Can Colleges Reform Their Police Departments?

A University of Massachusetts at Amherst employee was walking from the campus recreation center to his office when someone called the police to report an “agitated Black male.” He felt powerless and scared, he later wrote, while detectives questioned him in the lobby of the building where he works as a case manager in the university’s disability-services office.

A new model policy for “racially just policing,” written by the ACLU of Massachusetts and Bridgewater State University, and published on Tuesday, was designed to prevent episodes like that, which have occurred again and again. They can traumatize the victims and make students and employees of color feel as if they don’t belong on predominantly white college campuses.

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