On new student move-in day last year, August 21, 2023, as a thousand-plus new first year students arrived with their families for drop-off, these billboard vans circled University of Rochester’s private campus in Western New York.

This billboard campaign, supported locally by the University of Rochester Public Safety Officers Association, was part of a broader, reoccurring playbook by campus public safety officers nationwide last fall to exploit tropes of racialized urban violence to expand their armed policing power. University officials successfully issued an injunction to forbid the trucks on campus but could not prevent them from driving on the public road that marks the campus boundary.

It was into this terrain, in which public safety officers fought for a narrow view of safety as armed enforcement and protecting students against a race-class subjugated “other” in surrounding communities, that students and allies began protesting support of Palestine in the fall and winter of 2023/24. The United States and Israel have exchanged violent and repressive policing strategies and tactics for years through partnerships, which has included campus police. Militarized policing in the United States has long been linked to counterinsurgency abroad, and the policing of campus protests in the previous year put that reality into stark focus.

After months of escalating confrontations between public safety officers and students at the University of Rochester demanding ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from companies supporting militarized occupation, war, and genocide, by May 2024 senior administration authorized public safety to clear Camp Resilience. In a coordinated operation between the university and city, officers in full face coverings with flex cuffs, batons, and some with guns, blocked access to campus, surrounded the academic quad, systematically destroyed the encampment, and arrested two participants. While students left promptly as drones flew overhead, these officers then stood guard for hours over an empty quad while the campus buildings remained locked with the entrances blocked.

While university officials and the media sought to frame this response as necessary to remove allegedly dangerous and troublesome pro-Palestine student activists and outside agitators who were disrupting campus safety, beginning the story with the billboard trucks in August makes clear that campus public safety had already proclaimed the campus “unsafe” based on raced and class exclusionary logics months before sustained pro-Palestine activism began.

This billboard truck, and subsequent events on our campus and nationwide, revealed the stark truth that from the onset, campus police have always carried two primary functions: “protecting” campus communities from criminalized BIPOC communities in the areas that surround urban campuses, and repressing student dissent.

The history of campus policing in the United States dating back to the nineteenth century reveals a persistent effort to control student populations, despite universities’ expressed commitments to fostering freedom and critical thought. In 1860, Harvard College students strongly opposed the faculty’s decision to employ armed police to enforce campus regulations, leading to tension between students and the administration. As Alex Vitale notes, in the late nineteenth century, Yale introduced a watchman-like system, granting these watchmen the legal powers of municipal police, including the authority to make arrests. Yale police, as many other campus policing agencies, continue the work of fear-mongering in order to expand and legitimize the armed policing of campuses.

Modern campus policing emerged primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, when universities increasingly invited law enforcement onto campuses to quell protests, such as those opposing the Vietnam War, resulting in rampant police violence. Universities then developed campus police forces under the direct control of administrators, hoping to provide a more nuanced, preventive, and less violent approach to campus protests. In the decades to come, campus police followed the trends toward militarization and expansion that local and state policing entities embarked on post 9/11, especially after moments of student activism.

University of Rochester is illustrative of broader trends in the past decade. In 2013 what had been a set of civilian campus security officers became a renamed Department of Public Safety (DPS), with a growing portion of sworn officers, who had explicit law enforcement training, arrest power, and authorization to carry guns. By 2016, the racialized and classed justification was that officers patrolling the university hospital’s emergency department needed weapons to protect clinicians from, as several public safety officers told faculty members over the years, “gang bangers who come into the hospital with guns and knives to finish each other off.” DPS then used this logic to suggest officers also needed to be armed to protect the undergraduates from the associated “violence” spilling over from the hyper-segregated city onto the undergraduate campuses. In 2018, DPS named this telos transparently as the “evolution of the armed peace officer program” in requesting authorization for more weapons for more officers. Coalitions of students, faculty, staff, and community members pushed back strenuously both times, including most notably the Minority Student Advisory Board’s occupation of a Faculty Senate meeting in fall 2018, which stalled, but did not dismantle, the expansion.

Rochester students’ pushback against the racialized logics of policing expansion on campuses was part of broader nationwide resistance by students, faculty, and staff, most notably in 2020 aligned with nationwide #BLM protests. On our campus, students formed the University of Rochester Abolition Coalition (URAC), working both at the city level with #BLM protests demanding defunding police after the death of Daniel Prude, and on campus, organizing political education and direct actions including an overnight sit-in outside the DPS office. In June 2020, the Scholars for Black Lives collective started #PoliceFreeCampus as a call to action for campuses to divest from policing and punishment and to invest in improving campus and community safety. In 2022, the “Cops off Campus” movement formed, linking these efforts across North America.

These waves of activism locally and nationwide to defund, disarm, and demilitarize led to temporary gains—slowing, not reversing, trends towards campus policing—but they also led campus police officers at University of Rochester and nationwide to double down on the need for punitive, armed law and order to justify their own existence, including the billboard fear-mongering campaigns. The subsequent violence against pro-Palestine encampments, in which campus, local, and state police wielding pepper spray, flash bang explosives, and handcuffs stormed universities like Yale, the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, and Columbia to destroy student encampments, was the inevitable outcome of policing and police expansion, and not a reflection of actual danger of pro-Palestine student activism.

While at the start of the year in Rochester, the injunction showed that there was space between some administrative attempts to redefine campus safety and DPS desires for more weapons and police power, administrators and policing emerged in lockstep by the spring, mobilized by bipartisan political forces demanding punitive law and order responses to faculty and encamped students advocating for an end to the genocide in Gaza.

There are parallel logics of surveillance, control, and repression that undergird policing and militarism in both the United States and Palestine. Student protestors and their allies nationwide have articulated how the struggle for police abolition and Palestinian liberation are intertwined. We can follow their calls through dismantling campus policing and ending all forms of police repression and colonial control, which are waged most heavily on subjugated communities and those dissenting from systems of oppression. This will ultimately pave the way for life-affirming approaches to safety and justice to thrive for all.