Erica Jung is a recent graduate and former chapter leader of the Young Democratic Socialists of America GW during the 2019-20 academic year.
As people all over the country and the world take to the streets to protest over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, students must internalize the messages against police violence and use of force from protesters nationwide and seek change on campus to make GW safer for black students, faculty and staff. This includes pushing GW to minimize the GW Police Department’s relationship with the Metropolitan Police Department and make internal policy changes, to disclose its financial investments and potential ties to anti-black companies and to eliminate police involvement in career center events.
Firstly, protesters are calling for policy changes to police departments nationwide that we can also introduce to GWPD. The Black Student Union has outlined several of these changes, including decreasing GWPD’s dependence on MPD for lower-level threats to campus safety and a zero-tolerance policy for officers who act on racial bias.
These proposals are a response to a clear problem with GWPD’s use of force. Earlier this year, a video emerged appearing to show a GWPD officer pushing a student down the stairs of University President Thomas LeBlanc’s on-campus residence, the F Street House. The incident occurred during a march organized by Sunrise GW to deliver a letter to officials asking GW to divest from fossil fuel companies. The officer was placed on administrative leave shortly after.
If GWPD officers are responsible for protecting life and property, that incident demonstrated that property was a greater priority for the officers at the scene. These changes proposed by BSU will ensure more focus is placed on life.
In an effort to build stronger relationships with the community, GWPD Chief James Tate has expressed an interest in community policing. While advocates of this approach argue that community policing can help foster trust between students and officers, community policing can also extend the presence of police into students’ daily lives. Social problems may easily turn into police problems, with the potential for escalation and police violence typically disproportionately placed on black and brown students. Students must be careful to identify any attempts made by the department to blur the boundaries between the police and students, which can allow for an expansion of police presence on campus.
Second, students and administrators should ensure GW does not financially support the prison-industrial complex by examining our endowment in detail. The prison-industrial complex is a network of overlapping government and private-sector interests that maintain power and profit through the use of surveillance, policing and imprisonment in dealing with social, economic and political problems. These systems are designed to enslave through mass incarceration that systematically targets black Americans.
As GW students, we should demand more transparency from the administration with regard to its financial investments. In the same way that Sunrise GW has campaigned for divestment of University funds from the fossil fuel industry, students on campus should pressure the University into divesting from companies that engage in anti-black practices. At Harvard University, students have called on the administration to divest from companies that profit off of the prison-industrial complex – we should follow.
We now know the University holds investments in the fossil fuel industry, but there is still a lot that we do not know when it comes to GW’s endowment. The investments funds that constitute our endowment could be supporting a variety of companies that profit from the prison-industrial complex, but the lack of transparency on the administration’s part deters any further investigation.
Finally, we must separate GW’s career services from ties to the police, given that the institution is inherently abusive against people of color. Last year, several employers tabled at the GW 2019 Career and Internship Fair that took place in the Marvin Center, including the New Jersey State Police. Just last week, on Friday, the Department of Sociology emailed students about a virtual career fair to “connect with law enforcement recruiters from [their] clients in different parts of the country.” In light of the recent demonstrations against the police, GW’s various career services branches should dissolve their ties to law enforcement organizations.
Students at GW play a huge role in creating change within the University that delivers important benefits to its students. As student groups work together to demand the divestment of University funds from the fossil fuel industry, they must also support the BSU in pressuring the administration to implement the changes they have demanded.
We must take lessons from these recent protests and apply them to GW. Change can and must happen on a community level, with democratic participation from the people who are most impacted by the University’s policies. While most students spend only three to five years on their undergraduate careers, there is a responsibility to ensure a safer space for incoming classes. Our commitment to fighting for a better world is not confined to the limits of electoral politics, as many GW students like to think, but rather rests on a continuum of possibilities. Is it so bold to imagine a campus in which students are food secure, able to access affordable medical and mental health services and feel safe?