After the decision to simultaneously bring the Los Angeles Police Department to USC and close our campus to the surrounding community, President Carol Folt made the University a hostile place for many students, staff, faculty and community members. These decisions not only prevented students from speaking freely on campus through demonstrations but also cut off the surrounding community from a staple in their neighborhood, which created an even deeper divide between USC and the South Central community. 

While overpolicing should be criticized wherever it happens, the overpolicing of USC’s campus is particularly heinous. Situated in South Central with a majority Black and Latine population surrounding the University, the unprecedented number of LAPD officers on campus made the surrounding area immeasurably more dangerous for residents of color, who are stopped, searched and arrested by LAPD far more than their white counterparts, according to a 2008 study by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. 

For Folt to bring LAPD to remove the encampment protesters in the name of campus safety was a complete farce. If Folt truly cared about “campus safety,” she would not have used police to escalate tensions on campus and brutalize students. She would have continued to meet with the encampment leaders including the Divest from Death Coalition and found collaborative solutions to her problems with the encampment. 

For a school that strives to make its campus an ethnically and racially diverse place, this lack of care for students and community members was disappointing — but not shocking. Over the years, USC has continuously made decisions without consulting members of the South Central community, demonstrating that the University doesn’t care about how its actions affect the community around it. 

One of the biggest examples of this was the choice to overhaul USC Village and turn a place once full of local businesses into student housing. USC Village formerly consisted of locally owned and affordable businesses which were replaced by more expensive counterparts such as Target and Trader Joe’s.

The overpolicing over the past few weeks has made underrepresented groups, and especially Black and undocumented students, feel wary about coming to campus. A Tulane University study conducted using public school students from New Orleans during the 2018-19 school year found that the majority of Black students do not feel safer with police presence. For undocumented students, they fear that run-ins with police can lead to surprise deportation. Forty-eight percent of Black Americans do not trust police to treat Black and white people equally, according to a 2020 PBS NewsHour-NPR-Marist poll. 

USC students of color are no strangers to the brutality and harm that police perpetrate against people of color, so to subject them to unnecessary encounters with police on their own campus is just plain cruel. These communities are often the targets of state violence at the hands of police. Folt’s unnecessary show of force has made campus an unsafe place for students of color and undocumented students and completely ostracized them from campus facilities and campus life during what should be a time of celebration. 

Instead, this graduation season has become a time of anxiety, with many students feeling unwelcome on the campus that they have called home for four years. DPS officers scanning student IDs for access to campus and searching backpacks upon entry conjure up images of Transportation Security Administration lines at airports — which is not something that is usually associated with the end of a school year. With these extra security checkpoints, some USC students, staff and faculty experienced racial profiling, with several Black Faculty in Residence being denied entry while a white faculty member was allowed in.  

From helicopters constantly flying overhead during my German final exam to long lines waiting to get to campus, these things compromised my ability to learn far more than any protest ever did. I can confidently, and without reservation, say that the pro-Palestinian encampment and protests on campus posed significantly less risk and distraction to me than the LAPD. 

With that, I hope — no, I implore — Folt and any future University president to not choose to bring police onto campus in response to peaceful student protests. This egregious show of force in the name of public safety did not make USC safer and instead put the most vulnerable of our students, staff, faculty and surrounding community at risk. USC must do better.