University announces that it is defunding its police department

While many Democrat politicians are moving away from the “Defund the Police” movement, one university is going all in.

Fox News reports that the University of California, Davis has announced that it will be taking several steps to move away from conventional policing. 

Some of the changes:

In its announcement, the university said that it will be eliminating three positions that were held by traditional police officers. These positions have been vacant, but funds were still allocated for them.

Now, these funds will be reallocated to new positions that the university has created. Those positions are a “public safety policy analyst in student affairs; an analyst position to support data, accreditation, and transparency efforts within the police department; and a new position dedicated to the Health 34  initiative.” The latter trains firefighters to provide a mental health response to certain types of calls.

In addition to this, three other police officers are being “repurposed” by the university. These officers will be part of the university’s new “CORE” program, which focuses on “outreach, education, and providing support to the UC Davis community in a non-traditional way.”

The university explains: “When called, an officer in plain clothes will arrive in an electric vehicle or on a bike. The officer will be able to answer questions and concerns, advise on a range of law enforcement issues, and connect you with the resources you need.”

These are not all the steps that the university is taking, but the majority of the big ones. The university, for example, has also announced that it will no longer participate in the federal government’s Law Enforcement Support Office program, even though it never really received law enforcement gear from that program.

The university also announced that it has earned accreditation from the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. The is a group that the university says “is grounded in President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing.”

Looking forward

We have seen Democrat politicians recently move away from the Defund the Police movement, which has become more and more unpopular, particularly as crime has continued to rise across the country. But, the University of California, Davis is now one place where this experiment in non-traditional police will proceed.

The big question, of course, is will it succeed.

One thing that we can say for sure is that this leftist vision of policing will certainly get tested at this campus. That’s because, as the Daily Mail reports, the university has been seeing its own rise in crime in recent years.

The university, in 2020, saw 565 incidents of theft, 100 burglaries, three forcible rapes, two aggravated assaults, and one robbery with a dangerous weapon. In 2021, in October alone, the university saw 134 criminal incidents, including one forcible rape.

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