Under any capitalist or fascist regime, the enforcers of that system are the police. In the United States, policing departments regularly administer and protect the state’s monopoly on violence to maintain class and racial hierarchies while assaulting any efforts to disrupt this oppression. Thus, police and prison abolition has always been a fundamental struggle for the American left, especially in Black liberation movements.

While many other organizing demands such as free health care should be imposed immediately, a hallmark of police abolition is incremental policy change, shifting resources from law enforcement institutions to community services. Abolishing private university police, however, need not require much preparation. These groups are explicitly extraneous, elitist and unaccountable to the public. 

University police have nearly all the powers of municipal officers, including the authority to make stops, searches, investigate crimes, conduct arrests, enforce local laws and issue traffic citations. While state laws authorize their existence, private campus police departments are not bound to the same contractual and democratic limitations as public departments.

For example, The University of Chicago Police Department, whose jurisdiction extends to include thousands of non-university residents, is not subject to Illinois’s Freedom of Information Act. This makes it nearly impossible for citizens to access arrest or other records that are typically public.

Nearly everywhere they exist, university police forces are not restricted to on-campus activity. In Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Police Department exercises police powers over communities outside the university. This fundamentally erodes the Fourth Amendment, which includes the right to due process, shared liability structures with police and the freedom from forced subjection to private authority. Neighborhoods that never consented to the authority of an elitist private institution are now subject to policing by officers that they cannot easily hold accountable. 

Since its creation in 2019, student and community opposition movements have protested the JHPD’s abusive........

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