cops off the planet!
Join this Virtual Sit-In in the tradition of electronic civil disobedience to shout Ya Basta!
What Is Abolition?
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.
Amidst a global pandemic, relentless state and vigilante violence against Black, brown, and Indigenous people, and national calls for abolition, schools across North America have committed to increasing police budgets. College police forces are increasingly militarized. The University of California has a history of using its police departments to brutalize students and to surveil and assault activists. UC also has a history of using its research and prestige to lend academic credibility to racialized policing and incarceration regimes off campus and around the world. In the past decade, California State University police officers have killed 2 unarmed people of color and kept jail on the CSU Northridge campus! Despite being required by law to make info on use of force incidents public, the UC has rarely complied. Like all policing, policing on UC and CSU campuses is violent by design and cannot be reformed.
We say Cops Off Campus, Cops Off Earth. Our immediate goals include the abolition of all policing, but we focus on our respective campuses and the simultaneous reinvestment of funds towards reparative public goods: education, cost of living adjustment for student workers, housing, mental healthcare, and other means of transformative social justice.
For More Information
https://copsoffcampuscoalition.com