America's militarized campus police can shoot, mace and beat citizens!
image credit: KRON news
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), there are currently 861 PRIVATE campus law enforcement agencies.
About 95% of 4-year schools with 2,500 or more students operate their own PRIVATE campus law enforcement agency!
Laws governing campus police required officers to be sworn and to pass minimum training requirements before they were given full arrest powers. The BJS says approximately 75% of the campuses were using armed officers!
"A majority of the campuses with sworn police officers also used nonsworn security officers."
Think about what the BJS is saying. Private campus cops are given powers to arrest, shoot, mace, beat American citizens!
After becoming a "campus police officer" many of these nonsworn/minimally trained cops will be hired by police departments across the country.
It's gotten so bad that even library security guards are acting like police and searching for suspicious people.
Years ago non-sworn officers were either deputized by local police agencies or weren’t given arrest powers. But that's changed over recent years. According to BJS, most sworn campus police officers had arrest (86%) and patrol (81%) jurisdictions that extended beyond campus boundaries.
Many of these new powers are established through “mutual aid agreements” with state and local police forces – which have increased considerably over the past decade, often with encouragement from the Department of Justice. Others have been created by amendments to existing statutes.
Ohio man’s family demands answers after a white campus cop killed a black motorist during a traffic stop.
" UC Police Chief Jason Goodrich said the traffic stop was initiated on campus, but Sam Dubose did not stop his vehicle until they were off campus. A mutual-aid agreement between the city and the university departments allows University of Cincinnati police officers and a host of other law enforcement agencies to work outside of their jurisdiction."
“The public needs to pay attention to what the legislative branch is doing in our states, especially when it comes to police powers that impact our children, colleges, and universities,” attorney Jamie P. Hopkins says.
Campus police in Massachusetts are empowered as “special state police officers,” a category that includes police employed by hospitals and railroads. As of June,2015 there were 1,500 special state police officers in Massachusetts.
"Twenty-one private colleges in Greater Boston have campus police forces. Harvard has 77 sworn officers, followed by Boston University with 67 (plus an additional 29 officers for its medical campus), and MIT with 59 officers. Wheelock College, which has fewer than 1,000 undergraduates, employs a single sworn officer."
Last week in Nashville, where more than 500 law enforcement officials representing 239 institutions gathered for the annual conference of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA). This year’s conference — which lists the scandal-ridden global security monolith G4S as one of its corporate sponsors — included presentations on counter-terrorism strategy, sex crimes investigation, tips for handling an active shooter, and, perhaps most telling, strategies for policing student behavior off-campus.
This should serve as a warning to everyone in Massachusetts, G4S was involved in providing security for the London 2012 Olympics!
Ed Milibandthe UK's labor party leader called on Parliament to re-think "outsourcing of policing" to private companies like G4S.
At the event, Protecting Communities, Fighting Crime Together, Miliband said that although public-private partnerships were "an important part of modern policing", large-scale outsourcing and the privatization of police forces has to be stopped.
"Clear lines" had to be drawn about what policing services private companies should provide, with neighbourhood patrols and criminal investigations the sole responsibility of the police, he said.
If you guessed G4S works closely with DHS give yourself a gold star; click here, here & here to find out more. DHS even makes it a point to be at every IACLEA conference.
Numerous DHS, NSA, TSA officials are working on campuses across America!
Just how bad is GS4? In 2011 community members burst into G4S's Tucson offices and declared their opposition to the company’s profiteering at the expense of immigrant communities across the nation and throughout the world.
Incensed by G4S’ role in promoting the criminalization of immigrants and the expansion of the private prison industry, the protestors entered the G4S office complex, delivered a letter to company representatives and unfurled a banner reading “G4S: Prison profiteering destroys communities."
Militarizing campus police blurs the lines between public and private authority and poses a threat to due process.
It’s difficult to say just how much campus police agencies are expanding their reach, because journalists and civil liberties advocates who try to dig into the issue have been stymied by a culture of secrecy and state laws that protect private entities from public scrutiny. In some cases, these police agencies are “public” enough to be empowered to make arrests, conduct searches and use lethal force but are “private” enough to be exempt from public records laws.
Treating university police like real cops is having serious repercussions.
Campus police are not heroes
DHS has referred to campus police as "Heroes Among Us."
image credit: Harvard Crimson
In 2014 Indianapolis Police Chief Rick Hite admitted police are a paramilitary organization:
“We have historically been a paramilitary organization"Hite said.
Colleges at DHS's behest are using license plate readers to spy on EVERYONE on campus and there's nothing you can do about it!
Colleges are also allowed to hold PRIVATE rape tribunals that determine if a student is guilty or if the victim asked to be raped.
DHS has even allowed railroad companies to create their own PRIVATE police departments.
People who say they have been mistreated by the railroad police have little recourse except to complain to the railroads, but because the railroads are private companies, they can operate largely in 'SECRET'.
America has almost ONE MILLION police officers, this doesn't include private police or security guards, which is larger than the 1.5 MILLION by most estimates. Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s. The more than 1 million contract security officers, and guards work directly for U.S. corporations.
Which means there are over 2.5 million police in America.