Twenty years ago, The Daily Free Press published an editorial accusing the Boston University Police Department of “racial profiling” and a “lack of skill.”
The piece outlined the 1984 killing of 19-year-old Christopher Dignan by a BUPD officer, detailing double-standards extended to University police and noting their routine targeting of minorities on BU’s campus.
The report found department spending on oversight and community engagement decreased while spending on traditional policing initiatives — those focused on investigation and arrest — increased.
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.
There will never a perfect time to push back on racial profiling, especially when a number of legitimate crimes were committed. In this case, the gun-related charges cannot definitively justify the means used to discover the illegal handgun. However, racial dynamics disproportionately affect Black and brown people.
Massachusetts drivers might soon face penalties for driving with a phone in their hand. A bill aimed at deterring distracted driving passed the state legislature Wednesday and is now a signature away from becoming law.
Reginald Andrade, a longtime University of Massachusetts Amherst employee, was a victim to racial profiling Friday morning when an anonymous caller told police he looked “agitated” as he entered the...
