Past faculty member and Senior Associate Dean of Student Affairs Emeritus Berky Nelson has a perception of the Los Angeles Police Department that is tainted by the 44-year-old memory of blood in a Campbell Hall stairwell.
In the aftermath of the 1970 Kent State University shootings, police officers from LAPD were called to the UCLA campus to contain a student demonstration.
Then a faculty member of the history department, Nelson said he recalls some police officers armed with rifles on building roofs and others beating students in their faces until you couldn’t see their eyes.
Though it is unclear why the University of California Police Department was absent from the fray that day, Nelson still wonders who called LAPD onto campus and what justified their actions toward students. Now a senior associate dean emeritus of student affairs, he takes pride in what he considers to be a different, more communicative relationship that student affairs has built with UCPDLA, the UCLA branch of UCPD.
Still, a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education urges universities to disband campus police, speculating that there may be conflicts of interest in how campus police, which are duly sworn peace officers with the same authority as city police, report to university chancellors, rather than directly to the state.
While we should absolutely hold UCPD to the same standards of transparency we would apply to any other police force, UCPD’s entire mission revolves around protecting UC students first. Students can work with the university police to bring about improvements, just as the university police work with campus administrators to capitalize on our campus resources. As part of our university, UCPD is not only more invested in, but also more in touch with our student body than a municipal police force would be, and is worth the benefit of the doubt.
And UCPD does occasionally give us reason for doubt. This past summer, allegations of racial profiling have been made against UCPD, including one by Claudius E. Gaines III, a black UCLA facilities employee who claimed a university police officer racially profiled him in pulling him over for a traffic violation last summer. Another incident involving racial profiling resulted in the university paying a $500,000 settlement to Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David S. Cunningham this July.
But the advantage of having our own campus police agency is that we can place checks on it.
Currently, the undergraduate student government’s Office of the President is collaborating with administrators and UCPD Chief of Police James Harren to establish an oversight committee addressing alleged racial profiling by UCPD. University police departments may be accountable to chancellors by rule, but students can demand they are accountable to us too. In creating this committee, Undergraduate Students Association Council President Devin Murphy proves that we can not just urge reform, as we would with city departments, but directly implement it.
UCPDLA works with our campus administrators, too. UCPD officers at UCLA are in constant contact with Title IX officers, Campus Assault Resources and Education (CARE) and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) members. This intimate and communicative working relationship allows officers to send referrals and effectively use other resources on campus, like CAPS, and ultimately understand what kind of assistance is most important for students, said UCPDLA Captain Manny Garza.
Although UCPD reports to university administrators, there is little justification for concern about political interference. No day-to-day operations, including arrests, need to be cleared by the university, Garza said.
What it comes down to is that UCPD can be made sensitive to our campus in a way that we cannot expect municipal officers to be. For one, our officers are familiar with students – in fact, some UCPDLA officers are UCLA graduates, and other safety programs under the department, like community service officers programs, employ students.
And UCPD really is a connected network: during large-scale and potentially chaotic events such as our quarterly Undie Run, UCPDLA calls upon its brother and sister officers at the other UC campuses for additional security.
Publications may denounce campus police for their lack of transparency to the greater public as a university entity. But the other half of that equation is that students, not just chancellors, become the people responsible for placing checks on these agencies. Murphy’s plan to create the oversight committee is just one way we can work internally with our police departments to better them.
For all the defense UCPD provides for us, we should recognize that their existence is one worth defending, too.