MIM Notes 188 June 15 1999

NO MORE CAMPUS COPS!
STUDENTS: UNCLOAK THE ANTI-CRIME HYSTERIA

MIM and RAIL have long campaigned against fear-mongering on 
college campuses. In Western Massachusetts, this work has 
especially focused on the UMass and Hampshire College campuses, 
were groups of students have willingly allowed themselves to be 
manipulated by the police and part of the administration to demand 
stronger security apparatuses on campus.

With campus funding tight, valuable resources are diverted to pay 
for more security. There have been exactly zero studies showing 
that increasing campus security brings about a reduction in campus 
crime. Again and again we have challenged the fear-mongers to 
compare their "safety" on campus with comparative non-campus 
locations. We aren't saying that assaults don't happen on college 
campuses, just that they happen very, very infrequently. But the 
politics of fear is based somewhere else besides reality.

Trying to achieve the unachievable with the more security results 
in two things: More police, and therefore more resulting 
harassment and oppression of Blacks, Latinos, First Nations and 
Asian-descended peoples. That's all the police are designed to do.

RAIL has gotten some praise and a lot of resistance for this work. 
Now someone has quantified their resistance. In a farewell column 
of the UMass Daily Collegian's crime reporter, RAIL was listed 3rd 
from the top on a list of the 10 things she hates about UMass: 
"RAIL. They scare me. Really, they do." (One notch higher were 
student "criminals" and the Chancellor held the top spot.)

And to say that true coincidences are rare, the same reporter was 
also a Student Gover-nment Senator responsible for passing motions 
demanding more call boxes and instituting an annual fear walk with 
the campus police.

So what is it about RAIL that scares the reporter? We're not a 
physical threat to her, but our work opposing the politics of fear 
is an attack on everything she stands for. And here, we can say, 
is a Collegian reporter who understands exactly what we're saying. 
Now the question for readers: are you willing to break with the 
politics of fear and say "No more police"?