Inspired by the recent op-ed published by March For Our Lives at UNC-Chapel Hill, leaders of Students Demand Action at BU invite students to join the fight against gun violence, too.
If we are ever to achieve true public safety, we can no longer rely on the BUPD — a violent institution with an egregious history and present of violence and racism.
It’s important the crowd of mangy white supremacists who broke into the Capitol a few weeks ago are labeled as terrorists. But do the same for the cops letting them into the building and posing for selfies, the cops participating in the insurrection and the cops who engage in acts of terrrorism on the daily.
We can no longer sit complacently in the midst of injustice. We can no longer use ignorance or lack of information as an excuse for continual violence and discrimination. The facts and evidence are all here: BUPD’s time is up.
Abolishing the BUPD does not mean abolishing all University services and leaving it at that. Abolishing the BUPD requires that we create and fund more effective alternatives.
Campus police were established and empowered to restrain social activism throughout the student bodies of America. Campus police were created to control students, not “crime.”
The idea that BUPD is magically exempt from all the bad that municipal police officers unleash into the world simply because they are privately employed by a university, however, is emphatically false.
The solution to this is not as simple as instituting reforms and regulations for campus police. Municipal police officers are already limited by these regulations and accountability measures, and they are still brutalizing protestors and murdering Black people.
When caught by the campus police selling LSD and Molly, a University of Massachusetts Amherst student by the name of “Logan” was given an offer he couldn’t refuse. In exchange for becoming a campus...
