely structured around the community they serve. Mia Cathell, a senior in the College of Communication, one of two respondents who did not ask to remain anonymous, reiterated the response of many non-Black students, writing that the department “is designed to rapidly respond to campus-based and college-oriented issues.”
“BUPD might have more empathy towards underage drinking and the punishment is mitigated by administrative policy,” Cathell wrote. “BUPD is in place to protect young adults and their shenanigans from the full force of the law. Be grateful you’re sitting in front of the Dean instead of behind bars, booked overnight.”
The idea that BUPD is magically exempt from all the bad that municipal police officers unleash into the world simply because they are privately employed by a university, however, is emphatically false.
As a side note — the level of cognitive dissonance people exhibit when it comes to campus policing gives me migraines. Most non-Black survey responders rigidly refused to acknowledge the racism ingrained within the carceral state and policing as a whole, and yet they were able to recognize that campus police officers who serve a campus mainly populated by middle- to upper-middle-class white people are supposed to be inherently “nicer.”
First of all, campus police are not regulated by the same transparency or accountability protections as regular police (as mentioned in Part 2 of this series). This lack of rules for campus policing makes them more dangerous and less transparent than a regular police force.
Campus police are not accountable to the public, or the government — as a private security force, they are meant to serve the administration. Cathell indirectly highlighted this very issue herself in her response: the Dean is the one in charge here.
The University’s police force is serving its administrators, not its students.
In his op-ed, Robbins claimed that the fact that BUPD directly answers to University administrators — and not to the public — were simply “potential” (and not inherent) areas of conflict that could be simply “remedied by ethical police practices.”
But that’s not how the world works. We can’t just sit back and trust that officers who have the power to utilize force against students will behave ethically. If municipal police officers are currently behaving heinously with these regulations and protections in place, what is keeping campus police officers, who are not even constrained by these same regulations, from doing the same?
I don’t care if I end up sitting in a jail cell instead of the Dean’s office. The point of the matter is: why was I arrested or apprehended by campus police in the first place?
Why is a fully armed police force best equipped to deal with a campus whose main “criminal activities” are intoxicated young adults and lost bicycles?
Even if we were a campus embroiled in non-stop violence, evidence supporting the idea that police officers or the threat of punishment are stable deterrents of crime is conflicting, if not minimal.
My point is this: there is no reason why we need to buy into the fantasy that police officers ensure public safety. Despite all the glib promises of community and ethical policing, BUPD is nonetheless a police force, trained at the same academy as regular police officers, and armed with the same kinds of guns.
Second of all, campus officers work hand-in-hand with municipal police forces. They are the Spidermen in that meme.
The policing power of campus officers has increased significantly in recent years, both on- and off- campus. According to an analysis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of data from the 2011-2012 school year, more than 70 percent of campus police agencies had jurisdiction over areas off-campus.
This includes BU, whose 2019 Police Safety on Campus report states that “all Boston University police officers are empowered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to enforce criminal laws and to make arrests, not only on the campus grounds but also in the areas surrounding the University. They also hold appointments as deputy sheriffs of Suffolk County, Middlesex County, and Norfolk County.”
BUPD, and other universities’ campus police agencies, are allowed jurisdiction off-campus due to “mutual aid agreements” with state and local police departments.
BUPD has these agreements with police departments of Boston, Brookline and Cambridge, as well as that of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, county sheriffs, state police and other universities as appropriate, according to BU’s safety report.
These mutual aid agreements reveal the extent to which municipal police forces and campus police departments are enmeshed in the same violent system.
BUPD does not hide its associations with the Boston Police Department. In fact, the safety report states with pride that the BUPD has received “formal recognition from the Boston Police Commissioner.”
Why on Earth would you want praise from a police force that is widely known for its brutality against Black Bostonians?
Data collected by the BPD shows 70 percent of individuals the BPD stopped in last year’s “Field Interrogation and Observation” program were Black, “even though black residents comprise less than one quarter of the city’s population,” WGBH reported in June.
This, incidentally, is identical to racial profiling data from 2002 that showed that out of 10 students stopped by BUPD, seven were Black.
Black Lives Matter protests in May and June were met with police violence and tear gas. BPD officers cornered protestors in small areas to prevent them leaving — thus forcing them to break curfew — and sprayed them with tear gas and pepper spray. Video evidence shows BPD police cruisers come close to running people over, as well as police violently shoving and hitting people with their batons.
BPD has refused to release body camera footage of these incidents, as of June 9.
If the BUPD was truly this oasis of community policing they claim to be, they should have cut all of their ties with the BPD by now and actually have done something to protect their students from police harassment and violence. But they didn’t — because both police departments are built on the same racist structures.
College of Arts and Sciences graduate Jailyn Gladney wrote an article for The Nation in 2015 about how her boyfriend, who is Black, was racially profiled by BPD cops on campus. A cop car followed him as he walked through Allston to a supermarket just outside of campus.
“When he stepped out of the market, two Boston police officers were outside waiting for him.
One of the officers asked him what he was up to, where he was from and where he was going. He told them that he’d just come from the Chinese place up the street and that he was a BU student who lived about a mile away in on-campus housing. They didn’t believe him and asked to see his identification. As he reached into his pocket to grab his student identification card, he saw another cruiser roll up while the second officer watched him in silence with one hand on his gun holster. As the first officer scanned the ID, he explained to my boyfriend that they’d stopped him because he’d supposedly been looking over his shoulder into parked cars—something they said that thieves usually do before stealing them—and told him that he shouldn’t look so suspicious walking down the street late at night.
My boyfriend later told me that the reason he kept looking over his shoulder was because a cop car was slowly driving the wrong direction up a major thoroughfare without its lights or siren on.”
The presence of campus police does not prevent students from having to deal with regular law enforcement. Any cursory look at the crime logs will show you that municipal police departments regularly interact and deal with student issues on campus. Campus police just offer another way for students of color, specifically Black students, to get harassed.
Third of all, there are no sufficient measures in place to ensure corrupt BUPD officers are fired. Police unions have been linked to increased rates of police brutality, as they fiercely protect officers from receiving any serious consequences for their abuse of power.
Boston University’s 2015-2020 agreement with the Boston University Police Patrolmen’s Association protects police officers from substantial punishment for misconduct.
Article 7 on Discipline dictates that officers “may be subjected to disciplinary action for just cause, such as, but not limited to, matters of insubordination, poor attendance, and poor job performance.”
Does police brutality fall under job performance? It most likely does, but it is jarring to see police brutality and the possible murder of civilians to be listed under “poor job performance.”
The agreement states that “the University may not consider prior discipline, up to and including a five (5) day suspension, as a basis for subsequent, progressive, disciplinary action if more than three (3) years have elapsed since the discipline was imposed.”
Disciplinary actions include discharge, unpaid suspension, demotion or written reprimand, according to the agreement.
These sorts of protections keep corrupt cops from receiving any form of real consequence for their repeated actions.
Any argument that the BUPD is better than municipal police departments because they are not represented by police unions is ludicrous.
The National Fraternal Order of Police President Chuck Canterbury told The American Prospect in 2015 that the mission of campus police is “no different than any police agency, and that is to preserve peace and protect the lives of their citizens.” He said he “encourage[s]” schools to properly equip their forces, and that it is “a shame” that officers are unarmed.
Campus police are just like municipal police, except even less transparent and even less accountable to the public. They are not magically exempt from the systemic corruption of normal police simply because they work for a university.
To put it plainly, campus police are not a “soft” form of policing because “soft” forms of policing don’t exist. Policing as an institution was created to preserve slavery. Campus policing was normalized during the 1960s to suppress student activism. Once you decide on throwing armed officers at any issue that comes your way, you forfeit any chance at achieving real community safety.
As activist Mariame Kaba wrote in a New York Times opinion piece, “a ‘safe’ world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.”
