Statement on Policing at Yale – A call for Education
Presented by FAS Senate Chair Matthew Jacobson at the November 19, 2020 FAS Senate Meeting:
As you know, many Yale students and New Haven residents have raised serious questions about policing at Yale since April 2019, when Hamden and Yale police officers shot Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon, an unarmed black couple, in their car. As you also know, these local discussions dovetail with a national reckoning in the era of Black Lives Matter, a movement that crystallized after the Ferguson, Missouri killing of Michael Brown, and that escalated this past year after the killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and George Floyd in Minneapolis, among others. The Yale Daily News (YDN) reports just this week that on Friday, November 13, 2020, Yale administration officials met for the first time with members of the student group, Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, who have called for the university to defund and disarm its private police force. This is an issue that will be coming to a head soon, and perhaps would have done so already, if this were a normal year when all students were on campus and when face-to-face gatherings, teach-ins, protests, and rallies were easier to mount.
The FAS Senate does not hold a position on this question, nor am I staking one out here. But we do believe that faculty members have a critical role to play in the discussions ahead, and that it is incumbent upon all of us to educate ourselves on the issue. The questions are complex, as is the range of answers given: some argue for a straight-ahead abolition of the police; others propose a reapportionment of funding, so that violent crimes, drunken disturbances, psychotic episodes, and cats stuck in trees do not all fetch the one-size-fits-all response of an armed officer arriving on the scene. Reapportionment of the budget, they argue, would create the opportunity to address root causes and flexible response rather than “policing” per se. Still others argue that, like it or not, we live in a heavily armed society, and so an armed constabulary is necessary; others point with caution to instances where policing structures were reformed or dismantled only to be replaced by something worse—we risk taking away the Yale Police, they warn, only to have them replaced by some version of a Pinkerton Guard.
We call on faculty to educate themselves for the discussions that lie ahead—to educate themselves not only about the policing structures and practices that are currently in place, but about the differential way these are experienced by various segments of the community (including the wider New Haven community), and about what the alternatives might look like once our normalized practices have been denaturalized and held up for examination. The faculty stake in these questions is pronounced: as we are keepers and guardians of the university mission, there is a sense in which what takes place in Yale’s name takes place in our own name as well—we urge that faculty accept the ethical responsibilities of institutional stewardship, as we did when vexing questions that arose around Yale-NUS. Further, Yale’s faculty could and should be an immense resource for this public debate. President Salovey himself has said that as he sees it, short of total abolition, “everything is on the table”—“virtually everything about the way [Yale Police] do their work can be discussed,” he said last month. [YDN, October 27, 2020] There are experts in the area of race and policing at the Law School and across the disciplines of the FAS; there are also scholars in contiguous fields who have relevant expertise in areas such as social and cultural analysis, data collection, the sociology of criminal justice, social psychology, ethics, and social reconciliation. Every available resource should be mobilized for this university-wide discussion.
There will be a number of opportunities upcoming for the kind of education we are calling for.
Center for Policing Equity held an event earlier today, which we posted; and the Justice Collaborative | Thursday, December 10th, 11:45 am-1:15pm
Tracey Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School & Elizabeth Hinton, Associate Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History at Yale, in conversation with Gwen Prowse
Zoom link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/96972807676
The FAS Senate will post information and Zoom links for all such future events on our website. In the coming year we also look forward to hosting events with Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, members of the administration, and other stakeholders, as well as town hall discussions that can bring the community together to hear each other out and to think alongside one another.
Thanks to all who have been giving their energy and thought to this issue—in particular to our colleague Phil Goff, who gave an illuminating presentation earlier today.