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June 3, 2020

To President Morton Schapiro, the Northwestern Board of Trustees, Interim Provost Kathleen Hagerty, and Vice President for Student Affairs Julie Payne-Kirchmeier,

This letter arises through a collaboration among undergraduate and graduate student leaders and organizations at Northwestern. As letter writers, reviewers, and signatories, we reflect, recognize, and build on the ongoing leadership of Black students and Black student organizations in calling for Northwestern to invest in life-giving institutions and divest from law enforcement.

This letter builds on a long history of organizing and actions by Black students, staff, and faculty to improve the Black student experience and commit to life-giving institutions. These actions include the Bursar's Office Takeover in 1968, student demands in 2016, and the Black Student Experience Task Force in 2016. We acknowledge these efforts and urge Northwestern to commit to honoring them and answering new calls to invest in the health and well-being of Black student communities.

As we continue to reinvest in life-giving institutions, we understand there is also a need to divest from the institutions that harm us. After University of Minnesota students wrote a powerful letter calling for the university to sever their relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department in response to MPD’s police murder of George Floyd, the University of Minnesota has cut ties with the MPD, calling the video of Floyd’s murder “appalling.”

Inspired by this action, the broader Black Lives Matter movement, and the Chicago-based Assata’s Daughters and  #NoCopAcademy, we call on Northwestern University to serve as a model for peer institutions and take a public stand against racist police violence by cutting ties with the EPD and CPD, two departments with an appalling history of violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, gender non-conforming, and trans communities. While police violence terrorizes all these communities, we want to acknowledge that policing is a specifically anti-Black institution, that Black victims are at the center of the current protest, and that Black rebellion, protest, and outrage are fueling the current moment. In line with the ongoing work of Black cis, trans, and queer youth organizers and organizers of color in Chicago advocating for the abolition of policing, we call on Northwestern to divest financially and sever ties with EPD, CPD, and all other programs or entities which support, educate, or otherwise benefit law enforcement.

With this in mind, we strongly urge the Northwestern administration to take the following actions:

1. Invest in life-giving institutions and commit to the health and wellbeing of Black student communities.
2. Immediately sever all formal contracts and informal relationships with the Evanston Police Department (EPD) and Chicago Police Department (CPD); disarm, defund, and disband the Northwestern University Police Department (NUPD); and divest from the Center for Public Safety and other law enforcement and military agencies.

Divesting from and severing ties with EPD, CPD, and NUPD AND investing in Black communities and experiences are both necessary steps to ensure the physical and emotional security of Black students. Divestment without investment is ignoring ongoing instances of anti-Black racism on campus; investment without divestment is actively ignoring the white supremacy inherent in systems and institutions endorsed by Northwestern. More information about each action is included below.

INVEST & RECOMMIT

To invest & commit to the health and well-being of the Black community, we call on the University to:

1. Recommit to the Bursar’s Takeover Demands and the recommendations from the 2016 Black Student Experience Task Force Report;
2. Create a policy that protects students that protest on campus and disavows forms of intimidation including but not limited to, threats of expulsion or suspension by the university;
3. Ensure that injuries sustained in the course of community-based activism are included in coverage provided by NU-SHIP;
4. Create a fund or grant meant for students to receive support from the university if they are faced with legal fees or issues after participating in protests or political activism;
5. Finals must be made optional for the Spring 2020 quarter grades and final assignments cannot negatively impact students (same format as Winter 2020 quarter);
6. Allocate significant resources and funds to activist groups involved in pursuing justice for the Black community, including but not limited to Chicago Community Bond Fund Black Lives Matter, and NoCopAcademy;
7. Form a committee to investigate avenues for reparations for Northwestern;

1. Should there be any ties to slavery found, the University must make a public statement/apology;

8. Provide free counseling and publicize it through campus-wide communication channels to Black students in times of crisis after anti-Black racist incidents occur.

We, as a collective, want to emphasize the importance of a sustained commitment to and investment in life-giving institutions and structures of support for Black students. Northwestern is a predominantly white institution that has historically been  and continues to be a psychologically and physically harmful place for Black students. Our presence on this campus is often challenged and criminalized. Such racist incidents from the 2018-2019 academic year alone, include, but are not limited to, the University’s refusal to remove a eugenicist from campus, “it's okay to be white” stickers, and the noose left in the Henry Crown Sports Pavilion. These experiences are compounded by the systems of oppression we are subjected to as Black people.

The value of supporting Black students cannot be overstated in the face of these circumstances. This support means not only listening to Black students, but also trusting that we are the best determiners of our own needs. Support and investment is demonstrated when the University follows through on demands Black students made in 1968, echoed in 2016 by students and again in 2016 by administrators,^[1] and continue to make in 2020. We are demanding the university recommit to the unmet demands and our new ones articulated above.

AND

DIVEST

We call on the university to:

1. Cancel all contracts with EPD and CPD for supplemental law enforcement support at sporting events, concerts, or other large events hosted by the university community or at university facilities.
2. Bar EPD and CPD presence at protests organized by members of the Northwestern University community.
3. End any joint patrol programs with EPD and CPD on university owned and affiliated property.
4. End the Emergency Operations Center sharing agreement with EPD and CPD
5. Remove the university’s affiliation with the Center for Public Safety and reallocate funds or resources towards organizations that serve underrepresented students.
6. Disarm, defund, and disband the NUPD and entrust the safety of the university community in unarmed mediation and intervention teams with third-party oversight.
7. Divest from, and release a comprehensive history of investment in, all military and militarized entities, including the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Military, and military-contracting entities, including, but not limited to, the top five weapons manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.

While this call to disassociate and sever ties with EPD was prompted by the murders of George Floyd on May 25th in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor on March 13th in Louisville, Tony McDade on May 27th in Tallahassee, and other recent police murders, it also stems from the fact that EPD has repeatedly abused Northwestern community members and Evanstonians alike, especially Black community members.

• In October of 2015, the Evanston Police stopped a then-PhD engineering student Lawrence Crosby, who was on his way to campus to do lab work, allegedly in response to a call that a car had been stolen nearby. In an incident of anti-Black police brutality, six EPD officers proceeded to knock him to the ground and beat him, and to falsely charge him with disobeying the police, even as a dashboard camera shows him complying.

• In November of 2014, two EPD detectives coerced Jesús Sánchez into falsely confessing to the murder of Rafael Orozco who was killed in May 2013. EPD also used similar tactics on others who were with Sánchez to link him to the crime where he was charged with 12 counts of first-degree murder of Orozco and attempted murder of another man at the scene. Jesús Sánchez was wrongfully convicted and served over four years in prison.

• This past February, the Police Chief Demitrous Cook posted photos on Snapchat of official police documents that included the names, photos, addresses, birthdays, and notes such as “DOA” (dead on arrival), “in custody,” and “HIV” of at least thirty of the EPD’s known subjects potentially under investigation. The photos were almost exclusively of Black men.

• Just last week, police used force to arrest Trent Hunt, who was using his cell phone to record a traffic stop. Police aggressively followed Hunt and tackled him to the ground when he walked away.

• Recent reports show that Black residents in Evanston are disproportionately subject to police harassment. This pattern in the broader Evanston community does not disappear when EPD police Northwestern’s campus, posing a threat to Northwestern’s Black Students and other students of color.  

This pattern of abuse and violence is not limited to the EPD and Evanstonians. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has a long, reprehensible history of racist police violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in Chicago, and Northwestern students of color have not been immune. In 1999, a CPD officer named Van Watt IV murdered NU student and football player Robert Russ–an unarmed Black man–during a traffic stop on Lake Shore Drive. In 2012, CPD officer Dante Servin shot and killed Rekia Boyd, a murder which launched the national #SayHerName campaign highlighting the violence committed by police on Black women. In 2014, the CPD attempted to cover-up the murder of Laquan McDonald by CPD officer Jason Van Dyke. In recognition of this pattern and practice of racist police violence, the City of Chicago entered into a consent decree with the Department of Justice in 2018, a judicially-enforced plan for sustainable reform of the CPD. Nevertheless, the city has failed to comply with the plan having appointed two superintendents, Charlie Beck and David Brown, known not only for their failure to stop, but also their active encouragement of, racist police violence in their former positions in Los Angeles and Dallas. 

Northwestern students, faculty, and alumni have been among the activists and journalists who have catalogued the CPD’s history of racist brutality and fought for justice on behalf of victims. The Pritzker School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center has helped overturn many of the convictions of many of the 200 mostly Black men tortured by CPD Commander Jon Burge between 1972-1991. The law school’s Center for Wrongful Convictions has helped secure the exoneration of many incarcerated Chicagoans who spent decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit and in which the CPD’s misconduct led to wrongful convictions. This important and ongoing work stands in glaring contradiction to the university’s continued relationship with the EPD and CPD.

It is also important to acknowledge that Northwestern has not always acted for justice in the face of racist police murders and targeted criminalization of African American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Northwestern was an early incubator of police science, a rampantly pseudoscientific field ostensibly dedicated to improving police work, but which has long served to help police departments coerce confessions, tamper evidence, and illegally surveil communities. The founding of the Center for Public Safety (CPS) at Northwestern in 1936 was instrumental to the rise of police science.  

CPS has since become an influential center for programs and courses for police departments from all over the country and the world. CPS offers courses and seminars, including one dedicated to “Building Police-Community Partnerships,” designed to improve the performance of police departments. But as the historical record and recent research shows, professionalizing and reforming police departments has little effect in mitigating police brutality. The university cannot, as President Schapiro writes, “grieve at how society tolerates and facilitates injustices, demonstrated so vividly in these and other recent events,” while supporting the activity of institutions like CPS on its campus. We thus call on the university to dissolve the CPS and reallocate those funds to communities on campus that have been historically targeted by racist police violence.

We strongly urge Northwestern to abolish NUPD by disarming, defunding, and disbanding the NUPD, and instead entrust the safety of the university to unarmed mediation and intervention teams with third-party oversight. We want a Northwestern where harm is not handled punitively, but through a restorative justice lens. The process of abolition calls for dismantling oppressive systems, such as policing that maintains injustice and to invest and create community based practices that actually restore and prevent harm. Black students must be a part of and centered in the process of disbanding Northwestern Police. This demand is also not new. In 2018, a group of students called on Northwestern to disarm its police force, but their demands ultimately went unheeded. One year later, at a protest against former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, armed NUPD officers racially profiled, physically assaulted and brutalized student protestors, sparking calls from alumni and student groups for the university to disarm the university police force. Not only has NUPD physically harmed students, but it is part of a troubling trend in private university police forces that are not required to make their activities public or be subjected to any form of public oversight.

Like the CPD and EPD, private university police forces have perpetuated racist police violence in our communities. In 2018, a University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officer shot a UChicago student of color suffering a mental health crisis, leading to large demonstrations from the UChicago community demanding that the UCPD be disarmed and defunded. In 2016, the first year UCPD made their data public, it emerged that every pedestrian  that the UCPD stopped and interviewed was Black. In 2018, 70% of the pedestrians NUPD stopped were Black, which represents only 17.6% of the community NUPD polices.

Finally we note that the federal government’s 1033 Program grants local law enforcement agencies access to surplus or new military equipment. So, as our students are protesting injustice, they are being beaten and brutalized by militarized police officers. Our university should not be invested in these entities, because “a continued investment is morally reprehensible.” For this reason, we call on Northwestern to divest from all militarized entities.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

At its core, policing is premised on the surveillance and social control of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, gender non-conforming, and trans people. As a self-defined elite institution, Northwestern has a responsibility to put pressure wherever necessary to demand justice in the cities of Evanston and Chicago, and to lead other institutions in the divestment of law enforcement agencies.

The persistence and collective memory of racist police violence places a heavy burden on the mental and emotional health of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, gender non-conforming, and trans students already afraid of being surveilled or targeted on campus. For this reason, Northwestern must use the funds resulting from divestment to re-invest in Black student communities.

In response to the murder of George Floyd, President Schapiro released a statement, pledging that he, “and the university, will work toward that end” of making the nation better. These proposed actions provide Schapiro and other campus leaders with an opportunity to honor that pledge. We hope that he, and all those in a position of power to change the university, will move beyond words into action. 

Signed,

For Members Only ● CoalitionNU ● Black Graduate Student Association

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