Are there more than just two possibilities—armed or unarmed—for the future of Portland State’s Campus Public Safety Office? Around 100 Portland State students, faculty and community members attended a panel discussion Tuesday to explore other possibilities in the campus security discussion.
Community weighs policing alternatives
Are there more than just two possibilities—armed or unarmed—for the future of Portland State’s Campus Public Safety Office?
Around 100 Portland State students, faculty and community members attended a panel discussion Tuesday to explore other possibilities in the campus security discussion.
The event was organized by PSU’s Student Action Coalition and the Students for Unity. All members of the panel opposed arming CPSO.
The issue is more complex than the administration is making it out to be, said Chelsea Harris, a graduate student at PSU and a member of Students for Unity who helped plan the event.
“There are other ways of thinking of the issue than just one police force [CPSO] or the other [Portland Police Bureau],” Harris said. “It also brings up a lot of bigger societal issues that I think students are willing to engage with.”
The panel included Genevieve Goffman, an activist with local groups Pink Tape Collective and Blazing Arrow Organization; Meghan Keener, an activist with the transformative justice group Praxiss; Kristian Williams, local author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America; and Dr. Aimee Clott, a PSU professor of conflict resolution.
CPSO Chief Phil Zerzan said he encourages community dialogue on the topic.
“We welcome an opportunity to participate in it,” Zerzan said.
While the panelists answered questions about what the campus might look like if CPSO were armed and why alternative ideas need to be considered, the group was unable to reach a consensus on a specific approach they could collectively endorse.
The discussion started with the panel answering questions posed by members of Students for Unity, covering topics like why there is a need for community alternatives to police; how having a police department could exacerbate racism, sexism and classism on campus; and how PSU’s community could best respond to reports of sexual assaults on campus.
One topic, transformative justice, was covered at length. Transformative justice is a strategy for responding to conflicts that takes into account not only the actual crime but also its causes, and tries to treat an offense as a transformative opportunity for victims, offenders and all other members of the affected community.
According to the panel, transformative justice could help find the roots of these societal issues.
“It’s about this culture that makes these [crimes] possible over and over
again…transformative justice is about getting to that root and working [to end it],” Keener said.
People in our society have a propensity toward violence, Clott said.
“We live in a culture that causes fear and anxiety every day…That experience with culture [is what] gives [people an] entitlement to be violent,” she said.
“[Transformative justice] has to do with seeing sexual assault or violent crime as everyone’s problem. Transformative justice is getting rid of whatever it is that causes us to harm each other in that way,” Goffman said.
As far as implementing transformative justice at PSU, Clott said there is no specific way to accomplish it.
“We have [an] opportunity to create this, and we don’t know what it looks like, but we should at least try,” Clott said.
A timely question in the second hour of the event came from an audience member who wanted to know how PSU would respond to an active-shooter incident without police on campus, given recent school violence around the country and the shooting at Clackamas Town Center in December.
The panel could only answer this question with more questions.
“Is having a shootout on campus…preferred?” Keener asked.
“Would I feel safer if there was a cop on campus with a gun who [might] shoot someone just because they look dangerous?” Goffman asked.
“There are things police do well and things they do badly. The things they do badly include responding to reports of crime and sexual assault. The things they do well are hassling poor people and…shooting people needlessly. I think we need something that’s fundamentally different than a police force,” Williams said.
“The police stop and search and…kill. One way to look at that is, it’s their fucking job. Preserving inequality is what they’re there for,” he added.
Keener agreed that something other than a police force is needed.
“Once you have this police force, it’s not going to be your choice anymore, and that’s [something] that concerns me. I’m having trouble coming up with a relevant example for this because I think it’s ridiculous to have police on campus,” she said.
Clott would like to see the roots of the societal issues causing crime addressed, instead of “putting a Band-Aid” on them with a police force.
“When we look at these issues we tend to pathologize people…we need to destigmatize [the sensationalism around events of trauma and violence] and look at the bigger picture,” she said. “I think what we’re looking at is the further institutionalization of inequality.”
Keener said the focus needs to be on change, and not on arming police.
“We need to put work into changing our culture and changing our responses to things,” she said.
Williams ended the discussion by acknowledging that the panel didn’t have answers to all the questions posed to them.
“What comes out of this isn’t a specific [equation] of what has to be done…All kinds of things are broken, so [you can] start anywhere.”
Editors note: This story has been edited re: the individuals invited to be on the panel.
It scares me how completely out of touch with the reality of the world these people are. The so-called “answer” to the question of an active shooter was absolutely ridiculous. What would the possibility of a “shootout” be the alternative to? Easy answer: the continued killing of innocent people. So yes, a possible “shootout” would definitely be preferred when that is the alternative. However, an actual “shootout”, based on past active shooter incidents, is very unlikely to even happen. These people would prefer a slaughter of students and staff and that is unbelievable.
This naivety, while I guess it shouldn’t, really surprises me. I have trouble believing people can be this absorbed in their own make-believe world.
A couple things to Clarify! Members of the Administration WHERE invited. We invited Monica Rimai, Michelle topp, Dana Tason, Jessica Amo, and JIlma Meneses. Secondly the line that says “the group was unable to reach a consensus on a specific approach they could collectively endorse,” is problematic. This was not the intention of the panel, and actually indicates a misunderstanding of the topics presented. We tried to make it clear that there is no SINGLE answer to this question and there SHOULDN’T BE. Every crime committed is different and shall be dealt with, with respect to it’s context and its form. We have no intention of replacing a dogmatic overarching system with another dogmatic overarching system.
Eamon, I’m a bit shocked by your naivety. First, the idea of arming campus security is not being brought up to prevent shootings on campus but as a misguided response to sexual assaults on campus, which, as the panelist mentioned, the police are historically terrible in their response to and which armed security are not going to be any more effective in preventing than unarmed security. Police or other responders very rarely arrive on a situation of sexual assault that is *currently* happening. They respond after a victim has contacted them or been found and usually only add to the trauma of the situation.
Secondly, concerning the idea of a school shooting; how many school shootings have their been in Portland? How many people of color, people with mental illnesses, poor people, have been needlessly shot by the Portland police just in the past 5 years? Which is truly the greater threat and detriment to anyone other than economically privileged white men?
Liz, how many shootings were there at Virginia Tech before they had theirs? How many shootings were there at Northern Illinois before they had theirs? Columbine? Thurston? University of Oregon? Sandy Hook? Clackamas Town Center? Did the fact that none of those places had a shooting before prevent the first one from happening? That is an unbelievably ridiculous belief that just because it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t ever happen.
Sexual assault was focused on here, but I can tell you from personal experience, having attended and worked for PSU in the past, the idea of arming campus POLICE (not security guards) does not have anything to do with preventing rape. The point being made is that a full service police agency, rather than Public Safety department, can better investigate instances of sexual assault. And police officers in this country carry guns. Get used to it.
In the view of people like you, every police shooting is “needless”, so for me to argue that point would be worthless.
Here’s the deal, everybody on that panel is full of crap and if they don’t know it they are deluding themselves. What is their motivation you say? Glad you asked. Their raison d’être and self-identity is tied to the niche they are trying to create for themselves as “experts” that someone would pay to listen to. Essentially, they are saying “listen to me I’m an expert,” too bad that is not true. Even the Conflict Resolution professor uses, at best, a misleading statement: “People in our society have a propensity toward violence.” Actually, a very small minority (about 2%) of people in our, or any society, have a propensity toward violence. You could even make a case for humans having a universal “phobia” against harming their fellow man, why do you think it takes so much training to get soldiers to kill each other? I contend that the professor states the “propensity” in such a way so as to make the issue look bigger than it is, and as an “expert” in conflict resolution, make herself more valuable as a problem solver to this, realistically, non-issue. The same goes for the rest of the panel members, the professor is just easier to pick on since she is quoted less often and the others are so brilliantly obtuse that to debate with them would be like trying to debate with a … well nevermind, it just too much work to address issues that are beyond silly. I’ll leave everyone with a couple pearls of wisdom: 1) Denial is not a survival strategy and 2) Sometimes, violence does solve problems.
Of course with this radical thinking, hegemonic forces of society are questioned for their role in supporting, creating and continuing issues of racism, sexism, classism, etc. In this case, law enforcement became the particular ruling force of discussion. With it came an assumption that members of law enforcement are tied to a pessimistic view on human nature. They simply want to use their authority granted by the state to harm those outside of the elite instead of fulfilling their purported roles as protectors of the public. However, outside of those with the reins of power, an idealistic notion on human nature seems to assert that crime can simply be overcome by tapping into the goodwill of humankind through shifts in culture.
While looking at different perspectives and seeking new solutions to social problems is certainly a worthy investment, the views espoused by these panelists present an incongruous stance on human nature that ultimately creates a dangerous worldview caught too much in the world of academics with little regard for pragmatism. Portland State must deal with the realities of its urban surroundings; pretending that a small group within the university community can solve all the city’s social problems is overtly idealistic and actually pretentious.
Although the utopian world imagined in this event is definitely a dream we can all welcome, that doesn’t change the here and now of this campus. Crime does and will continue to happen here. And frankly, we need more than a dream to deal with that.