History of #PoliceFreeCampus
In June 2020, as an addition to the ongoing community efforts for a police-free future, the Scholars for Black Lives collective started #PoliceFreeCampus as a national call to action for colleges and universities to divest from the institution of policing in exchange for improving campus and community safety through investing in humanizing resources and supports to address issues of harm and accountability. The campaign garnered hundreds of signatures on its initial online petition, generated a series of national opinion and scholarly essays, and informed the work of higher education professionals working to reimagine campus safety and security without the presence of law enforcement. Now, #PoliceFreeCampus is moving toward making campus law enforcement and campus safety data more accessible and sharing the stories of campus and community stakeholders on the front lines of the campus abolition movement.
A police-free campus,
a police-free future.
This is our call to action and we want to use data and critical analysis to help make a police-free world possible.
An Abolitionist Research Project
The #PoliceFreeCampus Project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort to understand the historical and contemporary consequences of campus policing as an apparatus of state surveillance, control, domination, and dispossession. The project draws together scholarly and public discourses related to police abolition and situates the active role colleges and universities have played in furthering the carceral continuum. While this is specific to understanding the impact of campus policing on the marginalized communities in which many postsecondary institutions are located, the project is deeply interested in how campus-community organizers collaborate across social, spatial, and symbolic boundaries to reimagine public safety and security in the ongoing fight for police-free futures.