In the wake of the national and international protests against police violence, the Board of the Riverside Faculty Association calls on the UCR Administration to take action to address the antiblack history and practices of policing in the United States at the level of local, state, federal and campus police.
Although university administrators have released outraged statements regarding the police murder of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, the UCR administration bears responsibility for their complicity in police violence on and off-campus, and in their continued ties with state police and funding of university police.
We are at a crossroads that demands not only a reckoning with the anti-black history of policing, but decisive action that recognizes the failure of police reform. Ample evidence has demonstrated that police reform is not adequate. Police reform will not work to end police violence. We recognize that violence is not an aberration of policing; rather, it is at the heart of police power, and its trajectory has been racialized from the beginning. The violence of policing was never inevitable but built over centuries of legal, imaginative, and material practices as a mode of everyday governance to further anti-black racism, colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and racial capitalism.
This historic uprising calls for action to dismantle the various forms of institutionalized white supremacy and antiblackness, and police abolition is the first step in this endeavor to decolonize the university.
We endorse the position taken by Scholars for Social Justice and support the demands of the Blackness Unbound Faculty Collective Statement. Following and amplifying the June 20, 2020 recommendations by the UC Academic Senate, we publicly call on the UCR administration to take the following four actions.
- End ties with local and state police forces. Do not bring police to campus to attack, beat, pepper-spray and shoot our students. Prohibit ICE agents from entering campus and protect our undocumented and international students. End all ties and investments in corporations that support the prison-industrial complex.
- Defund and disarm the UC police. Currently, UC policy sanctions police deployment of batons, chemical agents and lethal force (UC Gold Book 303.5., 303.6, 830.2, 833.1). This sanctioned police violence must end. We call on UCR to invest in and develop alternative models of safety and security for members of the campus and surrounding communities, following existing, well-documented programs that prevent what is called crime, reduce harm and respond to crises (medical, mental health, domestic disputes, and sexual and gender-based violence). We call on the administration to develop programs such as Dream Defenders and Ujimaa Medics, and consult abolitionist experts and organizers on alternative forms of community security and harm reduction.
- Invest in education and training. We call on UCR to redirect police funding toward material support for Black students, Black faculty, and Black staff on campus. Invest financial resources in Black Studies programming and the foundation and sustainability of an autonomous Black Studies Department. Train administrators, faculty, staff, students and community members in practices of harm reduction, transformative justice, crisis response, mental health. This includes increasing support for especially vulnerable students, particularly the Underground Scholars, our students directly impacted by the prison industrial complex.
- Radical budgetary transparency throughout the entire University and in consultation with faculty from the RFA Board and Blackness Unbound Faculty Collective who have forwarded public demands.
These demands are informed by Black-led and multiracial social justice movements across the United States to defund and dismantle the police, alongside a UC-wide call to defund the police.
We request that the UCR Administration provide a response to this public letter by July 30th, 2020.
