Against Task Forces

Posted: September 1st, 2022 | Author: ucdcoc | Filed under: Disorientation Guide '22-'23 | Comments Off on Against Task Forces

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A statement by UCFTP, a statewide Cops Off Campus network in California. First published in 2020.

 

Aware of community-based resistance to anti-Black police violence, University of California Chancellors are convening task forces to reform UCPD into a kinder, gentler, more equal domination machine. But task forces do not make policing better. Task forces allow universities to preserve and protect the violent institution of policing. We advocate a position of refusal. Declining to serve on task forces obstructs administrative efforts to continue supporting campus police forces. Declining recognizes and exposes task forces for what they are.

We are living through the repeated failures of task forces. UC has implemented systemwide policing task forces in 2012, 2013, 2018, 2019, and that’s just this decade. The UCPD of today continues to harass, violate, intimidate, and criminalize members of the UC community, particularly its most marginalized, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, undocumented, proletarian students and workers. This UCPD is the outcome of task forces. Like prisons, policing (as we know it now) is not forged by reforms that preserve its fundamental structures and goals.

At a national level, we have also seen a wealth of task forces, most famously the Obama “My Brother’s Keeper” task force on policing (2014). Its marquee example was…the Minneapolis Police Force, which developed the so-called “MPD 2.0” plan that resembles in every way the current proposals. We are simply repeating that failure now. It was a massive failure long in advance of the MPD murder of George Floyd. Task forces are permission to keep killing.

Reform imagines some decent idea of policing from which we have strayed. This never existed. Task forces offer a fantasy that policing has simply deviated from some noble mission of ensuring public safety. That, however, was never its mission. Born of race and class domination, US policing first emerged in the South from slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves; in the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped squash labor strikes and riots against the rich. The long history of UC police repression of campus political dissent and freedom of expression reflects what all police do everywhere.  The policing that we all reject is just the police force enacting its core functions.

Task forces encourage spending more money on policing, not less. Witness the long history of investing in task forces even as dangerous and racialized policing persists. Or the pernicious idea that more equipment, more technology, more training, more cops will somehow change the basic nature of policing. There’s a lot of money in this but no accompanying evidence. Task forces are a deadly grift.

Reforms preserve the status quo. By refusing to consider national and international calls by activists and organizers to defund and abolish the police, efforts to “reform” UC police departments will preserve a status quo that continues to threaten the safety of UC students and workers, particularly Black, Latinx, and Native members of the UC community historically targeted by police. 

Police, by and large, do not respond to “violent crime.” The average US metropolitan police force devotes just 4% of its time to so-called violent crime. And this represents total time, not crimes solved. The average police officer makes between one and two felony arrests per year. 

Policing has no place in the university. Campus police forces are globally rare. Most educational spaces in other countries do not have them. No police, no task forces — ever. These campuses do not show evidence of greater crime, violent or otherwise. There is nothing natural, commonsensical, or safe about campus police.

Finally, incremental reform obstructs transformative justice. Race-related task forces, studies, and other reformist measures are instruments to prevent change and preserve the racial subordination that police violence enables. Task forces are not the way toward transformative justice.

 

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