No Cops On Campus Collective

11/08/2023

THURSDAY! SHUT IT DOWN FOR PALESTINE. STUDENTS WALK OUT. Meet at 2.10pm on Thursday Nov 9th at 87 ave and 112 street. From the River to the Sea!

11/02/2023

Please join NO COPS ON CAMPUS for “Sign Making for Palestine” on Friday November 3rd, from 3-4.30pm in OLD ARTS 430 at the University of Alberta. Come and make signs with us to support Saturday’s national day of action! From Edmonton to Palestine, land back now!

03/02/2022

SAVE -- Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton supports the No Cops on Campus Collective. Read their solidarity statement below:

03/01/2022

A statement on transit safety and policing by the No Cops on Campus Collective:

In recent months, various media outlets (see also here) in Edmonton, Alberta have published articles and opinion columns sounding the…

06/18/2021

On June 21st, , the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta. We continue our look at why removing police from campus is fundamental in terms of the University of Alberta adhering to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action with Call to Action 31

Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action 31: We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to provide sufficient and stable funding to implement and evaluate community sanctions that will provide realistic alternatives to imprisonment for Aboriginal offenders and respond to the underlying causes of offending.

We are often led to believe that carceral responses are the best we can muster to deal with crime. This excuse serves as a smokescreen to the clear alternatives that are evident around us and restricts us from building the capacity to exist in spaces without the police. The Prairies have the highest incarceration rates in so-called Canada, and yet the Prairies have always had strong alternatives to imprisonment existing within Indigenous models of law. One of these, the Cree model of Wahkohtowin, highlights the responsibilities and reciprocal obligations between human and more-than-human beings. As a model of kinship, Wahkohtowin is contrasted against the settler model of policing, which individualizes and alienates us from each other.

The University of Alberta routinely embraces the language of Wahkohtowin, centring it within its strategies to Indigenize the institution. Despite this, the University remains committed to settler models of law and order; the Liaison Officer Program encapsulates this. As decision-makers frame the University’s growth around freedom and inclusion, they continue to invest in policing. Of course, during a time of brutal austerity when hundreds of academic and non-academic staff are losing their positions, and tuition rises by thousands of dollars, the police receive more funding and a chance to increase their presence.

The Canadian state proudly states its commitments to reconciliation and at the same time uses armed forces to invade unceded Indigenous territories. Simultaneously, Universities claim to be centres of progress and Indigenization while they contribute to harms against Indigenous peoples. The creation and continuation of the Liaison Officer program represents a failure to exist beyond the status quo. Sharing messages of reconciliation and Wahkohtowin means that the University must commit to its words. The University now has dozens of opportunities to push for strong social safety nets and practices of harm reduction, protecting ALL members of the university, including those who do not attend it.

The police do not stop crimes from happening, but rather serve as a sink of resources better spent on transformative approaches. On Monday, June 21 -- National Indigenous Peoples Day -- we will be delivering our open letter calling for an end to the Liaison Officer program. We deserve better than sticking to the same models of safety that harm more people than they help, and we deserve to work together towards a collective capacity of safety and assistance. Through its messaging, the University has alluded to this same belief, but it has yet to prove it. Please sign our letter if you have not done so yet.

06/17/2021

On June 21st, Indigenous Peoples Day, the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta. We continue our look at why removing police from campus is fundamental in terms of the University of Alberta adhering to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action with Call to Action 30.

Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action 30: We call upon federal, provincial, and territorial governments to commit to eliminating the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody over the next decade, and to issue detailed annual reports that monitor and evaluate progress in doing so.

The Prairies have the highest rates of incarceration within so-called Canada. In prisons, Indigenous people represent anywhere from one third to three quarters of all prisoners. Last week, we posted about the school-to-prison pipeline, which occurs among primarily Black and Indigenous communities that are under-resourced and over-policed. Instead of believing that Universities are immune or a third-party to this system, let us position them directly within it.

The current proposal of a Clean Air strategy by the University, which would ban smoking on campus, represents a case through which Universities explicitly force Indigenous peoples into interactions with policing. Instead of engaging students in an approach to smoking that enshrines harm reduction, the University returns to carceral solutions.

Forcing students to engage with peace officers on campus leaves the impression of campus as a space that is not for them. If students choose to leave campus to smoke, they are vulnerable to being profiled by police on the boundaries of campus. None of these interactions have to end in an arrest to be considered violent: they lead to a stockpile of stressful incidents that gravely reduce the quality of Black and Indigenous experiences of campus. Repeat interactions with police typically also lead to future interactions. Being “known to police'' is used to cast people as troublemakers worthy of punishment and is necessary for the function of the school-to-prison pipeline. The University is a space where this happens regularly; inviting more police onto campus worsens its impact.

As the University makes written statements on justice and the police, we want to be cautious of the congruence between their words and actions. It is deeply unjust that as students continue to struggle, the University administration cuts services while increasing the cost of education. At the same time, admin increases police presence and reasons for punishment, such as through a ban on smoking.

There is a clear link between the decision to increase police presence on campus and adverse experiences of post-secondary. Conversely, once we move beyond the “solution” of policing, we can begin to transform our experiences with each other, as well as moving towards the liberatory motives that the University often tries to embody. This is impossible to complete so long as programs like the Liaison Officer or the “Clean Air” strategy are central to campus policy. We support groups like the Aboriginal Students Council that are pushing back against the policy and encourage you to consider the intersection of these policies with the University’s long legacy of harm. We also invite you to sign onto the open letter calling for an end to the Liaison Officer program.

06/16/2021

On June 21st, Indigenous Peoples Day, the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta. We continue our look at why removing police from campus is fundamental in terms of the University of Alberta adhering to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action with Call to Action 57.

57: We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to provide education to public servants on the history of Aboriginal peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.

The No Cops on Campus Collective believes that the colonial, anti-Black carceral logics upon which policing is founded leads to oppressive, violent, and racist policing practices. As such, implementing TRC Call to Action 57 would require deep investment in re-educating public servants and society at large about accepting that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and foundational importance of Indigenous law must be practiced and enacted. This investment is fundamental to counter the damaging power that policing, prisons, and other carceral institutions have on Indigenous communities and ways of life. Call to Action 57 thus requires more than simply reforming the police. Rather, to accomplish these goals it requires defunding the police so as to free up resources and create room to remake the social order in accordance with Indigenous law and treaty rights.

This is why we call for an immediate end to the Police Liaison Officer Program at the University of Alberta. We also call upon the provincial government of Alberta to provide resources that the University can invest in education and initiatives rooted in these alternative visions demanded by the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action.

If you have not done so already, please sign the letter at nocopsoncampus.com

06/12/2021

On June 21st, Indigenous Peoples Day, the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta.

Today we look at the Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action 38:

38. We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial, and Aboriginal governments to commit to eliminating the overrepresentation of Aboriginal youth in custody over the next decade.

As of 2018, Indigenous youth represent 43% of youth incarcerated in Canada, yet only 8.8% of the national youth population. The school-to-prison pipeline, or nexus, as some have further articulated, charts how getting into trouble at school is often an early and formative encounter with carceral coloniality for many racialized youth.

As many have pointed out, the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Indigenous people is mirrored by the regulatory and disciplinary school system. “Special” and streaming programs are two examples of settler-colonial educational strategies geared towards managing behaviors and controlling the school social body, by targeting those who deviate from the norm, or who have needs that are not met by the school.

Further, while colonial educational institutions themselves operate through carceral logics, schools also push Indigenous and racialized youth into the juvenile justice system, a function of the School Resource Officer program that embeds police officers in schools, as well as surveillance by school counsellors and other personnel. By involving SROs and the police in school discipline and security, youth become embroiled in the criminal justice system at an early age, where every subsequent encounter leads to harsher punishments.

Colonial education is a vital mechanism of settler-colonial assimilation, regulation, and discipline. This was true of the residential schools, and this is true now of an education system that continues to enact systemic violence against, and surveillance of, Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and community members.

NCOC recognizes that as an educational institution supposedly committed to Reconciliation, the University of Alberta has a responsibility to disrupt the school-to-prison nexus. Ending the police liaison officer program is one way to demonstrate this commitment. If you have not signed our letter, please do so, it will be delivered on June 21, National Indigenous Peoples day.
https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSdPnJBd130.../viewform...

06/10/2021

On June 21st, Indigenous Peoples Day, the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta.

Today we look at the Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action 63, which calls for "building student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy and mutual respect."

"Abolition is about building our collective capacities to imagine and build worlds we want to live in. It is also about learning to critically interrogate the structures of power that shape our present circumstances. In settler-colonial contexts like Canada, this means that calls to defund and abolish the police are strengthened by continually studying the entanglements of settler colonial law and policies with policing, incarceration, and other penal institutions.

For example, it is important to understand that the emergence of the North West Mounted Police played a strong role in the making of the Numbered Treaties, especially Treaty 6. Treaty 6 is an important agreement made between representatives of the British Crown and Indigenous nations in 1876, with amendments made in subsequent years. As nêhiyaw (Cree) legal scholar Sharon Venne notes, Treaty 6 is the agreement which allows non-Indigenous people to live on Indigenous territories in the Plains. While the treaties are supposed to be “nation-to-nation” agreements between sovereign powers entered into freely with the intentions of reciprocity, non-interference, and mutual respect, early police forces in Canada threatened Indigenous leaders who would not sign treaties with incarceration. In fact, Indigneous leaders like Poundmaker and Big Bear who refused to sign Treaty 6 initially were criminalized and imprisoned by the settler state.

TRC Call to Action 63 calls upon the Council of Ministers of Education in Canada to build the capacities of students at all levels of education to partake in opportunities to foster “intercultural understanding, empathy, and respect.” Part of building these capacities is being clear eyed and critical about how the logic and practice of policing has shaped Indigenous-settler relations in the present moment. This critical orientation to education should not only be expressed in our classrooms, but should be met with concrete changes to institutions of learning. This is why we are calling on the University of Alberta to eliminate the Police Liaison Officer Program. Please sign our open letter calling for the end of this program. "

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdPnJBd130gKBO-2AMtKun4YY5afepCbjKHzcqh3wHr2NSKOA/viewform?gxids=7628

06/07/2021

On June 21st, Indigenous Peoples Day, the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta. You can support the letter by signing it https://forms.gle/Ze2BD9HhpMi2p8Xe9
Today we start our look at why removing police from campus is fundamental in terms of the adhering to the Truth and Reconciliation with Call to Action 47.

TRC Call to Action 47 states: We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, and to reform those laws, government policies, and litigation strategies that continue to rely on such concepts.

The University of Alberta is located on Papaschase land. We know this and are reminded of it in the territorial acknowledgements included in email signatures and opening statements at campus events. Why then is University of Alberta Protective Services (UAPS) given the authority to decide who is and who isn’t allowed on campus? How can the University justify continuing to uphold European declared sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands?

Most people do not know that UAPS has the power to stop any individual on campus and request student ID or a formal letter of invitation from the U of A. If that individual is unable to produce either of these they can be “escorted” off campus. Unfortunately, we have witnessed this too many times, and each time the person has been targeted for not looking like what UAPS has decided a university student or guest should look like. It is clear that the racist and classist conventions of policing have shaped each incident of carding that has happened to those we know. In addition, on multiple occasions, these carded folks have not been escorted off campus but, instead, they have been forcibly detained by UAPS for further interrogation and intimidation. This violent practice reinforces the systems of white supremacy and classism that built the U of A into the institution it is today. The U of A has made public claims of decolonizing and committing to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. It is obvious that these claims are not supported in practice, as clearly exemplified by UAPS mandate to ensure the continued policing and retention of stolen land.
https://forms.gle/Ze2BD9HhpMi2p8Xe9

06/06/2021

CW: Residential schools / Canadian state violence against Indigenous people

On June 21st, Indigenous Peoples Day, the No Cops on Campus Collective will deliver our letter to end the Police Liaison Officer program at the University of Alberta. We chose this day because the history of policing in so-called Canada, and particularly in the Prairies, is inseparable from the dispossession and forceful removal of Indigenous peoples from their land. This dispossession has taken -- and continues to take -- multiple forms. The recent reminder of at least 215 children murdered by the residential school system in Tk'emlúps/Kamloops, and the many more children murdered and abused by this system, makes clear that the history of residential schools is foremost a history of the relationship between policing, incarceration, and education. Police actively participated in and enforced the theft of Indigenous children from their homes, their culture, their language, and their communities under the guise of "education." Today, policing continues to structure our educational institutions, from schools to universities, through systemic violence against and surveillance of Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and community members. The school to prison pipeline disciplines and criminalizes Indigenous students as a foundational practice of, and pathway to, future incarceration.

From now until June 21st, we will draw attention to the intersections of policing and settler-colonial dispossession because we know that there can be no abolition without decolonization. You can sign the open letter at https://forms.gle/tAou4ZKwqRBth2j28