Last Thursday, Angela Davis spoke at an event organized by a Northwestern Black students’ organization, For Members Only. Davis started the conversation about abolition and transformative by thanking Black students at NU for their activism and all the work they were putting into fighting for abolition on their campus. She repeatedly told the student that they “need police out of our schools” because they “don’t solve problems [and] they generally make matters worse.” The event had a distinctly hopeful edge, with the community coming together after weeks of demonstrations.
The visit came at the heels of Halloween night, when many students were bending pandemic rules to play dress up. That night, 150 Northwestern students marched in Evanston to protest what they saw as a system of racist and violent policing by the university’s law enforcement, but were met with police in riot gear. According to student testimonies published in The Daily Northwestern, an hour and a half into the march, protestors were flanked and then pepper-sprayed by the Evanston Police and the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System. One student was also arrested and released 6 hours later after NU Community Not Cops, the organization that had arranged and led the protest, paid her bond.
NU Community Not Cops (NUCNC) has been the student-led force behind the abolition movement at Northwestern University. It was formed over the summer in the wake of a weak administrative response following the brutal murder of George Floyd. On June 3, NUCNC released a petition demanding that Northwestern abolish the Northwestern University Police Department, as well as sever ties with the Evanston and Chicago Police Departments and to simultaneously invest in life-institutions designed to further justice for Black students.
On October 12, after months of frustrating delays and hollow administration commitments, NUCNC launched daily Direct Action, which oftentimes involved a march through Evanston and to university President Schapiro’s house. On October 19, President Schapiro wrote an email that went out to the student body and families condemning the protests that he said “disgusted” him. He reiterated that the university had “no intention to abolish the police.”
Schapiro’s email was extremely controversial, and NUCNC and the African-American Studies department were quick to respond with statements criticizing the President for employing anti-Black language. Since then, several departments and programs, as well as 500+ faculty and staff across undergraduate schools, have condemned Schapiro’s email (The Daily Northwestern compiled a comprehensive timeline detailing these developments). NUCNC has continued to organize protests and students have continued to show up.
The weekend before Halloween, we spoke with an NUCNC spokesperson before the escalations took place. They asked to remain anonymous.
In your own words, what are NUCNC’s goals? What does it want to achieve and what is its scope?
NUCNC is an abolitionist group that is calling for Northwestern to divest from NUPD and sever ties with EPD and CPD, both of which have an appalling history of violence against Black, Indigenous, brown and queer folks. Our work emphasizes NU’s commitments and thus demands a divestment from police and an investment into life-giving institutions, the Black community and mental health.
A lot of departments and programs at NU have come out in support of the protests. Could you tell me a little about how faculty can support students and the movement beyond verbal/written [support]?
One thing is that the administration and Morty are rightfully afraid of the coalition of NUCNC. One, if you’re able, come out to the Daily Actions. If you’re not in Evanston/Chicago, you can boost our daily posts [on social media]. You can donate or distribute wealth and Venmo or CashApp we have in our Instagram and Twitter bios. And lastly, faculty can refuse to meet with Morty and the administration until Morty has personally met with us and till he listens to us because he hasn’t since June, which I believe makes it more than 150 days since he last acknowledged us.
The movement at NU is being led by Black students. How do you account for the fact that while non-Black POC and white folks might be allied with the movement, Black students face the greatest emotional burden of it while also being most pointedly targeted by the administration? How does NUCNC make sure that the Black community in particular is afforded the space for self-care?
NUCNC believes in horizontal organisation- there is no hierarchy. Everyone is an equal organiser and participant, meaning that when someone graduates, the information and skills are still part of the organisation. Horizontal organisation allows people to take a step back to focus on themselves if they need to and to let others take their place. Also, vertical organisation and structures, as well as ranking people for evaluation, are reminiscent of white supremacy and colonisation. If we have a vertical hierarchy where we have a President and a Vice President and worker bees, that’d just perpetuate systems we are fighting against and lead to activist burnout.
Well, these tactics are clearly working because the administration is feeling pressured. In fact, the most recent email attempted to provide some “concrete steps” towards justice. I was wondering what you thought about their roadmap, which mentions a Community Safety Oversight Board, which as I understand is a rebranded version of an already existing Police Accountability Board. Where do we go from here?
The Police Accountability Board, which you correctly identified as an older version of the CSOB, did not meet once in the three years of its operation as a board. These steps are absolutely performative and certainly not concrete. The fact that Morty is pleading with faculty or doing his best to buy faculty approval with resuming retirement contributions shows that what we’re doing is working. We need to not focus on the administration’s response because it really doesn’t matter what trivial, empty statements they put out– our goal is still the same. Besides this paltry task force, they’ve also promised to disclose the police budget on November 16 after months of stalling. We are not distracted by this, we already know that an overwhelming portion of the budget goes towards giving amnesty to the NUPD. A misconception about the NUPD is that it is a fledgeling-security-guard-mall-cop kind of thing. These are trained officers– a whole police department full of officers who are getting more and more violent. During our direct actions, they brought riot gear and canine dogs. NUPD is just another extension of American white supremacist and colonial institutions and it shouldn’t be infantilised. We’ve been asking for the budget for months and the fact that they are scrambling to re-contextualise it proves what we already know. We can’t let it detract from what we really want to accomplish.
Since we don’t exist in a bubble, how do we enact abolition within the colonial system of academia which itself is considered an organ of white supremacy? Is abolition of police within NU truly abolition, and can we sustain it, if progress still occurs within the framework of the predominantly white, private university?
That’s something that we have been grappling with, and something I have come to realize is that abolition is not just ideology but it is something you practice every night, like a ritual. So when it comes to undoing these interlocked systems of oppression- of capitalism, and white supremacy, and militarism- abolition is not just something you believe but something you do.
The question of what alternative structures will fill the gap in the absence of carceral solutions might be unproductive, and so what alternative structures already exist, and are already in place at Northwestern, and NU’s peer institutions, that we can build on?
We’re all still working to build these structures, but I hesitate when people talk about abolition as an alternative to policing because that makes other people think of community policing and no one wants to be police, theoretically. Plus, when we speak of “alternatives,” that reminds me of language of reform and we are not about that. When it comes to community safety, we need to lean more towards mental health providers and therapists because even social workers can police you in some ways. Black communities have been not calling cops for decades. Plus, there are ways in which most college students practice abolition without realizing it. So if you’re at a party, and your friend is super drunk and they need to go home, you don’t call the police. Your first instinct is to call an Uber home, or go home with them and make sure they get there safe. And so this is like community support. The police aren’t the solution to supporting your friend, and even if they’re in danger, health services are a better option. We need to take this framework and thought process to other situations. We can take this to mental health situations like if someone is having a manic episode, or is suicidal, because the police do not have the tools or wherewithal to de-escalate.
So community support would focus resources and energy in re-centering and rehabilitating the victim rather than exacting punitive measures. I know that the Black community is often seen as monolithic, especially politically, but Black people exist all across the political spectrum. Many might in fact not be in support of abolition or this movement. I would like to know what NUCNC, and what you, would like to say to Black students who might be opposed to abolition?
The history of the police is that it’s an institution born out of that of slavery, and for the purpose of the subjugation of our people through slave patrol. And as time has gone by, these patrols were just reformed and also made more powerful, this system isn’t broken. It is doing its job, which is to maintain and protect white supremacy. We were formed to hold the administration accountable, because you can’t celebrate the people who came before us, who brought about the 1968 Bursar’s takeover and the 2016 Black Student Experience Task Force and then condemn current protests. More than 50 years later, we’re still fighting for the same things. The scenarios of sexual assault and mass shootings, which is what we bring up when defending police, have not been prevented by the cop. Within the punitive framework in which law enforcement operates, they have not been able to bring people justice, and so when we’re talking about abolition, it just comes down to humanity. You value people, and it might sound cheesy, but you value their lives and their struggle and their personhood because abolition is about love. I love and want to protect y’all and abolition helps me do that.
