All of Them Means All of Them: Toward the Total Abolition of Policing

⟵ Back to Table of Contents

The following essay was written by Abolish the UC in October 2020 in response to the Cops Off Campus statewide day of action.

No Cops, No Campus

When we say “Cops Off Campus,” we recognize policing as far more insidious than the literal daily presence of armed police on UC campuses, lurking in classrooms and student living quarters. Policing is a ubiquitous campus administrative practice that pervades our working, learning, and living environment via ICE agents, Student “Hospitality Officers,” Student Judicial Affairs, various unions and their reps, Campus “Freedom of Expression” Teams, Campus Diversity Directors, and even department chairs and deans tasked with reporting students (or having students report on peers) who are undocumented, threatening to strike, supporting striking colleagues, or just painting graffiti on campus buildings…

The UC not only employs campus police forces; it runs programs that feed new recruits into the state and county forces that habitually brutalize and kill Black, brown, and poor people throughout the so-called US. UCI, for example, feeds so many students into the famously corrupt LAPD that the force uses its high percentage of UC graduates as advertisement. UCPDs accept surplus military weapons designed for armed conflict and use them primarily against student protesters — we all remember when UCPD used military-grade pepper spray at close-range on their students protesting tuition hikes — and as recent reports document, just last year, the UCSC secretly made use of the DHS and federal surveillance technology to surveil campus activists, faculty, workers, and staff. The UC’s use of campus cops opens invariably into relationships with state, federal, and international policing and redoubles a climate of racism, targeted violence, and perpetual stress/danger for the most marginalized members of our communities. “Cops Off Campus” means no more University pigs, but it means an end to their auxiliaries, too: an end to policing in all its forms.

This summer, George Floyd’s murder and the uprisings that followed marked a moment when protests over racist police executions turned decisively from calls for justice and charging killer cops into focused demands for the total abolition of police. While city councils and state legislators dialogued and reshuffled their police budgets in an attempt to placate voters, protests have intensified with the realization that federal and state police are not forces that lawmakers will, or are able to, control. Here at the UC, the university has no mandate to employ police forces, and their presence on public campuses is nowhere decreed or required. We don’t need to agree to or accept the normalization of UCPD’s presence on UC campuses and their ever-increasing budgetary allowance. Police presence is an expression of the UC’s investment in white supremacy and racial capitalism. They serve no other role. Policing is the logic of anti-Blackness and the logic of settler colonialism. Policing is the logic of whiteness and property. We cannot study, think, or stop fearing for our safety in a space where the police are welcome. They shouldn’t be welcome; they’re not welcome. They threaten and traumatize the students, teachers, and workers who are everywhere already disproportionately targeted by state violence: Black, brown, Indigenous, trans, and disabled people.

To ask, “what will the UC do with the money currently earmarked for policing if campus police are dissolved?” is concern trolling. Phrased differently, it’s akin to asking “what alternatives exist, or can be created, to continue policing under a different guise?” There are no “alternatives” to policing in this sense. Policing is an incommensurable violence. Yet this question does demonstrate an unsettling truth: the anti-Black, settler colonial, racial capitalist University cannot exist without policing. A real end to campus policing has to include not just an end to the presence of uniformed officers at the UC, but an end to the compulsion to police our communities — an end to the practices and conditions and World that make policing possible. The University itself is one such condition of that World. To truly get cops off campus requires a real commitment to grappling with and letting go of impulses to control and threaten each other: a real commitment to abolition. That includes the abolition of the University as we know it. We’ll figure out a world without police, without policing. Let’s get cops off campus, sure — but also, let’s have no campus and get cops off the whole fuckin planet.