Let’s Talk About the History of Campus Police in Oregon
If you go to school at UO, PSU, or OHSU, your campus police force is armed and it answers to a private board that is not elected. This unaccountable board also runs your school.
With talks about police accountability and how policing upholds Anti-Black White Supremacy on our radar right now, I wanted to give some historical context to something that impacts college students in Oregon every day: campus police.
While students in Oregon have worked to disarm campus police, so far they remain another violently militarized force. And as the call to disarm campus police in Oregon becomes reinvigorated, activists need to know the history of campus police in Oregon.
First off: they have been around for less than a decade. Senate Bill 405 passed the Oregon Legislative Assembly in 2011. It allowed public universities to create their own police forces if the State Board of Higher Education, a state entity that oversaw public universities in Oregon at the time, said it was ok.
This was already problematic and students organized against it at the time saying this would make campuses less safe, especially for Black students, other students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and other students who experience oppression. But things immediately got even worse: the same year, Oregon passed a law allowing Universities to break off from public oversight and form their own “institutional boards” to oversee their institutions, a move which campus activists, student governments, and the statewide students’ rights group Oregon Students Association also fought against, calling it what it was: a move towards privatizing our public universities in Oregon.
This left campuses like University of Oregon and Portland State University with little to no state oversight and forming their own police forces who answered to the unaccountable Boards of Trustees which were largely made up of wealthy donors.
IN FACT the same policy proposal where the UO laid out it’s vision for privatization, backed by ultra-rich mega donor and forced labor pofiteer Phil Knight, contained a section calling for the creation of a private UO Police force. Read it here and see section “C-20: Campus Police”.
Why would the UO view having their own police force as an essential part of their attempts to privatize? Let’s take a wild guess: maybe both Police and Privatization exist to enforce the line between who “belongs” somewhere and who “doesn’t belong.”
U.S. Policing has it’s history in slave patrols, union busting, as well as attacking Black communities in the reconstruction era south. Police have been used to suppress Black folks and other people of color, the homeless, immigrants, lgbtq folks, and activists.
Privatization in higher education means that schools which were once public goods (meaning all community members should have access because they are funded by tax money) become private entities (meaning they are paid for and accessed only by those who can afford them). When we privatize higher education, only those who can afford to pay astronomical tuition to go there get to be there. For most of Oregon’s history, the bulk of funding for our public universities came from the State of Oregon- it was a public good. Over the past two decades, the burden has shifted to students, and institutions mostly operate off of tuition.
That tuition rate is set by the same unaccountable boards of trustees that allow campus police to do things like (CW warning for murder, homophobia, and racist violence by police for upcoming links) murder Jason Washington, point guns at students of color, and make lists about how much they hate the communities they pretend to protect and serve. And as student organizers at the Portland State University Student Union have pointed out time and time again, PSU is an urban campus in downtown Portland, and the PSU police are also largely a presence that has swept homeless folks and other “outsiders” out of what is supposed to be a public campus in the middle of a city.
Central Administrations at these institutions have also time and time again suppressed student organizing. Ask any student who has tried to get an institutional President, Student Affairs Director, or Board of Trustees member to make meaningful change around tuition affordability, campus safety, or dismantling our deeply entrenched systems of white supremacy on college campuses.
An interesting note about the University of Oregon, for example, is that the UOPD Police Chief is Matthew Carmichael, and this guy has a special niche: reviving the PR image of campus police after they get public scrutiny for doing horrible things. Guess where Chief Carmichael was chief of police before U of O? UC Davis, where he was brought in to clean up their image after they got national attention for letting their campus police pepper spray peaceful student protestors on campus. He was then brought into the UO to clean up their police department’s image after it was leaked that they had made an enemies list (actually they called it the “Eat a Bowl of D*cks List”) that targeted, among others, student government leaders and on-campus activists.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of the ways campus police, and campus administrations in general in Oregon have continued to “other” marginalized groups, suppress activism, and uphold systems of violence and oppression, but I hope this might at least be a useful introductory primer for students who are ready to demand the change we have needed for so long. This struggle has been going on a long time, longer even then the history in this post is able to cover. In fighting for a better world, and a safer, more inclusive campus for everybody, it’s important we share these stories, make these connections, and understand who our opponents are.
