reprinted submission courtesy of the Arcade Projects
This article first appeared as a submission in the 2023-2024 Disorientation Manual: a student and working-class guide to the Evergreen State College, a compilation zine written and edited over the summer of 2023 and distributed by the Arcade Projects. The following introduction and timeline has been submitted to the student newspaper for the awareness of our community.
For our enrollment headcount of just over 2300 at the start of the 2023 school year, we have four full-time police officers and two private security guards. If these numbers already do not compute for you, let us also take into consideration the 180 students who attend classes at the Tacoma Campus, rather than Olympia, and the unknown amount of students who only attend Evergreen remotely.
As we enter Spring Quarter, Evergreen Police Services has increased foot patrol of CAB Building with particular eye towards the campus bulletin boards, snatching posters they don’t like or hurt their feelings. They —And should you have unfortunate occasion to be stuck on campus until 9pm, you can see the police use their vehicles to play Mario Kart with each other, racing around the roundabout to the parkway.
Love & Solidarity.
The police deserve nothing but your burning hatred. It is not hard to understand why. All the myths that once justified cops as a non-negotiable social necessity have been exposed as bedtime stories for Amerikan barbarity. The sublime horror of this country’s history compounded over the years and combined with our personal experiences have changed the general public’s opinions. Where 75% of this country used to disapprove of MLK’s peaceful protests, now 54% of Americans called the burning of the Minneapolis Third Precinct an act of justice.
Police Services and their rent-a-cop accomplices have full reign of campus. They are armed with AR-15s, purchased security cameras disguised as smoke detectors and electrical outlets, engage in regular patrols across campus, and cooperate with multiple other institutions of state violence such as the Seattle Police Department’s Intelligence Unit and the FBI. You will inevitably encounter the cops at one point or another while at Evergreen and it is vital to understand their history and social function.
The state is an apparatus for the management of class antagonisms, constituted principally by the monopoly on violence exercised by “special bodies of armed men” such as our boys in blue. In Amerika, the principal origins of the police are slave-catchers and strikebreakers. In every other country the police have their own sordid histories which are reproduced in their present barbarism. The practices of brutal defense of the social order mutate internationally, with tactics pioneered in military occupations abroad or by Empire’s client states inevitably being directed inward.
When we talk about the horrors of police, it’s hard to apply that to our bumbling-buffoonish campus Police Services. “You mean the cops who can’t even stop basic bike theft and look like they are about to cry when you don’t smile at them are monsters?” Yes. We do. And that’s what makes the whole farce of American policing so ridiculous: the most organized gang in America is composed of ‘just some guys’.
Evergreen cops treat their job like counterinsurgency. There are obvious historical reasons for that, but another key factor is that they’re literally just bored. We are living in the aftermath of a long history of intensive but ultimately failed struggles which cemented Evergreen’s reputation as a “problem school” and ushered in our current moment of reactionary blowback. What the cops do here first and foremost is control space. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a massive process of neoliberal austerity and enclosure aimed at making Evergreen “normal” in the eyes of capital. While the college has implemented budget cuts every academic year post-2017, the Police Services budget has remained steadily at over a million dollars since at least 2015, with the current budget for Fiscal Year 2024 being $1,135,695.70.
If we look at Evergreen externally, as if it were a city or neighborhood in its own right, the situation is bleak. Workers’ rights are a joke, the budget is in freefall, the drunk bus is gone, we’re in a food desert, and it’s almost impossible to build any kind of community by conventional means. All the rooms we can’t access and things we can’t use invoke the image of foreclosed homes rotting on the outskirts of Detroit. Our class divide is huge. “The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” both the tradition of struggle and the tradition of normalcy and its expectations. The police have evolved from telling kids not to smoke weed to active monitoring of the entire campus in order to impose the end of Evergreen-that-was.
Evergreen exists as a playmobil microcosm of all the contradictions of capitalist society and an omen for every other institution of higher education.
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TIMELINE (ADAPTED, EDITED, AND EXTENDED FROM 17 APRIL 2019 EDITION BY MASON SOTO)
1967 – School is founded with no plans for police or security presence.
1971 – First campus security are hired, plain-clothed student aides and two guards. Phased out by 1981 for trained full-time security officers with a commission from the Sheriff’s commission, sans official policy for a campus police department.
1974 – Security Director resigns after involvement in shortage of campus funds.
1985 – Administration opposes a sworn, armed police force on campus at recommendation of disappearing task force and campus forums.
1989 – TESC sued by Larry Savage thru L&I claiming “unsafe work environment” sans-cops. DTF commissioned by Pres. to assess security after Senate bill targeting Evergreen fails to pressure all public universities into fully-commissioned PDs. Surveys reaffirm not arming police, recommend foot patrols and standard record-keeping.
1990 – L&I sides with Savage, attests unsafe work environment without “full police powers,” Evergreen decides to downgrade security by making them avoid any confrontation and call in Thurston County for backup.
1992 – Year of the Rodney King Uprising in LA. Trustees and admin authorize unarmed campus police force and new security policies following outside recommendation, in the face of hard community opposition.
95-96 – Admin, a task force, and Pres. call to arm police. Community Action Group at Evergreen organizes protests, petitions, and a sit-in that blocked the Library Loop entrance. Sidearms approved by Trustees in 6-1 vote.
96-97 – Campus secretary alleges sexual harassment, which goes unresolved.
98-99 – Officer forced to resign after multiple allegations of pulling gun on campus employees.
2001 – Police acquire tasers.
02-03 – In a span of days, a student is maced and police raid dorms with guns drawn. Forums follow to no consequence. Later, campus police are freed of arming restrictions and carry 24/7 at recommendation of UW Police Chief, then-Pres. Les Purce, and Police Community Review Board.
07-08 – Two intoxicated students tased by police, students of color complain of racial targeting.
2008 – At-time Police Chief Ed Sorger requests rifles, prompting announcement from GSU, presentations by police, and review board forums.
Feb. 2008 – V-Day Uprising/”Dead Prez riot” over alleged police racism results in flipped cop car and police investigation into Evergreen Students for a Democratic Society.
April 2009 – Police Community Review Board rifle survey results withheld from students. VP of Student Affairs Art Constantino stresses liability while Assistant Attorney General admits there is little to no liability to the college. Board rejects rifle proposal.
2011 – Police Awareness and Student Safety (PASS) club founded, busted a year later with a public records request revealing that they sent police services information about students and faculty.
2012 – Police acquire segways? (Why?)
2014 – Public emails and faculty allegations expose campus police and Ed Sorger in particular spying on political groups on campus incl. Port Militarization Resistance activists, collaborating with military spy John Towery. Ed Sorger resigns two years later.
Winter 2017 – Students protest swearing-in ceremony of Police Chief Stacy Brown, with two students prosecuted for taking the mic from VP of Student Affairs Wendy Endress.
May 2017 – After dispute online and a call to police, two black students are taken from their dorms in the middle of the night and detained for hours. Protests over Bret Weinstein and emails also result in alleged use of excessive force by Off. Timothy O’Dell, who is cleared of wrongdoing.
June 2017 – National attention over anti-racist protests culminates in Patriot Prayer provocation, a shooter threat, and campus closure with State Trooper presence. At State Senate hearing on campus safety, Stacy Brown recommends police get rifles.
Aug 2017 – Stacy Brown resigns, Ed Sorger named interim Police Chief. On the 14th, then-Pres. George Bridges approves $11k purchase of AR-15 rifles for Police Services without consulting the Review Board or other campus forums, to no announcement.
17-18 – Supplemental budget request is approved for $150k worth of police funds, including the AR-15s and additional personnel. This was less than initial $393k in Brown’s request, admin suggested cuts could be made elsewhere on campus to make up difference.
May 2018 – Last meeting of Police Community Review Board, which has ceased to function since.
Summer 2018 – Evergreen cuts 20 staff positions as part of $5.9mil budget cut. Stacy Brown makes $625k damages claim against Evergreen, alleging hostile working environment. Status currently unknown.
Fall 2018 – CPJ reports rifle purchase, IWW launches “Profs Not Cops” campaign in response to AR-15s and proposals for more cops, proposing new faculty be hired instead. Demonstration drew crowd of ~100, who marched on the President’s office in the largest post-2017 campus protest.
Oct. 2018 – Police purchase covert surveillance cameras, citing recent thefts. No boards or forums are consulted. CPJ later exposes and denounces surveillance in April 2019.
Feb. 2019 – After phone zap and second protest, campus IWW declares “victory” as admin “appear[ed]” to fill their demands, with vacated police positions not being filled and new positions reportedly opened in Political Economy and Community Media. AR-15s remain.
May 2019 – Ed Sorger ends term as Interim Police Chief, David Brunckhurst instated.
Feb. 2020 – George Bridges announces resignation as President and is replaced by former VP of Finance and Operations John Carmichael after 2020-21 academic year.
Summer 2020 – Admin makes $5.3mil in budget cuts. Students organize protest of ~30 in solidarity with George Floyd Uprising, with cops watching and heckling students. Undercover police presence alleged.
Aug. 2021 – Former CPJ News Editor Daniel Vogel files lawsuit against Evergreen alleging obstruction of access to public records related to police surveillance and possible violations of the college’s Patriot Act Policy among other records which “would be embarrassing or inconvenient for the school.” Litigation status unknown at time of writing.
2022 – Admin approves outside security contract through Kaeka Group to supplement police presence.
March 2023 – Fred Hampton Brigade organizes “Stop Cop City! Cops Off Campus!” rally and march of ~30 as part of National Day of Action Against Police Terror. Police Services photograph and repeatedly remove protest fliers and agitational artwork and forward information to multiple other campus PDs, Seattle PD Intelligence Unit, UW Police’s FBI Liaison, and the Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force. Internal communications state that the situation was being “closely monitored.”
