By Aster Hall
TESC’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) surrounding the Evergreen Gaza Solidarity Encampment (EGSE) included creating a Disappearing Task Force (DTF) called Civilian Oversight of Police Services. The description for this DTF states: “Police agencies… should be accountable to civilian (i.e., non-police) authorities and ultimately accountable to the people that police agencies serve. An effective system of civilian oversight provides for accountability, protects civil rights, and ultimately can help build community trust in its police agency. Without an effective system of civilian oversight, a police agency loses democratic legitimacy.”
This begs the question, is it our goal truly to create trust between the Evergreen Police and students, on-campus employees, and residents? Or is that factor irrelevant, and civilian oversight should simply be a given regarding an agency paid for by students? The police are trained to not trust you. It is safe to say that the move toward creating civilian oversight is necessary.
The job for each of the DTFs is to make recommendations to the college, worded specifically so as to be upheld legally, and in this case it is to create this aforementioned system of civilian oversight. Additionally, “among those recommendations will include updates to the Police Services Standard Operating Procedures to include the role of the Police Services Community Review Board [PSCRB]”, which has not met since 2018. “That board had a dual mission: to improve relationships between campus police and the community and to provide a system for receiving and considering complaints.” When the board last met, I remember a lot of discussion about the tension between these two missions. The goal of this DTF states its purpose as either revising and reconstituting this board, or creating something better.
These recommendations had originally been due by the end of this Winter quarter, however the due date has been extended to the beginning of May in 2025. The MOU signed states that the civilian oversight system is to be implemented no later than Fall 2025, and with full implementation by Fall 2026. This DTF consists of three student representatives appointed by the GSU, currently one faculty, Eirik Steinhoff (though it’s supposed to be two) appointed by the Faculty Agenda Committee, “additional staff appointed by the President”, as well as the chair, Joni Upman.
An anonymous task force member agreed to talk with me to let the Evergreen community know which direction this DTF is going.
Anonymous: “If like tomorrow, everybody on the board is like ‘okay, our recommendation is no cops on campus, no security services whatsoever, it’s all done.’ The board of directors is gonna see that and say ‘Mm, no.’ Even if they were like, ‘okay, this is a great idea.’ There’s legally binding contract agreements with the union, there’s state requirements that are completely outside of the school’s control.”
CPJ: “That they have to have police on campus, kind of thing?”
Anonymous: “Mhm. And at least, it might not be formally said, but they will receive pressure, and they’ve received pressure in the past for, like the AR-15 purchases. A lot of that was pressure from the state. And also, it used to be that cops were only allowed to carry handguns, and they were only allowed to carry handguns from something like 9am-5pm. And then what happened is like, I think, the union basically said, y’know ‘this is illegal.’ And then they talked to L&I. (Labor and Industry) […] let’s say we get past the fact that’s not in our scope, and the fact the board of directors isn’t gonna be like ‘Sure!’ and the fact that there’s not all these bargaining agreements between the unions and the school and the state legislature, which most of our funding relies on, and whatever else. So you just get rid of it, there’s no cops on campus. Anytime anyone around here calls the police, the state patrol comes in now. And now you’re having state patrol coming and effectively being the law enforcement on campus. And you can’t stop people from calling the cops. So until the broader system is dealt with, I don’t wanna bring state patrol onto campus. So it’s a hard position to be in.”
Anonymous: “In terms of the past board that was here, it was super unofficial. They didn’t have much of a structure. Honestly, a lot of what it seemed to be was, ‘oh yeah, anytime that there’s a bad event that happens on campus, the board will meet in some town hall with like no prior information almost,’ or with very little prior information and the entire community, and the police are there, like, you have your two hour meeting and that’s it. And it’s like, what do you think that looks like? It’s people yelling at the cops, which is fine if you just wanna create a space to come yell at cops, but you’re not gonna be able to work a policy out, to have that structure of a board with teeth who’s gonna be able to both connect with community and give them access to what’s going on, give them a place to get all the right information. Try and get community feedback, make people feel safe, have an avenue to submit complaints that are formally responded to and researched. And they didn’t really seem to have that.”
CPJ: “I know you’re working hard to figure out a very specific answer to this question, but I’m wondering how you visualize cops on campus and police accountability.”
Anonymous: “We’re still in preliminary phases and I don’t know if everybody is gonna agree, I have an idea of what I think policing should look like on campus. Y’know ideally, there needs to be a robust community oversight board that has faculty and students on it, the students are trained and paid for their time. That is meeting weekly, whether or not an event is happening to both review policy, do all of these things, plan, suggest reforms, look at arrests, traffic stops, whatever data. And having a quarterly event where it’s like, this is what we’re doing, this is what we worked on, and also, there needs to be a method of having some teeth. I mean, that’s ideal. Or like, what kind of oversight is there? This is how a lot of pretty good models have failed, they don’t have enough oversight power. And that’s really hard to get and design. It’s really hard. I don’t even know what that could look like yet. But also, there needs to be transparency within the entire process. And there also needs to be a degree of separation enough. Some of these people are gonna be working with people’s very personal information. So there also has to be that degree of separation, but there has to be transparency about the whole process, as much as possible.”
CPJ: “Yeah, how do you balance that?”
Anonymous: “I think it has to be like, ‘there was an event on campus that we’re not allowed to talk about but we’re responding to it, we’re doing a preliminary investigation,’ bla bla bla bla bla, you can’t say any details but you do have to say you know about it, you do have to make that public announcement and then also explain your findings while respecting that. And all of that is really hard to do, so I think there needs to be training before the year and there needs to be onboarding, and offboarding. I guess I view it as a real structure that has to stay. Because sometimes people at Evergreen, they stop caring about stuff, they stop paying attention, and I want this to be an official thing that stays.”
CPJ: “Are there any models that you’ve found or looked at that seem like they’re doing a really good job?”
Anonymous: “I’ve looked at a lot. We’re still in a very preliminary stage. I’m speaking mostly on behalf of myself and what I’ve seen in the process so far. Let’s see…” The models Anonymous later shared with me are the City of Phoenix’s, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and Michigan State. “The basic structure of the board is like pretty similar throughout all the schools, really what changes is what they’re able to suggest, who’s allowed to be on the board, what capacity they’re allowed to be on the board, and if you feel you’ve been wronged or harmed, what that process looks like. And we’re gonna be looking at municipal models in the future, we haven’t super gotten into that yet.”
CPJ: “Municipal as in, versus university?”
Anonymous: “Just to make sure we’re not missing anything, because it is unique. It’s a state school, so we have to deal with state stuff. But there’s also people in the community who are policed by our police, and stuff, so it’s kind of this unique system, and the way it’s formatted, the hierarchy, who’s in charge, who does the chief of police answer to, all of this stuff is different from a municipality so we do have to look at school systems, but also take into account well maybe municipalities have more teeth, but they’re also allowed to make their own laws because they’re like a town that can make ordinances, or whatever else. In some ways there’s a possibility [they have more leeway over their police than we might].”
CPJ: “So it’s smaller, so like there’s more room for change versus trying to change the entire Washington state union laws around public institutions and their police forces.”
The following portion of our conversation is in reference to the MOU stating that “the President’s office will support members of the committee who wish to attend the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement’s annual meeting in Tucson, Arizona on October 13-17.”
Anonymous: “It was an oversight on the encampment to not have a specific date that [the DTF’s] started. I’m not even saying [admin] is doing it in bad faith, they’ve had a hard time staffing, part of it is faculty, to the DTF’s… Part of the agreement was that everyone was gonna be staffed to the DTF and then sent on the community police oversight meetup in Arizona.”
CPJ: “Oh, in October right?”
Anonymous: “Yeah, that never happened, it was never really talked about or whatever, and so, both would have been really helpful in terms of crafting our [civilian oversight system.] Knowing how other people have set their systems up and what issues they’re running into, and then what fixes they wanted to incorporate from the beginning, would have been like– now we’re gonna have to figure all of that out through the process. And there’s gonna be stuff we’re gonna miss. That is really frustrating. They effectively failed to follow through on that MOU. But with that, we kind of assumed, it will start in the fall, we’ll have six or seven months to do the contract.”
CPJ: “It would have been great to have some kind of public pressure, to make sure that happens, regarding administration.”
Anonymous: “I contacted the people that I could about that, but yeah I think a lot of energy dropped out after. ‘I need some community support,” and everybody was busy, everybody’s doing stuff and that’s fine, but these are things we need to get done.”
CPJ: “If they’re been people picketing like, ‘you better send people to this conference!’”
Anonymous: “It would have been probably just me” *laughs* “I don’t even think we were staffed at that point.”
CPJ: “Under the description of this DTF, it is stated that you must consider the following: What budget or other resources are necessary to implement your recommendations, keeping in mind that resources are limited? I’m curious if there is a way to defund the Evergreen Police for the purpose of funding this civilian oversight system.”
Anonymous: “That’s a great question. I think part of that is in the community bargaining agreement with the police union and the school. And so, um, do I think it’s possible? Yes. Would that mean in the next bargaining agreement they’re saying ‘we’re cutting your wages or we’re firing an officer,’ y’know whatever else, it would have to be something like that, I think. I haven’t looked at the exact stuff. It’s really easy to be like, don’t buy this piece of equipment or whatever, but if the thing in the bargaining, ‘well they have to have this bulletproof vest, or this thing or that thing,’ y’know, there’s just nothing we [as the DTF] can do about it. Again, if there was any amount of popular pressure to what level popular pressure is able to do something about these broader structural issues, I’m there for it, I’ll be there, I’ll help, and I believe in it. And also, I don’t really see that happening. But if there’s a consistent interest in this board, and if it’s coupled, if we create this infrastructure and it doesn’t just fall into rubble immediately, and there’s people coming on and it has stable funding, and there’s students getting paid to do it, and they’re getting trained, and sent to this thing or that thing, and understand it. It’s gonna both educate people on how to do reformism in the school system, basically, which you have to know a bunch of shit to actually be able to do, and hopefully be able to engage with the broader community and say, ‘this is an issue that we’re running into with the cops, we need your support on this, we’re trying to make this policy come through, we’re giving them this policy recommendation, they need to listen to us.’ They have the education to understand how to make that reform and also have the support of that, I could see that happening in the future. But right now, there’s no bargaining unit, there’s no wedge, there’s no massive popular mobilization, and there’s a pretty entrenched structural issue. But I wish it was that simple because that’s what I would do. I would say, one less cop car, one less cop.”
CPJ: “That makes total sense, you need that infrastructure and resources for people to be able to research this kind of stuff, lobby for this kind of stuff, etc, etc.”
Anonymous: “I hope that we can make it so it’s also an opportunity for students to go into the world and be able to use this. Short of burning it all down, if you’re just trying to get a goal or a thing through, you have to understand this community bargaining, these contract agreements, and unions, state law, general police politics, and police pressure, and all of these things, and so hopefully it’ll be a resource to navigate that and expand.”
CPJ: “Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I totally understand the argument of like, “I dunno, I think reformism and abolition are put on two separate ends of a spectrum, but I do feel like the organization that comes with reformism can build up into bigger movement and structural change and abolition, and stuff like that.”
