Inspired by the indictment of a University of Cincinnati police officer for the murder of a man stopped for lacking a front license plate, Vox uncovers — for me anyway — a piece of history about which I knew nothing. Until the 1960s, Libby Nelson reports, “campus security at many colleges wasn’t anyone’s full-time job.” Instead, colleges assembled a “system of professors, administrators, and watchmen and maintenance workers.” The eruption of protests in campuses nationwide led administrators to question the appearance of local sheriffs, not only out of jurisdiction but ill-trained to deal with a volatile group:
But well into the 20th century, campus security at many colleges wasn’t anyone’s full-time job. It was a patched-together system of professors, administrators, and watchmen and maintenance workers.
The exception was Yale, where two police officers from New Haven were assigned to campus in 1894. The official origin story is that rumors that Yale medical students were stealing cadavers from New Haven graveyards had led to violence and riots in New Haven. But this is quite possibly apocryphal; there’s no record of such a riot in 1894, and New Haven’s violent riots over body-snatching actually occurred 70 years earlier.
But Yale’s police weren’t full-time, and few universities followed their lead, Sloan said. In the 1960s, though, local police were increasingly called to campuses to deal with student protests. Those encounters often turned violent.
College presidents began to lobby state legislatures for the right to create their own police departments, where officers would have a constant presence and become part of the campus community rather than being seen as “some kind of invading army” when something went wrong, Sloan said.
At my university we’ve got a well-armed force with hi-tech gizmos and assault rifles courtesy of the feds.
Humanizing The Vacuum 