Policing
History: The University of Chicago Police Force (UCPD) was created in the 1960s as a part of the university’s greater role in urban renewal. With roots in the South East Chicago Commission (SECC), created to make the area surrounding the university “more attractive” to families and faculty, the force focused its attention on surveilling the surrounding Black communities. Campus policing is a significant way that the university profits from upholding punitive and carceral conceptions of safety: the university protects its image and property, which in turn make it more attractive to wealthy student-families, at the intentional expense of our Black and Brown community members.
Today: The UCPD is one of the largest private police forces in the United States, and its jurisdiction extends north to 37th Street, south to 64th Street, west to Cottage Grove Avenue, and east to Lake Shore Drive, far beyond the reach of UChicago’s campus. The 65,000 residents of Hyde Park, Woodlawn, and Kenwood, only 20,000 of which are associated with the university, are double-policed by the CPD (Chicago Police Department) and the UCPD, who have the same powers due to the Private College Campus Police Act (1992). Furthermore, the UCPD has openly embraced “broken windows policing,” a strategy which severely punishes minor crimes in hopes of deterring overall crime and has been linked to racial profiling.
Key Incidents: In 2010, an officer placed Mauriece Dawson, a Black student, in a chokehold for allegedly being “rowdy” in the A level of UChicago’s Regenstein library, an area in which students don’t need to restrict their volume. Bystanders didn’t report Dawson’s behavior as anything out of the ordinary, yet UCPD proceeded to arrest him and charge him with trespassing and resisting arrest. In 2018, a UCPD officer shot Charles Soji Thomas, a Black student, in the midst of a mental health crisis. This student was subsequently criminalized and incarcerated in the horrid conditions of Cook County Jail. In 2022, the same officer who shot Soji shot our neighbor Rhysheen Wilson as he was undergoing a mental health crisis–an eerily similar display of how policing harms those already most vulnerable in our communities.
UChicago & the City: UChicago is complicit in upholding the prison industrial complex (PIC) across Chicago–that is, the intersecting interests of government and industry that employ surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to ‘social problems.’ The Crime Lab is UChicago’s privately owned and faculty-run lab that works directly with the CPD and has ties to the Mayor’s office with the proclaimed intention of curbing gun-related violence. The Crime Lab actively helped implement several new technologies in CPD’s policing practices, including Shotspotter: an audio-surveillance system that is meant to detect gunshots and bring police to the scene. The Office of the Inspector General of Illinois (OIG) studied this system and showed that 9 out of 10 times a Shotspotter alert goes off, there is no evidence of a gun-related incident. Moreover, just last year, the University pushed a $3 million dollar plan for increased surveillance through city council.
What you can do: Utilize police alternatives–feel like you want/need to call the police? Due to a lack of true investment in alternatives and virulent copaganda, this may feel like the case. Here is a zine that discusses 12 Things to do Instead of Calling the Cops. Remember that involving the police can have deadly consequences for yourself or your neighbors, and should be avoided at all costs.
Want to join the fight against the PIC?
On-campus, #CareNotCops demands that the University disarms, defunds, disbands, and discloses its private, militarized police force, and invests in existing community care networks and resources for students and communities of color.
Off-campus, #LetUsBreathe Collective is a collective of artists and activists that organizes “artists to love and transform themselves, their families, their communities, and their cities through radical imagination and healing,” Defund CPD is a massive grassroots effort that calls for reallocating policing funds to our communities, and the GoodKids Mad City (GKMC) Peace Book aims to reduce youth incarceration through the restorative justice practices and models for neighborhood-based peace treaties.
