WHY POLICING ON CAMPUS MUST CHANGE AND IMPROVE
Traditional law enforcement practices at our college campuses must change. Our future depends on it.
As colleges strive to increase graduation rates, transform lives and work to foster more equitable student outcomes, we must ensure that all members of our campus communities feel safe and welcome. That is not happening today, as decades-old approaches to policing are proving insufficient.
The resources and training needed to effectively address the most common health and safety issues on our college campuses today — hunger, homelessness, substance abuse and the mental health crises that emerge from these issues — fall woefully short. It is time for colleges to make an unwavering policy and fiscal investment to transform law enforcement and public safety on college campuses.
This is not a call to defund the police. It is a call to rethink public safety by taking a holistic approach that addresses the root cause of problems, not its symptoms. The county of San Diego recognized this when in 2021 it began deploying Mobile
Crisis Response Teams staffed with trained mental health clinicians and specialists who work with residents experiencing a psychological crisis in nonviolent situations and connect them with appropriate care. County officials say the program, created after law enforcement responded to more than 54,000 calls in 2019-20 involving a psychiatric crisis, has been shown to be more effective than traditional police responses.
Colleges, too, must embrace new, comprehensive approaches that address student needs with a greater understanding of and emphasis on how those needs intersect with policing. It is an approach begging for innovative behavioral intervention teams to engage in a new form of community-oriented policing — without the police. It is an approach that is especially critical during a pandemic that is causing unprecedented levels of stress across all segments of society.
Indeed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental illnesses are among the most common health conditions in the United States, and more than half of our population will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their lifetime. Yet because of misconceptions and misguided priorities, approximately 40 percent of people incarcerated each year, including some 44 percent held in local jails, have a history of mental illness and less than half of people with a history of mental illness receive mental health treatment while held behind bars.
We are also falling short in addressing the impacts from rampant hunger and homelessness.
Despite an unprecedented infusion of emergency aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 6 in 10 San Diego Community College District students are housing insecure and more than 4 in 10 aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from, according to a recent #RealCollege Survey of more than 10,000 students at San Diego City, Mesa and Miramar colleges and the San Diego College of Continuing Education. Eighteen percent of students were homeless at one time or another in the year prior to the survey results — meaning they were living in a shelter, on the streets, in a car, or temporarily with a friend or relative. Some 43 percent reported being food insecure within the previous 30 days, meaning they had limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate food.
What we are calling for is not radical. All of this is in line with the California Community Colleges’ “Call to Action,” a systemwide review of law enforcement and first responder training and curriculum that was adopted after the senseless murder of George Floyd. A letter signed, June 5, 2020 by members of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office said, “Now more than ever, our students, faculty, staff and administrators need to feel a sense of agency and must have open and honest conversations about how we come together as an educational community to keep building inclusive and safe learning environments,” The Call to Action also involves revising curriculum and training at public safety training academies, the biggest of which in San Diego County is at San Diego Miramar College.
Of course, change is not cheap. Bolstering mental health services at college campuses, staffing behavioral response teams with mental health experts, and revising public safety curriculum will cost money. It is an investment well worth pursuing.
The stakes are enormous. Community colleges are committed to open access and expanding social mobility. Failing to act is failing society.
Community colleges are committed to open access and expanding social mobility. Failing to act is failing society.
Turner Cortez
Fitch