#CareNotCops

The #CareNotCops campaign began in 2018 in response to the shooting of then-fourth-year student Charles Soji Thomas by the UCPD while he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Understanding the violence Charles faced as part of a larger, systemic problem, our goal has always been to abolish our campus police force. #CNC is committed to building alternatives to police and educating the UChicago community on the impact of the University in Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Washington Park, Kenwood, and other surrounding neighborhoods. We advocate for better mental health resources, particularly for students of color that are made accessible not only to students, but to the community. We advocate for the redirecting of funds from policing to genuine services to the community such as mental health services.

#CareNotCops worked alongside UCUnited’s #EthnicStudiesNow & #CulturalCentersNow past campaigns to manifest our vision for the campus. We demand that the University divest from policing and invest in supporting students and communities of color. We are not only organizing against University policing; we use our organizing to actively foster a shift in the ways that we relate to each other— we know that as of now the university isolates us, pits us against each other, and depletes us of the capacity to organize together and create community. While the university promotes an endless grind of work to obtain theoretical knowledge, we center lived experiences and working in community with others. Holding the right politics is not enough. We can’t work towards systemic change if we fail to engage with the world.

In pursuit of this, we are continuing to foster partnerships with community organizations throughout the South Side including GoodKids MadCity, Assata’s Daughters, and the #LetUsBreathe Collective. We acknowledge the privileged position we are in as a group primarily made up of University students, and we want to center the perspectives and experiences of those most impacted by police violence in the work that we do. We will continue to facilitate community meetings and partnerships in order to inform and critique the work that we do. 

Our 4Demands

1. We demand that the University immediately defund the UCPD by reducing its budget by 50 percent and redistribute these funds to community-driven South Side projects and organizations that are committed to building networks of support that work to render police obsolete. Understanding the expansion of the UCPD as intertwined with the University’s project of gentrification and displacement, we call for the University to never again acquire property on the South Side, and to restrict UCPD jurisdiction to the main campus. 

2. We demand that the University disarm the UCPD. This means the removal of all weapons, including guns, tasers, mace, and tear gas. UCPD’s protocols rely largely on individual officers’ discretion, and we have seen this open-ended policy lead to excessive force wielded disproportionately against Black individuals time and time again. Regardless of whether UCPD procedures are made more explicit, it is clear that any weapon in the hands of police is a threat to Black students and community members.

3. We demand that the University disclose the budget for the UCPD and other Safety & Security measures for the past 20 years, and every year following. Because the UCPD is a private police force, the public is unable to request official records through the Freedom of Information Act. The University thereby utilizes a blatant lack of transparency to prevent public access to complaints against UCPD officers, the UCPD budget, and the exact size and capacity of their force.

4. We demand that UChicago fully disband the UCPD by 2022. While the above demands are immediate steps to reducing the harm that the UCPD inflicts, we want to be clear that these are intermediate steps on the path to full abolition. The violent acts committed by the UCPD—especially against our students of color and our neighbors in Woodlawn and Hyde Park—will continue until UCPD ceases to exist.

Cops Off Campus Coalition

Starting in mid-2020, #CareNotCops came together with a number of other abolitionist campus organizations to form the Cops Off Campus Coalition (COCC). We are currently in the midst of Abolition May, a month-long series of actions taking place on campuses across the continent. This month began with a National Day of Refusal on May 3rd, when we organized our campuses to withdraw labor from the University by not attending class or work, and we will continue with another series of actions later this month. Below is the Coalition’s official statement of intent:

“The Cops Off Campus Coalition is a ‘coalition of coalitions’ building coast to coast across Turtle Island (North America). We are a network of local, regional, and transnational coalitions and collectives of students, educators, other workers, and all other community members impacted by police and policing at all levels of education (K-12, universities, vocational and professional schools, colleges, seminaries, etc.). Guided by the transformative worldview of abolition, we work within our own communities and collectively to forward urgent alternatives to policing that will build a future University beyond punishment and violence.

We mean abolition as informed by numerous intellectual, artistic, and sociopolitical traditions including black/queer/crip feminisms, the worker’s movement, and other radical traditions. In solidarity with the Land Back movement and all people and organizations of similar investment, the Cops Off Campus Coalition coheres around an ongoing commitment to the end of policing and police occupation of sovereign Native land as the (il)logic and procedure by which any and all learning spaces respond to and manage interpersonal harm and the systemic crisis of capital. We advocate for the complete dissolution of policing in all spaces of education (and ultimately across all aspects of our society), the severance of all school contracts with law enforcement agencies, and the dissolution of all task forces that serve to uphold police control and presence on our campuses.

We thus challenge every school administration’s commitment to – and use of – policing, which disproportionately violates Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and poor people and ultimately renders all members of educational campuses and their surrounding communities less safe. Further, it corrupts the mandate of spaces of education to educate rather than to violate and police. We are committed to a free university in every sense, equally accessible to all.”

Top photo courtesy of Paul Goyette