Policing Campus Protests

College campuses across the country celebrate their legacies of creating free speech guarantees following student protests from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, even though colleges had minimal tolerance of such protests at the time. As part of the New Left’s vision for a different society, students, sometimes joined by faculty, demanded an end to the Vietnam War and war industry research, fought for Black and ethnic studies departments, and protested urban renewal plans that displaced Black working-class communities.

We are experiencing another transformative moment. Lawmakers and other stakeholders pressure university administrators to act against students or face funding cuts. Police repression follows, escalating into violence. Universities create or enlarge their own police or security forces in response, while also expanding codes of conduct to quash disruptive protest activity. This Symposium Piece traces the throughlines between university responses in the past and today.

columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Patel-Final-Aug.17.pdf

More articles on Protests can be found HERE

Data Shows Significant Decline in Police Violence in California – Davis Vanguard

Note: There is no exact definition for Police Violence. Many times Police Violence is defined as any force used by the police. This is a poor and misleading definition. At the end of the article the point is made that “Red States” are driving increases of police violence. This can be because of legitimate uses of police use of force.

California law enforcement officers killed fewer people, fired fewer shots, and used force less often in 2024 than in any year since the state began tracking the data, according to an analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle, while red states such as Texas and Florida saw an increase in police killings.
— Read on davisvanguard.org/2025/08/california-officer-involved-shootings/

Appeals court upholds punishment for Cambridge cop| Universal Hub

A federal appeals court in Boston yesterday upheld the administrative leave and four-day suspension a veteran Cambridge cop got for a 2021 Facebook post in which he called police-brutality victim George Floyd  “a career criminal, a thief and druggie,” concluding the Cambridge Police Department’s need to maintain its “public trust” outweighed his First Amendment right to post his thoughts off duty on his personal Facebook page. Read more.
— Read on www.universalhub.com/2025/appeals-court-upholds-punishment-cambridge-cop-who-called-george-floyd

Anatomy of a Ferguson Cycle – by Charles Fain Lehman

Back in 2015, my Manhattan Institute colleague Heather MacDonald popularized the term “Ferguson effect” to refer to a dramatic increase in homicide which (the term and she implied) was caused by the wave of protests, in turn instigated by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the year before. The homicide rate rose 11 percent in 2015, and another 10 percent in 2016, before cresting and receding. This, MacDonald and others argued at the time, was the result of a reduction in police proactivity, itself caused by political attacks on and criticism of the police in the wake of Brown’s death (among other high-profile incidents).
— Read on thecausalfallacy.com/p/anatomy-of-a-ferguson-cycle