Cops by Any Other Name
Posted: September 11th, 2022 | Author: ucdcoc | Filed under: Disorientation Guide '22-'23 | Comments Off on Cops by Any Other Name
Obviously we believe that all University of California campuses need to do away with their police forces. But UCPD doesn’t just include its visible, uniformed officers going round on their ridiculous scooters and golf carts. A bunch of other offices, centers, student trainees, and staff exist belonging to so-called “teams” that do the job of policing even without a uniform. The university pays these groups and their individual members to monitor rallies, marches, strike actions, or campus speaker events that make the UC administration feel threatened. When the admin wishes they could surveil or record protests, meetings, or sponsored speaker events but fear that would look too much like a first amendment violation, they activate these teams and their members to show up and insist that they’re there to help keep students and community safe. This is, of course, a trick. They’re there to do the work of policing; they report either directly (check out the big cell phones reserved for communication with the admin that they’re usually struggling to use as they march behind you or observe from across the street) or indirectly to the UCPD; and they’re absolutely on the clock. Ask us how we know! Anyway, none of these groups are tagging along out of any genuine concern, and they’d never show up if they weren’t either getting paid or compensated through work-study: they’re administrative snitches, and you need to look out for them too.
This is a (non-exhaustive) list of groups either currently active on the UC Davis campus, or who have been identified in the recent past by student-faculty-worker coalitions whom they’ve followed or attempted to infiltrate covertly. They often do this through university procedures that require students — particularly minority and historically underrepresented students — to interact with them in their staff or director positions. This is particularly egregious — these administrators are not just snitches but gross af. We think you’ll see the pattern here, and we trust that this list will help you spot them and recognize their tactics.
Aggie Hosts
If you’ve been to a campus event you’ve certainly seen them: Davis students in black uniforms with gold stars embroidered on the chest and carrying portable radios. These students are part of the Aggie Host Security Officer Program (AHS), and their job is to “support the mission of the UC Davis Police Department.”
Aggie hosts show up to events to do crowd control and “diffuse [sic] disruptive behavior” — aka to police student protests. They also patrol the West Village and other university property, always ready to call the police on student parties, graffiti artists, and our unhoused neighbors. No matter what their purported mission, Aggie Hosts “work directly with police officers” to surveil and criminalize students, faculty, staff, and community members. No wonder UCDPD calls Aggie Hosts “critical members of the UC Davis Police Department.” No wonder so many of them end up becoming real cops when they graduate.
Aggie Host Security is sometimes presented as an alternative to policing, but we know the truth. If you work with the cops, if you report back to them, if you do their job for them, use police equipment and wear a uniform that says UC Davis Police on it, you are not an alternative to the police; you are the police.
If you see these people on campus, you should treat them like you would treat any other cop, even when they aren’t wearing their uniform. Don’t talk to them. Don’t fuck with them. Shun them in your dorms, classrooms, and dining halls. And definitely don’t invite them to parties.
CORE Officer Program
Jumping on a national bandwagon, UC Davis has devised its own contribution to “community policing,” a concept critiqued for its strategic continuation of support for the police and its historic connection to racist and classist enforcement practices like “broken windows” policing. These employees bill themselves as a chill alternative for folks who “do not feel comfortable calling dispatch,” but they work with the police and are the police. They say they “advise on a range of law enforcement issues.” Phrasing it that way makes it sound like they might be giving you legal advice about your rights, but they are not. Why would they create this confusion through their wording, encouraging you to talk freely to them? I think we all know. Similarly, one might wonder why they emphasize that they are plainclothes. They might seem to dress this way to foster a “more inclusive” environment by appearing less aggressive to students than do uniformed cops, but in reality, their civilian duds just make it all the easier for them to surveil unnoticed.
These CORE officers dress up as a cooler, non-menacing version of the police, but we urge you to treat them just like any other cop. Do not tell them anything you wouldn’t say to a uniformed police officer.
Student Expression Coordinators and the Center for Student Involvement
Leaders of registered student organizations will probably recognize this one. Any time you plan a campus event or host a meeting, you have to go through the Center for Student Involvement. They will make sure you’re following all the campus rules, that you registered your event correctly, don’t have too many people, aren’t being disruptive — they might even require you to coordinate with campus police. However, if you’ve ever organized or attended something antagonistic to the university, from a union rally to a protest over police violence, a different and much more sinister part of the CSI will reveal itself.
Every protest, strike, picket line, demonstration, or event that hasn’t requested a permit from the university will be visited by the Student Expression and Campus Activities Coordinator. This person (or maybe two or three people from related offices) will take one of two routes: often, they’ll post up a short distance from your event and monitor you, ready to call for backup on their walkie-talkie if things get out of hand; other times, they’ll walk up to people attending and pretend to be there in support. They’ll claim they just want to make sure everyone is aware of university regulations and that their job is to help you follow those guidelines so campus police don’t have to get involved. We wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we? You should always hear this as the threat it is: their job is to tell you to follow the rules, and if you don’t listen, they’ll call the cops on you in a heartbeat. They’ve also been known to identify people involved in protests or other actions and report them to the administration for student conduct violations, termination of employment, or legal action.
The Student Expression and Campus Activities Coordinator, when they’re not following people around campus like a creepy stalker, is part of the regular functioning of the CSI, helping student groups with room reservations and funding requests. The university makes sure that the Student Expression team is required at major events that vulnerable and often targeted campus groups consider essential to their communities. These administrative snitches see the power and radical potential of these student organizations — groups that fight for freedom in Palestine, for LGBTQ+ rights, for an end to incarceration, and so much more — so they step in to try to neutralize that potential. They get close to these groups, allegedly out of support, but really so they can keep a closer eye on them. You may have to talk to these people if you’re part of a student org, but you should always tell them as little as possible and avoid them at every turn. They are not your friends.
The Student Expression Coordinator job used to be done by Joseph Martinez, who recently moved on to Director of the Cross Cultural Center (more on them in a bit). We aren’t sure who will replace him as the university’s primary hired creep, so keep an eye out for any random staff who show up on the fringes of your meetings and stare.
The Cross Cultural Center and other resources for marginalized students
In 2011, a Public Records Act request revealed that UC Davis had an official bureaucracy dedicated to spying on and sabotaging student movements. The Student Activism Team (later rebranded as Student Affairs Monitors) was formed in 2010 in response to student and worker uprisings over budget cuts and tuition hikes. In the years that followed, SAM worked closely with UCPD to surveil students and workers, calling in the cops or Student Judicial Affairs on anyone who got too disruptive. Even more concerning, this public records request also revealed that staff from the Cross Cultural Center, the LGBT Resource Center, the Women’s Resource and Research Center, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and Native American Studies all actively participated in this surveillance program. These centers and programs where marginalized students were supposed to be supported collaborated with the very people who repressed marginalized people when they spoke up a little too loudly.
UC Davis does not provide enough resources for marginalized students, and what resources are available result from years of student activism. Likewise, Ethnic Studies programs exist only because students and faculty fought for them, and the fight to ensure that these programs are properly funded and staffed is ongoing. The administration is aware of this history of struggle and targets these centers, departments, and programs for infiltration in an attempt to neutralize their radical potential. Places like the Cross Cultural Center, the LGBT Resource Center, and the Women’s Resource and Research Center provide vital spaces for marginalized students and are often instrumental in supporting the work of students, faculty, and staff who are working to make the university a better place. We honor that work, and it is for that reason that we believe these centers of all places should be spaces where students are free from surveillance and policing.
While the Public Records Request mentioned above was from 2011, it is likely that the infiltration of seemingly benign offices by cops and their friends has only gotten more subtle and insidious since 2011. For an example of what this might look like, we can turn to the University of Oregon’s Demonstration and Incident Management Teams. Like UC Davis’s Student Affairs Monitors and Student Expression Coordinator, Oregon’s surveillance apparatuses “compose a sprawling network of informants that cover roughly every non-academic department of the university.” Although the Demonstration Team has existed since at least 2017, in recent years it has updated its tactics to dodge public scrutiny by avoiding public records requests. They’ve succeeded by creating a varied and decentralized hierarchy of communication that involves the campus counsel (aka the university’s lawyer) and the council’s privileged communication with their clients. By embedding the campus counsel within these teams, the university can make a large portion of their activities privileged legal communications and thus unavailable for public records requests or other forms of scrutiny. It is likely that, in the years since the 2011 Public Records Request, UC Davis has modified their own surveillance activities in similar ways.
As the 2011 Public Records Request demonstrates, the harm caused by the Student Affairs Monitors and their ilk goes much deeper than surveillance and infiltration; even more concerning is the university’s insistence on creating intimate ties between the offices meant to support students and those meant to police them. The Center for Student Involvement, detailed in the section above, offers a great example of how these two opposite functions of care and policing get pushed together by the university — even the sacred is profaned. The Office of the President’s new Community Safety Plan, which proposes to combine policing, mental health services, and basic needs into one centralized structure, demonstrates a similar strategy to make policing seem like a necessary part of support. Whether students are seeking mental health treatment or turning to a campus resource center, the university is dead set on involving the police. But we know that it doesn’t have to be this way.
ACAB Means All of Them
We all know not to fuck with cops, but sadly that means more than just avoiding uniformed police officers. There is an entire structure of policing built into the very fabric of this university’s administration. The existence of this extensive network of spies, creeps, infiltrators, and other bootlickers is a helpful lesson in what police reforms do — they don’t reduce the power of the police, but instead deputize students, staff, and faculty to be part of the university’s policing apparatus. So long as cops exist, these so-called alternatives to policing will only ever multiply policing throughout every aspect of our lives; the only option is to get rid of the police altogether.