Under any capitalist or fascist regime, the enforcers of that system are the police. In the United States, policing departments regularly administer and protect the state’s monopoly on violence to maintain class and racial hierarchies while assaulting any efforts to disrupt this oppression. Thus, police and prison abolition has always been a fundamental struggle for the American left, especially in Black liberation movements.
While many other organizing demands such as free health care should be imposed immediately, a hallmark of police abolition is incremental policy change, shifting resources from law enforcement institutions to community services. Abolishing private university police, however, need not require much preparation. These groups are explicitly extraneous, elitist and unaccountable to the public.
University police have nearly all the powers of municipal officers, including the authority to make stops, searches, investigate crimes, conduct arrests, enforce local laws and issue traffic citations. While state laws authorize their existence, private campus police departments are not bound to the same contractual and democratic limitations as public departments.
For example, The University of Chicago Police Department, whose jurisdiction extends to include thousands of non-university residents, is not subject to Illinois’s Freedom of Information Act. This makes it nearly impossible for citizens to access arrest or other records that are typically public.
Nearly everywhere they exist, university police forces are not restricted to on-campus activity. In Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Police Department exercises police powers over communities outside the university. This fundamentally erodes the Fourth Amendment, which includes the right to due process, shared liability structures with police and the freedom from forced subjection to private authority. Neighborhoods that never consented to the authority of an elitist private institution are now subject to policing by officers that they cannot easily hold accountable.
Since its creation in 2019, student and community opposition movements have protested the JHPD’s abusive structure. They argued that the police sustain the university’s role as a colonial power which enables systemic racism through land dispossession and gentrification, collaborating with the federally documented racism of the Baltimore Police Department, union busting and suppressing protest.
This abuse extends to Cornell’s own private police force. The Cornell University Police Department assists with stops, searches and traffic control in Ithaca. Officers maintain extensive ties with the Ithaca Police Department, which has a history of brutality against residents. In October 2020, Cornell Student Assembly approved a resolution demanding CUPD cut ties with Ithaca Police after Cornell deployed its officers to violently arrest protesters at a demonstration outside police headquarters.
At the end of last semester, on May 28, CUPD officer Bill Carpenter illegally entered an alumnus and student’s off-campus home without a warrant. Carpenter did not identify himself and barged into the apartment, blatantly violating the Fourth Amendment rights of an individual outside the university.
In addition to off-campus residents, University students would also be safer without private cops patrolling their quads.
For mental health and alcohol or drug related offences, the safety of the student should be a university’s top priority. The presence of police officers, however, dangerously escalates such situations, leading to unnecessary shootings instead of safely administered aid. Rather, non-armed trained medical professionals, such as the Cornell University Emergency Medical Service — should be the ones who respond to such crises. Although good samaritan laws exist, Cornellians have still suffered injury or death because people are still too afraid to call for medical help. Getting rid of on-campus police would alleviate some of that fear and bolster the preeminence of CUEMS.
The fear of disproportionate police escalation is not theoretical. In 2018, a University of Chicago Police Department officer shot a student who was smashing building windows as a result of a severe mental health episode. According to UChicago student Alex Peltz, a friend of the victim, this incident fits into a larger pattern of discrimination against nonwhite Chicago residents, “This happens to people across Chicago — it might have been a student this time, but the UCPD has always been racist. They’ve always been a part of segregation on the South Side, they’ve always been here to do things like fucking shoot people with mental illnesses, and people of color.” One student whose window had been broken, reported that she was more incensed at the shooting of a fellow peer than some minimal property damage.
What this incident proved: private police are not equipped to handle mental health crises. Regardless of the student’s state, no one would have been shot if a medical professional was first on the scene. When armed officers are more dominant than health care workers, it's extremely hard to believe that the University cares about the wellbeing of its students over protecting its property and control.
Inhumane priorities are a common trend amongst private police. The focus of Cornell University Police Department’s enforcement is blatantly obvious when analyzing their responses to sexual assault and hazing versus activism.
When a student was sexually assaulted by several members of the Chi Phi fraternity at their house, Cornell did not automatically suspend any of the individual male perpetrators and only temporarily suspended the fraternity. Hazing violations over the past few academic years have continued despite Cornell’s attempts to increase education and accountability. The most severe repercussions have included simply the temporary or year-long suspension of several fraternities. Remarkably, there have been no individual suspensions.
While these crimes are deplorable, the presence of private cops on campus is not the solution. Until Cornell stops privileging fraternities and the classism and misogyny that most represent, more police will not equate to a safer culture.
On the flip side, CUPD has acted without hesitation when dealing with student protest activity, mainly nonviolent conduct or speech regarding Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
In fact, after Cornell police began arresting protestors who participated in a walkout on the Cornell Pathways to Peace panel hosting Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli Foreign Minister and accused war criminal, Michael Kotlikoff’s chief administrator commented that he had hoped for a greater number of arrests.
Cornell’s priorities are clear: Sexual assault? No big deal. Speaking out against genocide? A grave offense.
Activism on campus has attempted to weaken CUPD’s power. In 2020, the Student Assembly passed Resolution 30, “Calling For the Disarmament of the Cornell University Police Department” and resolved that “supporting data and trends overwhelmingly show that police on college campuses should not have access to lethal weapons as it is unnecessary and proves to increase the likelihood of danger/use of lethal force rather than decrease.”
While disarmament is a vital step towards a more accountable and less problematic police system, only abolition can eliminate the abuses of private police. Law enforcement in general does more harm than good, harassing low-income areas, violently abusing their power and keeping prisons full. Free health care, trained mental health responders and fulfilling the human rights to housing, food and work are all more efficient ways of reducing crime. At Cornell, the oppressive police state that exists nationally is mimicked with a private police that has violated the rights of Ithaca residents, suspended activists so that Cornell can continue its investments in genocide and failed to prevent sexual assault or drug abuse.
The road to police abolition is a long one, with many vital reforms that need to occur first. Abolishing private university police can be done today.
Mina Petrova '29 is a Freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences studying English, History, and Government. Her fortnightly column North Star studies the past and critiques the present, focusing on politics, protests and activism that strive toward a more equitable future. She can be reached at mpetrova@cornellsun.com.
