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4 GROUNDCOVER NEWS OPINION DECEMBER 30, 2022 “Fund safety, not police:” How U-M administration makes us less safe and stifles alternatives U-M GRADUATE EMPLOYEES' ORGANIZATION ABOLITION CAUCUS On November 17, as University of Michigan President Santa Ono was leaving after his speech at the Ross School of Business, he was confronted by a march of two hundred members of Graduate Employees Organization 3550. This march, which kicked off our union’s contract negotiations with the University, featured speakers calling for a living wage and for a campus free from policing. Our march was trailed by four U-M police cruisers. Ono’s hasty departure presented an opportunity: two GEO members held up a banner, created during the 2020 strike, to block the president’s path and prevent him from continuing to ignore us. The banner read “FUND SAFETY NOT POLICE.” The underlining of “ICE” also signals GEO’s current demands for codifying protections for international graduate student-workers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The two students were quickly pushed aside by members of the President’s security detail, eager to shuffle off the disruption so Ono could return to business-as-usual. Each year, the University of Michigan spends over $32 million on policing and security. While the university’s endowment reached a record $17 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic, essential student services (such as Counseling Services, Services for Students with Disabilities, and the Center for the Education of Women) remain underfunded and the salaries of graduate students and other workers have not kept up with the rising cost of living in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County. This is why, in fall 2020, GEO went on strike for a safe and just campus. In the two years since, U-M has failed to redirect funds from policing. It has instead used diversion and counterinsurgency tactics, such as starting a toothless task force on public safety and a scholarship in the name of George Floyd. It has also attempted to normalize policing across campus. Under the “Ambassadors Program,” the university sent campus police officers and work-study students to enforce social distancing rules — a plan that was quickly canceled under pressure from the undergraduate Students of Color Liberation Front and the 2020 strike. As we wrote in the Michigan Daily earlier this year, “When it comes to campus safety, the university is trapped in an endless cycle of scandals and promises to do better.” U-M is quick to cry poor when it’s cutting budgets, freezing wages and raising tuition; yet the cost of policing continues to grow. The Division of Public Safety and Security, which houses the U-M Police Department, currently receives over $32 million dollars annually from the university. But what do they actually do in and around campus with this enormous budget? To answer this question, we obtained the daily activity logs of U-M police from January 2001 through July 2022. These data reveal several crucial facts that support the abolitionist call to dismantle U-M police and redirect its resources towards the life-affirming services that graduate workers, undergraduate students, staff, faculty and community members need. First, the vast majority of U-M police activity is not in response to violence, but rather to property crimes like a stolen bike or laptop, traffic violations, or drug and alcohol use. In 2021 for example, there were over 200 police activity logs related to drug or alcohol use. Likewise, most arrests are for drug and alcohol offenses (33%), traffic violations (13%), or disorderly conduct (18%). Disorderly behavior includes people experiencing a mental health crisis, urinating in public, and sleeping, resting, or hanging out in public spaces (such as the Nichols Arboretum). Contrary to what the cops say, it is police involvement in such things that is the major source of violence in communities. These statistics show how U-M police criminalize poverty, displace the poor, and effectively control who is allowed to be in or near campus — thereby further gentrifying the Ann Arbor area. Second, U-M police are involved in situations they shouldn’t be — and they make things worse. For example, campus hospitals are major hot spots for police activity. Michigan Medicine pays tens of millions of dollars to maintain a Division of Public Safety and Security presence in hospitals. As a result, people seeking care are harassed and arrested for things like possession of marijuana; the narrative “Marijuana was found in patient property” appeared 128 times in the police logs in 2022 alone. This is part of a long history of medical providers collaborating with police and other state agencies to criminalize or commit disabled people; those with unmet mental health and/ or housing needs; Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer and trans people; and immigrants. For many marginalized groups, seeking care comes with surveillance, policing, punishment and Percentage of police activity between 2001-2022 that involved arrests, broken down by police activity type (excluding ambulance/fire calls). Absolute numbers of arrests shown in parentheses. control. Policing in hospitals negatively impacts patient and community health outcomes. Police violate patient-provider confidentiality and trust and deter patients from seeking out necessary care out of fear of persecution by police, as well as child/family welfare and immigration authorities. In U-M’s case, we found that police are often called to handle suspected cases of domestic violence, child neglect, or mental health crises (including suicide attempts). All of these are serious matters that the police are ill-equipped to handle, and which require a noncarceral, non-police, community-controlled and anti-racist response. Third, U-M police directly collaborate with other police agencies, from the Ann Arbor Police Department to the Washtenaw County’s Sheriff’s office to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The logs reveal that U-M police have detained and turned people over to these other police forces, including ICE. Campus police are thus part of the larger system of racist violence that inspired the 2020 uprisings and GEO’s strike. The recent U-M task force on policing has failed to provide more information about these collaborations. Aligning with police is predictable given that U-M’s current Director of Housing Security, John Seto, was the Chief of the AAPD when police shot and killed Aura Rosser, a Black woman, during a domestic dispute (Aura had moved to Ann Arbor to find safe access to community mental health). These are only three main takeaways about U-M police activities. For more, see the interactive map on the GEO website: abolitiongeo.org. You can use this map to see what U-M police do in the place where you work, study, teach, and live — and ask yourselves whether this keeps you safe. Yet this data is incomplete. The map does not show the activities of police forces that collaborate with U-M police, such as ICE or AAPD. The City of Ann Arbor has denied our FOIA request for similar data on AAPD’s activities, and the city administrator, Milton Dohoney, subsequently denied our appeal. The data are also incomplete with respect to U-M police activities. Critical information is missing, including the race of the people arrested by U-M police during each incident, which the DPSS website does not make available. We know these data exist because the Michigan State Police publishes aggregated statistics about arrests made by U-M police broken down by race. U-M has denied our Freedom of Information Act request for these data, and the University President’s office has rejected our appeal of that decision. In a letter dated September 15, 2022, the Office of the President wrote that “the university is not required to make a compilation, summary or report of information, nor create a new public record, in order to respond to your request,” and pointed us to the existing DPSS website which doesn’t contain the information we have requested. This chain of events demonstrates that the university president is also the campus’s top cop: actively committed to concealing police activities amid calls for even a modicum of transparency. While the recent U-M task force on policing has called for more transparency, so far we have only faced institutional opacity. This active hiding of the racist nature of policing is intended to protect police power and undermine abolitionist efforts to build safe alternatives. But police power can and must be dismantled. Crucially, U-M police is relatively new. The campus police was see POLICE next page 

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