On Wednesday, August 28, 2024, the University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security (DPSS), through officers from the UM Police Department (UMPD), arrested four activists who participated in a die-in action protesting the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. This is just the most recent public incidence of the University’s violent repression of those who dare to take principled action against the University’s complicity in the mass destruction of the Palestinian people and their lands.
In the past year, the University has shown that violence is central to the everyday operations of the institution, both through its refusal to divest from an ethnostate actively committing genocide, and through its use of police and surveillance to mete out violence against protestors, track leaders of pro-Palestinian struggle, and ban activists from campus grounds. The politics and values that inform University leadership’s ongoing support for the maintenance of Israel as a settler colonial ethnostate are reflected in the ways that they carry out repression of pro-Palestinian organizing on campus. Through the endowment, the University invests in technologies that the state of Israel uses to constrain the movement of Palestinians and mark them for death. In Ann Arbor, the University directly wields police forces, surveillance cameras, and administrative processes to constrain, in an eerily similar way, the movements of students and community members. Protests, occupation of space, and calls for material change by the University have been consistently met with repression and violence.
In its repression, the University has also disproportionately targeted Black and Brown activists and organizers. These activists have reported being subjected to racial profiling, pretextual stops by DPSS, escalations in use of police force, and detainments and arrests that violate constitutionally protected rights. We are also aware of at least one incident that resulted in sexual contact with a DPSS officer while a protestor was being detained. This racist targeting and repression of campus activists has been carried out as University leadership trumpets its own diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and has launched the so-called “Year of Democracy and Civic Engagement.”
Ironically, these events have also unfolded in the wake of President Ono’s promise during a September 21, 2023 Board of Regents meeting to develop an unarmed, non-police response force for the campus. Graduate workers of GEO, knowing that police officers with guns are a threat to campus, negotiated and struck for an unarmed non-police response force for the UM campus. Since President Ono’s statement nearly a year ago, we have not seen or heard any news of this promised unarmed, non-police response force. We instead have seen the most intense use of police presence in any of our community’s memory, including the over 50 cop cars called in response to the November 17 sit-in of the Ruthven Administration building.
President Ono, Provost McCauley and Dean Harmon’s August 31 email, “Upholding our values and our policies”, suggests that none of those who were arrested during the diag protest in late August are UM faculty, students, or staff. Just as we reject the racist targeting of activists, we stand against the targeting of members of the local community, who are no more deserving of police violence and repression than those who hold a UM ID.
As GSIs and graduate workers of this campus who are invested in the safety of this community:
We condemn the University’s continued choice to violently repress and silence pro-Palestine organizers in the name of orderliness.
We call on the University to drop all charges against pro-Palestine activists and to end the use of police forces that are specifically targeting Black and Brown leaders of this movement.
We call on the University to uphold its promise of an unarmed non-police response force developed by community members.
This November will mark the 10 year anniversary that Aura Rosser, an unarmed Black woman, was murdered by Ann Arbor police. The AAPD police chief at the time, John Seto, is now the Deputy Director of DPSS. Aura’s death helped to drive the years of organizing and activism that lead to the calls for an unarmed, non-police response force for Ann Arbor. We call on other members of the Ann Arbor community to remember Aura, to see the violence and racism of UMPD and AAPD’s actions towards pro-Palestine organizers and activists, and to join us in calling for alternative forms of safety for our community now.
Solidarity,
GEO Abolition Caucus & the UM Safety Not Cops
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