Photo: The Internationalist
by Alice McIntyre
The Cooper Point Journal has, over the course of several years, documented struggles against police violence in our community on and off campus. It has documented police surveillance of students and made the public aware of the increasing militarization of Police Services at Evergreen, which it has openly rejected. The Cooper Point Journal has also consistently been a platform for students to express their own perspectives criticizing the presence of police on our campus.
In the context of nationwide upheaval against the plague of racist police terror in this country, and on the basis of our written record on the subject, I find it necessary to speak politically. Police Services should not be “reformed,” Police Services should not be switched out for “Campus Security,” they need to go. My position is clear: Cops Off Campus!
The police do not “protect and serve” us, they are the armed fist of the ruling class that maintain the rule of a privileged few through implicit and explicit violence. Scholars such as Sam Mitrani, Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage and author of “The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894,” have made it clear through their research that the police have two distinct points of origin: slave-catchers and strikebreakers. An institution whose whole history is defending systems of oppression by force has no place in our learning community.
That history isn’t distant. In May of 2017, two black Evergreen students were taken out of their dorms for questioning at nearly midnight over Facebook comments. And it’s not just Evergreen. In June of 2018, Portland State University campus police shot and killed black postal worker Jason Washington. On Sept. 14 of this year, at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX, armed police burst into the dorm of 17 year-old Christin Evans at 3 a.m. due to complaints from students (including her three white roommates) that she had “threatened” them. The accusations were soon shown to be a fabrication. Gun-toting enforcers of “law and order” are an active threat to the safety of students and the wider community.
This was demonstrated dramatically when in February, University of California police beat and dragged UC Santa Cruz grad student workers during a wildcat strike. The strikers, who were demanding a cost-of-living adjustment to offset skyrocketing rents, were not a “security threat,” they didn’t endanger students, in fact they were students. That is the function of the police. It has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with protecting the capitalist class.
Opponents of Police Services should have no confidence in the campus administration or the Board of Trustees to kick the cops out, and the student body by itself can’t drive them out on our own. To carry out this task, it’s necessary to mobilize student-teacher-worker power. Unions and campus organizations must act jointly and decisively in a militant campaign for a cop-free Evergreen.
