The Cops Off Campus Coalition is a “coalition of coalitions” building coast to coast across Turtle Island (North America). We are a network of local, regional, and transnational coalitions and collectives of students, educators, other workers, and all other community members impacted by police and policing at all levels of education (K-12, universities, vocational and professional schools, colleges, seminaries, etc.). Guided by the transformative worldview of abolition, we work within our own communities and collectively to forward urgent alternatives to policing that will build a future University beyond punishment and violence.

We mean abolition as informed by numerous intellectual, artistic, and sociopolitical traditions including black/queer/crip feminisms, the worker’s movement, and other radical traditions. In solidarity with the Land Back movement and all people and organizations of similar investment, the Cops Off Campus Coalition coheres around an ongoing commitment to the end of policing and police occupation of sovereign Native land as the (il)logic and procedure by which any and all learning spaces respond to and manage interpersonal harm and the systemic crisis of capital. We advocate for the complete dissolution of policing in all spaces of education (and ultimately across all aspects of our society), the severance of all school contracts with law enforcement agencies, and the dissolution of all task forces that serve to uphold police control and presence on our campuses.

We thus challenge every school administration’s commitment to – and use of – policing, which disproportionately violates Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and poor people and ultimately renders all members of educational campuses and their surrounding communities less safe. Further, it corrupts the mandate of spaces of education to educate rather than to violate and police. We are committed to a free university in every sense, equally accessible to all.