Abolish the Tulane Police Department and Cut All Ties With NOPD

Abolish the Tulane Police Department and Cut All Ties With NOPD

Started
November 12, 2020
Petition to
Tulane University Administration
Signatures: 30Next Goal: 50
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Why this petition matters

Started by Abolish TUPD

Abolish TUPD is a collective of abolitionist Tulane students and New Orleans community members. Working with members of the New Orleans community, we are dedicated to abolishing TUPD and creating conditions where police & prisons are obsolete. We are POC, queer, and BIPOC led. We are committed to centering and amplifying Black and Indigenous voices in our movement and adhering to all core principles of abolitionist theory.

Tulane funds the 8th largest campus police force in the nation. The scale of this racist institution is absurd given its inefficiency at keeping students safe. Tulane police does not protect us, they enact violence upon BIPOC community members daily. The transparency and accountability that should be required of TUPD is nonexistent: students do not even have public access to the list of officers employed under TUPD, or prior officer records. WHO is Tulane spending 9 million dollars on? Who are they protecting? Listen to those who actually experience the toxic presence of TUPD on our campus, and it’s clear that TUPD isn’t actually protecting anyone. Student accounts of TUPD profiling and harassment, disruption of TEMS repsonse to mental health crises, open admittance to engaging in misconduct, and refusal to protect survivors and enacting sexual violence themselves, prove that TUPD's existence is not just pointless, but actively harmful to those already most marginalized by the prison-industrial complex.

We demand that Tulane immediately commit to abolishing the Tulane Police Department and cutting ties with all institutions that operate as arms of the prison-industrial complex, including NOPD. 

In our commitment to anti-racism, we cannot accept that Tulane budgets 9 million dollars of OUR tuition money to fund TUPD, especially when their presence only serves to intimidate and perpetuate racism against BIPOC students and workers. TUPD cannot protect us whilst simultaneously harming some of us. Tulane is a predominantly white institution in a predominantly Black community, and for the administration to continue to fund any privatized police force is a dangerous act of racism in and of itself. We must conceptualize the notion of protecting and serving students in a way that exists outside of the white supremacist notions of community well-being that years of oppression have programmed us to take for granted. We demand that Tulane be held directly accountable to the BIPOC Tulane community when visualizing new ideas of community safety that don’t include paramilitary death squads. We demand that Tulane reevaluates their relationships with institutions that enact violence against BIPOC students, as well as the ideological stranglehold it puts on our imaginations and abilities to visualize a future where all students feel protected.

We are no longer interested in conversations about police reform. If Tulane truly wants to protect and serve students and workers on campus, they must commit to completely abolishing Tulane police. To do anything else would not only be an endorsement of racism, but a backtrack on the promises made by the university to protect BIPOC students and workers. We have no faith in the ability of TUPD to protect and serve us. We demand that our tuition money be reinvested in forms of community care that address the root causes of harm, and truly serve the student population, rather than into an armed extension of the racist carceral state.

List of our demands:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pBgy0Jp6A8IlnEZu7wGVuESlO_TAhxYIoKGALLumsE0/edit?usp=sharing

Social Media:

IG: @abolishTUPD

Twitter: @AbolishTUPD

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Signatures: 30Next Goal: 50
Support now
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Decision Makers

  • Tulane University Administration