The importance of demarcating
a university’s campus from a municipality became more important once
universities created their own police departments, which are distinct from a
city’s police department both in terms of mission and democratic legitimacy. From
the standpoint of a police department, being subject to a university’s administration
is qualitatively different than being a department under a democratically-elected
mayor and city council. I contend that in terms of how university-police
employees treat Black and Hispanic local residents, this fundamental
distinction is crucial even though it is seldom made. UCLA, located in the
Westwood area of Los Angeles in California, is a case in point. So too—and even
more so, is the private Yale University, located in New Haven in
Connecticut.
In 2026, UCLA’s student
newspaper reported that even though Black and Hispanic people made up “less
than a quarter of Westwood’s population—and 27.5% of UCLA’s student body—. . .
more than half of the people UCPD stopped between July 2024 and July 2025 were
reported to be” of the Black race or Hispanics of the Caucasian race or multiple
races; the label “Hispanic,”, unlike “Black,” does not signify a race.[1]
Whereas the British strictly prohibited the American colonists from intermarrying
with the Black and American Indian races, Cortez had a very different policy from
the start in New Spain; as a result, people of more than one race, and especially
multi-racial folks, are included in the Hispanic culture. Regarding race at UCLA,
that university’s police employees “stopped Black people—who account for 6.7%
of UCLA students and 5.3% of Westwood residents—in 24% of the stops.”[2]
Is 24% significantly higher, and, if so, what explains the differential? I
contend that ideological bias can get in the way of sufficiently answering
these questions.
Sidestepping the ideological
reason why the student-journalist mischaracterizes the Black race as an “ethnicity,”
as if race were just the sub-cultures that are associated with a given race,
the article’s bias and its ensuing blind-spot are difficult to miss, and they shut
out an entirely reasonable possible explanation. The student-journalist quotes
Terence Keel, a professor of African American studies and human biology and
society, who proffered the following as an explanation for the behavior of the
UCLA police employees: “Our society in general carries a fear of Black and
Latino men. . . . That fear pervades a lot of aspects of our society.”[3]
The implication is that UCLA employees who can legally use guns are afraid of Black
and Latino men, or are reacting to pressure from that fear in the university’s
administration. The student-journalist backs up the professor by adding, “80.5%
and 77.2% of the Hispanic and Black people stopped, respectively, were men.”[4]
The implication that those men were behaving properly and thus were victims of societal
or university prejudiced fear can and should be subject to critique rather than
left standing.[5]
Wholly absent from the article
is the possibility that Black and Latino men were disproportionately
misbehaving in public and thus were being subject to being picked up by the
university’s police for this reason rather than from prejudice. Given the
shared mores and norms of students regardless of race or cultural upbringing, and
the leverage that a dean’s office has over students to keep them in line
behaviorally, as well as the fact that Black students at UCLA are such a small
minority, I suspect that a significant percentage of the Black men being picked
up were likely local residents and that the arrests were being made off-campus.
I am not suggesting that the bad behavior has its roots in the race itself;
that would be a racist statement. Rather, local Black and (and Hispanic) sub-cultures
in Los Angeles could be to blame, specifically in regard to mores and norms
concerning anger and violence in public. To the extent that verbally or
physically violent behavior is presumed in those sub-cultures to be justified
due to societal prejudice, both police and the wider society can legitimately hold
the individuals accountable anyway for their conduct. Ultimately, individuals
are blameworthy, rather than context even though the latter arguable can have formidable
influence on individuals. Were we to place context first, every sort of excuse
would be coming out of the woodwork—each excuse insisting on being recognized
as valid.
As an example of a Black culture
in a particular city/context that actually encourages bad behavior in public, Chicago
had by 2026 become infamous for the bad behavior of disproportionately Black
people on the subways even in non-Black-majority areas, such as south Chicago.
On the blue subway line between O’hare airport and “the Loop” (i.e., downtown
Chicago), for example, it had become common to see Black men in particular
smoking tobacco, lying on the floor, and sleeping in chairs in subway cars. Additionally,
the hyper-verbalized, intense generalized rage of not a few Black young women (under
40) who felt entitled not to wait for deboarding passengers before entering a
subway-car door and yet “blew up” at people of other races exiting nonetheless signals
a real racial problem in which the racist individuals involved could
legitimately be held accountable. Both the intensity of the anger and the
decision to manifest it in public point to a sordid Black sub-culture that has
been pertaining to Chicago. Even just the sordid, utterly selfish attitude of “the
rules don’t apply to us” on the subway trains could legitimate Chicago police
in arresting Black people disproportionately at subway stations and even on the
trains.
It is important to note in
this comparison between UCLA and Chicago that only the police department of the
latter has democratic legitimacy in arresting people. Even though UCLA is a
public university, funded by the government of California, the head
administrator of the university—in an unelected position—could order the university’s
police employees to arrest students and even local residents off-campus. The
loop-hole giving a university’s police such power off-campus stems from the
need to be able to arrest people fleeing campus, but such a cause of continuance-of-incident
does not in itself justify making arrests off-campus independent of any
incidents on campus, and even patrolling on local streets. A university police
employee is not a municipal-city police employee. Conflating these two, as had
typically been done by even the early 2020s, carries a lot of risk, and even
contingent liability for universities!
The student’s article on the
disproportionate arrests of—I presume primarily local—Black and Hispanic men casually
mentions that the UCPD “serves UCLA and the Westwood area.”[6]
I contend that a university’s police department is and should (constitutionally)
be limited to serving on a campus, and further delimited to enforcing law
rather than organizational policies because they do not have the force of law;
private security guards, sans guns, can legitimately be oriented to enforcing
policies (but not laws). A university’s police department that enforces
organizational policies off-campus is especially toxic and illegitimate
from the standpoint of democracy.
When I was back at Yale (one
of my alma maters) for a semester in 2025 to audit a course, I was stunned when
an employee of the New Haven Hospital told me off-campus that Yale’s police regularly
arrested local residents coming out of bars off campus without any
connection to the campus! The President of Yale may have ordered the Yale
employees to arrest any local residents in New Haven who could pose a
threat to Yale students. If so, the local residents could legitimately sue
Yale, arguing that they are not at the university. Additionally, when a
Palestinian flag was draped on a Jewish symbol in New Haven Green, which is a
small park off-campus, in 2025, Yale’s police department issued a statement that
it would investigate the matter even though the incident took place off campus
and nothing pointed to a Yale student having been involved in the political protest
on public land. The organization’s police unilaterally—perhaps from
orders from Yale’s administration—presumed to sideline the local police
department even though the New Haven police department was more appropriate jurisdictionally
and was under a democratically-elected official, the mayor of New Haven, rather
than the Yale Corporation. The fundamental, qualitive difference between a city
and a non-profit private organization did not seem to register with Yale’s top
administrators, who could thus be accused of hyperextending their power onto
the locality. That Yale has a very large endowment does not mean that the
governments of Connecticut and New Haven can legitimately look the other way
rather than delimit the purview of Yale and its private police force. Such
organizational hubris and over-reaching as have been evinced at Yale go well beyond
matters of race, especially if a subculture tied to a particular group identity
is problematic as is the case in New Haven, whose local population is heavily
Black and antagonistic to Yalies.[7]
That UCLA’s police employees “served”
not only the university campus, but also Westwood was just an aside in the
article in the UCLA student newspaper, but sometimes such asides are the most
important, with the student-journalist’s and the UCLA professor’s bias in favor
of context over holding individuals accountable for their own behavior
running a close second. The norm in a race-related sub-culture that “the
rules don’t apply to us” is highly suggestive that people subscribing to that
cultural norm would be picked up by police disproportionately and without the police
employees being to blame. In fact, the sub-culture’s norm is so toxic that
police should be diligent in refuting it. How many of UCLA’s arrests of Black
and Hispanic people are due to prejudicial profiling versus actual bad conduct
of the individuals involved is beyond my ken; my point is that both reasons
rather than just the former are very likely in the mix, and thus warrant being
included in any explanation. Therefore, I am not arguing that racial and
cultural prejudices do not exist in human nature; rather, I maintain that there
is more to the explanation than the bias of contextual-exclusivity admits.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. By implication, I submit that the UCLA professor’s orientation was more ideological than academic—especially as he blocked out an entirely reasonable alternative explanation. Moreover, universities risk subordinating scholarly research to ideological prescription by creating departments such as Black Studies, Gay Studies, Women’s Studies, and Hispanic Studies. For a less controversial example, the business academy mislabels business ethics as corporate social responsibility—the label itself explicitly says that corporations should be responsible in addressing societal problems even though such money spent deviates from corporate charters and the fiduciary duty of corporate managers to the stockholders. The ideological agenda has been so salient that a professor of business ethics need not have taken even one course in philosophy on ethics! A business ethics professor at MIT even informed me in 2025 in Harvard Yard that ethics is a subfield of sociology rather than philosophy! The creation of a business “academic” field that is inherently ideological is similar, I submit, to creating a Black studies department, for example.
6. Ibid.
7. Because every person has many roles and thus can identify with many different types of groups—religious, political, cultural, racial, geographical—the reduction by a person to only one of one’s group-identities is itself problematic because the monopolization of one of the group identities is artificial. Put another way, a certain person who could identify as a Catholic Christian, a Republican American, an American, a Virginian, a Black person, a gay person, and as a woman would hypothetically be relegating or ignoring all of her other group-identities in thinking of and representing herself to other people as a Catholic. Such representations would in fact be rather strange at a political convention or at a gay bar! I submit that such an artificial monopolization is very likely rampant among Black Americans even in the twenty-first century. Ironically, such people may be responsible for keeping themselves in ideological chains.
