The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 26

Sometime last week while I was in the shower, a glass panel broke in my room. When I heard the panel shatter I ran out of the shower. I’ve a closet door that I took off of the rails in order to get quick access to my clothes. That closet door stood on its own. Fixing that glass panel is now one of the many things that’s on my list of things to do. A list that keeps on growing. Cleaned up most of the glass. Kept  it moving.

….

In March 2018 Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels announced plans to create a private police force for the university. Joining other peer universities (private schools like the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, public schools like the University of Michigan) the new Hopkins police force would combine cutting edge law enforcement technology with enhanced sensitivity to the concerns of various stakeholders. Because the private police force would require the Maryland State Assembly to pass legislation, public officials at the state and local level would have to weigh in,.

Not even a week after Daniels made his announcement a group of black faculty wrote a statement. We were concerned, that just three years after the Freddie Gray Uprising that such a move would take the university and the city backwards rather than forwards. But more to the point we suggested the police force would do little to nothing to actually stop crime, would place black and brown students, staff, and faculty in danger, would further crystallize the “Hopkins bubble” drawn around the university, and would be uniquely unable to deal with perhaps the most pervasive forms of crime at Hopkins—theft between students, and sexual assault.

You can see the letter here.

As a result of the letter, Daniels called a private meeting with us. We doubled down on these critiques, pointing both to our own personal experiences, and to the growing literature on policing and its effects. While increased policing may indeed increase the sense of safety and security it in fact does not actually increase safety and security—and the sense is only increased in certain populations as others will have their sense decreased rather than increased. Daniels was concerned that there was an increase in crime that just wouldn’t go down and was fearful that the crime would become more violent. We urged him not to give in to that fear—decisions made in fear are often (though not always) wrong.

Every single faculty member in that meeting disagreed with the policy. A significant number of students and community members also disagreed with it—here sensitive on the one hand to the specific concerns of black students, and on the other hand concerned with the seeming doubling down on policing in the wake of the Uprising.

The bill administrators developed in 2018 didn’t pass the Maryland State Assembly. My memory is a bit fuzzy here but from what I recall I think the administration thought the benefit of the policy would be self-evident, while it was not—the meeting with us should’ve been a signal. The student organizing should’ve been a signal.

In 2019 the administration picked up the idea again—this time with a full on public relations assault. They brought in consultants to talk through how to create a new police unit that would be sensitive to the community and also deal with crime. They convened a number of focus group meetings in communities, in addition to several town hall meetings, usually moderated by a black faculty member. Further, administrators gave Mayor Catherine Pugh several thousand dollars in campaign contributions the day before she testified for the bill at the Maryland State Assembly (Pugh would later resign after pleading guilty to corruption charges). They brought in Michael Bloomberg, billionaire alumni and former NYC mayor, to lobby on behalf of the bill.

Students organized using a combination of traditional and non-traditional methods, going to Annapolis to lobby, and taking over the administration building in the longest sit-in in Hopkins history, risking their academic careers and their lives (if I recall correctly administration officials reneged on a promise to meet with students and instead called dozens of Baltimore City police to evict the students, and later on would threaten students with expulsion for exerting their free speech rights). Concerned faculty met with Baltimore City councilpersons to talk about ways they could possibly weaken the bill.

All seemingly for naught. The bill didn’t pass unanimously, in fact some members of the Baltimore city delegation fiercely opposed the bill. But it did pass.

In order to assuage concerns that the force would be, like many other police forces, unaccountable, a police accountability board was stipulated as part of the bill. It would include members of the community (from actual community organizations if I recall correctly), it would include members of the Hopkins community (including at least one from the Black Faculty Staff Association). And in order to assuage concerns that the police force would simply duplicate existing practices, they used a headhunting firm to identify executive level security candidates to create and run the force.

….

Now the past year I’ve been on leave. Because I needed to take the time to look after my younger children, I needed the time to recover mentally from micro, meso, and macro-struggles, I haven’t been involved much in what’s been going on over the past year. Faculty have been organizing around a range of issues including the police, but because the bill had already been passed and it looked like it was a done deal, organizing against the police didn't take up a lot of their time. The best they could do was make sure the student protestors would be protected, and perhaps attempt to modify what the accountability board looked like and how it functioned.

Then the pandemic hit, and then George Floyd, Ahmad Aubery, and Brionna Taylor were murdered, with state officials neglecting to prosecute immediately in all three instances. When the global protests happened, the police question was raised again. Faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community organizations throughout the city organized. I ended my leave.

Two Fridays ago, administrators stated that they were going to put the police initiative on hiatus for two years.

….

Now about that glass door.

Every time I opened the bathroom door it would tap the closet door, gently. So gently I didn’t even know it was happening. Over the course of…maybe a few years, that gentle tapping tilted the closet door, to the point where it was off balance, causing it to crash into the panel, breaking it. That glass door was solid….until it wasn’t.

This is how we win.