As scholar-activists, the authors explore efforts of police disarmament within the context of an emerging social movement sweeping the University of California system. The Disarm UC coalition challenges the myth of policing as necessary for the production of a “safe” society, especially in an era in which fear-mongering has helped to naturalize far-right and authoritarian systems of control. Instead, this article asks how policing is always already a violent system within the American academy and how these historical precursors normalize the current militarization and mobilization of lethal force within universities. Such normalized violence reproduces historical inequities within academia and has material consequences for students and workers. Finally, the authors explore how social movements like Disarm UC disrupt police violence within the university, producing new social and material conditions for change.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.