Dizon and Davis Publish Practice Brief in Journal of Diversity in Higher Education

Abstract

Over the last 60 years, campus police departments have been established as the main form of security and safety in colleges and universities. In recent years, higher education leaders have been forced to confront the negative impact of police presence on Black and racially minoritized campus populations. Following the insights of student activists and abolitionist movements, we argue that the nature of campus policing has been misunderstood and misrepresented, consequently obscuring the inherent racist violence that policing generates. We propose that higher education leaders and policymakers take seriously contemporary calls to defund and abolish campus police in order to craft safer and more empowering campus environments for minoritized populations on campus and in surrounding communities. We synthesize the demands of social movement organizations and work by scholar–activists to outline eight steps to campus police abolition, which provide concrete humanizing, transformative alternatives to the current system of punishment, surveillance, and control.