Police on campus

There has been a lot of hue and cry about bringing police onto the campuses of our fancier universities. One Columbia faculty member was up in arms about how a car backfiring on Amsterdam Avenue could set off a bloodbath on campus. There have, indeed, been instances where excessive force seems to have been used by cops. The author of TriangleBlogBlog wrote of cops coming onto UNC campus and pepper spraying indiscriminately. Lucy just validated that story and said it was worse than that. Graham told me about seeing video of a faculty member at Columbia getting her head bashed against the concrete by NYPD. Not good. What with other stuff I've had going on I haven't had time to track all of this. I'm sure there's more. The Chapel Hill Police reportedly didn't take part in coming onto UNC's campus because of the bad optics, which is an interesting and probably good call. 

Much of the issue is that the top tier college campuses largely exist above the law. I remember being acutely conscious of this when we would hang out on the roof of my residential college at Yale drunk and/or stoned. The function of the gates and moats and all that was to keep the law out so that we kids of the middle class and up and could their own wild rumpus, free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. People like Brett Kavanaugh certainly loved this immunity back in their day. One of his freshman roommates is a friend of mine, a gay punk rocker type, who told of having a dead pigeon nailed to his door. Kavanaugh and his buds were the only logical people to have done it, but my friend had no concrete evidence so he couldn't aggressively take it to the press back during Kavanaugh's confirmation process.

Campus security largely exist to keep kids safe and keep outside threats away, but they do not get all down in students' business for the most part. So there certainly aren't enough of them to reimpose order when kids start seizing buildings and ripping shit up aggressively.

Another reason people want to keep cops off college campuses is that, on average, cops are Trump voter types who at some level fucking hate the kids and the faculty. The reason they are quick to break out a little pepper spray is that they can and the blue wall makes it hard to make charges stick to them. They're still not stupid enough to go shooting kids with guns for no reason, but the fog of war provides them with some opportunities for mischief.