Why has policing of US campus protests gone so wrong?

The harsh response by US universities to the nationwide series of student protests suggests that police reforms intended to reflect the unique circumstances of college campuses have largely failed, as officers have grown over time to identify more with their professional roots than with their institution-specific missions.

Police have arrested 2,500 people, mostly students, participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations over recent weeks at dozens of colleges, despite the protesters largely remaining peaceful and avoiding overt disruption to academic activities.

The US campus arrests look to many experts as largely an overreaction, prompted by a series of factors, including heavy political and donor pressure on university leaders to block student expressions of disagreement with Israeli military attacks that have killed 30,000 civilians in Gaza.

And an important contributor to the US campus violence, experts are concluding, appears to be the dwindling distinction between the police tactics and approaches developed over centuries for controlling general populations and the approaches designed specifically in more recent decades for academic settings.

“Generally, over the last 50 years, campus police have become more and more like municipal police,” said John Sloan, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “They’re training in the same academies, they’re procuring military-grade weapons. And when you copy the model, you get the same result.”

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin who studies police training, saw the same dynamic. “We like to believe that officers are so well trained that they will be able to titrate their violence – that they’ll be able to take care of students who were just expressing themselves,” said Dr Sierra-Arévalo, author of The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing.

“And that is, I think, a naive assumption about what this institution does,” he said, referring to the profession of policing, “and what it’s training its agents to do – police officers are violence workers, this is what they do, and that’s what they will continue to do.”

About two-thirds of larger US colleges and universities – those with 2,500 or more students – have their own campus police departments with armed uniformed officers. The other third have private security personnel, employed either by the institution itself or by private security services.

The campus police departments, Professor Sloan said, appear to have arisen largely from the student-led protests of the 1960s over matters of war and civil rights, where police-student conflicts harmed the participants on both sides. The most infamous such incident was the May 1970 confrontation in which the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students and wounded nine others at Kent State University.

But while many university leaders have been showing a greater willingness to consult with students on controversial matters and even negotiate solutions, Professor Sloan said, members of their police forces have increasingly taken a hardline stance.

Some of the more egregious examples during the current series of protests, experts said, include the police who were called by Columbia University to arrest its students at a largely non-violent campus tent encampment. In the immediate aftermath, a top New York City police official posted on social media his opinion that the encampments were clearly illegal, and that the participants were “organised and well-funded”, before adding: “What is also clear is that our youth are being radicalised and in some cases have been encouraged to escalate their protests into violence.”

On the other side of the country, campus police at the University of California, Los Angeles stood by for at least two hours – despite repeated pleas for help – while pro-Palestinian student demonstrators were attacked by a pro-Israeli group from outside the campus. By comparison, the following night police rapidly took down the pro-Palestinian tent encampment at UCLA and arrested more than 200 people. The University of California system is investigating the matter.

Fundamentally, Professor Sloan noted, the behaviour of police on US campuses is being tolerated and enabled by university leaders who have been frightened by congressional Republicans during tense public hearings where the lawmakers have threatened funding cuts if the institutions don’t harshly punish student dissent.

“Much of this”, he said, “can be traced to a small group of Republican legislators in the House of Representatives who have decided to declare war on higher education in the United States.”

University presidents were warned about the possibilities and dangers of police-amplified violence just a few years ago, Dr Sierra-Arévalo said, when officers battled civil rights protesters after the killing of George Floyd by using some of the same violent tools and tactics now being repeated against the pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Those episodes in 2020 made clear, as had been seen in the past, “that state violence may not be the answer for protests, generally, and often makes it worse”, he said.

For police, Dr Sierra-Arévalo said, putting on a uniform with a university logo doesn’t change much. Either way, he said, the police officers tend to have “incredibly little training when it comes to things like protests”. Because of that, he said, “they are going to devolve to the most base assumptions of their work, and that means that they must protect themselves at all times and at all costs – and that includes if they are confronting students”.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com