Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Geisel, A.W

Titel

Campus policing and police reform

Ist Teil von

• University of Pennsylvania law review, 2023-06, Vol.171 (6), p.1771-1823

Ort / Verlag

University of Pennsylvania, Law School

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In recent years, several highly-publicized episodes of police violence have inspired calls to reform our nation's municipal police departments. On university campuses, scholars and students alike have joined voices in support of this goal. But despite the popularity of police reform as a topic of advocacy, legal scholars have largely failed to critically examine the police forces that patrol their own campuses. This oversight is a dramatic one, as campus police forces operate at nearly nine-hundred of our nation's institutions of higher learning and collectively employ almost fifteen-thousand officers nationwide. To ensure that this significant portion of the American policing enterprise does not escape scrutiny, this Comment offers legal scholars and students a multifaceted analysis of modern campus policing. First, it catalogues the various state laws that enable campus policing operations and offers a new taxonomy to model their jurisdictional powers. The upshot is that, in most states, campus police have the power to arrest, detain, and use force both on- and off-campus. In many states, these powers are extended to campus police employed by private institutions, creating public-private partnerships that empower unaccountable school employees with one of the most closely-guarded powers in American law-the general police power. To demonstrate how these powers are used in practice, this Comment then presents a case study of campus policing at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, school-sponsored police officers patrol a district that extends beyond campus and into the neighboring streets of University City, where they interact with members of the public who are unaffiliated with Penn but who work or live nearby. Despite this fact, Penn's internal disciplinary system-as well as many of the complimentary services offered by Penn's police department-are available only to Penn-affiliates, not to the public. This differential treatment of school-affiliates and the unaffiliated public, and two other campus policing trends, are critiqued in the Comment's final Part. In addition to pairing these critiques with recommendations for appropriate reform, this Comment demonstrates how campus policing might act as a site for imagining more humane police forces in the municipal context, and encourages scholars to agitate for greater oversight of their own institution's police forces as a means toward actualizing that vision.