Opinion: Merced group wants alternatives to campus police amid excessive force complaints

We are writing as a collective of Merced community members, University of California Merced faculty, students, and staff, in coalition with Merced POC group, Central Valley Mutual Aid, 99Rootz, and We’Ced working towards abolition.

This #AbolitionMay we joined all other California State and University of California campuses, and individuals and groups across North America to get cops off campus.

Abolition is not simply an unrealistic call to abolish the police. It is as much about creating than about dismantling. Project NIA explains police abolition as “a process of reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.” We want police removed from all educational spaces.

We must acknowledge that policing disproportionately violates Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, poor peoples, immigrants, and refugees and ultimately renders everyone else in the community as being less safe. U.S. Police have killed more than 1,000 people per year for the last five years, and Black Americans are 2.5% more likely to die than white people.

As Dylan Rodriguez suggests, we should not think of individual incidents of police brutality, excessive force, or even homicide as merely blights of an imperfect yet noble social contract. Policing — like slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the prison industrial complex, and other forms of structural oppression — was born from white supremacist logic. And these racist structures have been core to America’s foundation and function.

Campus police were created to supposedly be a kinder, cooler type of police department. But, campus police still racially profile, threaten, and enact violence against students. Past murders and shootings by other campus police departments in the United States include Univ. of Cincinnati 2015, Georgia Tech 2017, Portland State 2018, Univ. of Chicago 2018, and Yale 2019. The Univ. of California Police Departments are no exception. There are over 200 reported incidents of use-of-force by UC police departments.

UC Merced Police are culpable too. There have been numerous complaints by Black and Brown students, faculty, and others against UCM PD. In 2015, UCM PD killed Faisal Mohammad. Faisal attacked and stabbed others, but he did not need to die; he needed help. The campus community understood the value of his life when it held a massive vigil for Faisal.

People might ask, “Why not reform the police?” Our rebuttal is that large-scale reforms were “enacted” after Watts, Rodney King, and Ferguson. But we are still seeing the daily harms of policing.

There are four agencies in Merced alone — Merced PD, Merced County Sheriff’s Office, Merced College PD, and UC Merced PD — which has led to the hyperpolicing of Merced residents. There is a police officer assigned to every Merced primary school and two assigned to every Merced High School.

We want all cops off all campuses because police do not make students, staff, and teachers safer.

What makes us safer? Access to healthy food, affordable housing, free education, free health care, mental health services, mutual aid, violence prevention, safe ride transportation, restorative justice, etc.

We have to re-imagine what safety can and should be.